Author: Manly Wade Wellman
Date: 2025-01-30T18:47:24+00:00
Keywords: Short Fiction; Science fiction; Fantasy fiction; Horror tales; War Stories; Adventure Stories; Martians -- Fiction; Space warfare -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Art -- Fiction; Werewolves -- Fiction; Actors -- Fiction; Byron; George Gordon Byron; Baron; 1788-1824 -- Fiction; United States -- History -- Civil War; 1861-1865 -- Fiction; Ozark Mountains -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Robots -- Fiction; Inventions -- Fiction; Los Angeles (Calif.) -- Fiction; Space colonies -- Fiction
Description: A collection of horror and science fiction stories by Manly Wade Wellman.
Publisher: Standard Ebooks

Short Fiction

By Manly Wade Wellman.

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Back to the Beast

(From the Smith City Mirror, June 26, 1927)

Police are searching today for Dr. J. E. Lawlor, well-known physician and scientist, following a report from his secretary, James Brock, that he had disappeared from his home at 2100 Van Ness Avenue.

According to Brock, Dr. Lawlor locked himself into his private laboratory twelve days ago, ordering his servants not to disturb him, and to send food down by means of a dumbwaiter. As he had followed this plan several times before while working on experiments, Brock complied with his request. The time set was ten days and when there had been no response from the laboratory during the two days following the elapse of this period, Brock feared some accident and, with the help of Georges Dmitri, Dr. Lawlor’s cook, and Emil Bonner, his chauffeur, he forced the door this morning and found that the doctor was gone.

A weird angle is added to the incident by the dead body of a large ape which Brock found in a corner of the disordered laboratory. Although Dr. Lawlor was known to be interested in natural history and to have conducted several experiments with animals recently, Brock stated that he was sure the ape was not in the laboratory when it was closed twelve days ago. The table was covered with papers, which have been turned over to the police. Brock, Dmitri and Bonner are held for questioning by Chief of Police John Walton.

Dr. Lawlor has no immediate family. A brother, Stanley Lawlor, of Topeka, Kansas, has been notified.

(From the Smith City Mirror, June 28, 1927)

Attempts to determine the species of the ape found dead in the laboratory of Dr. J. E. Lawlor, who disappeared last Saturday, were unsuccessful when Professor F. W. Baylor, head of the natural science department of the state university, said today that he had never seen such a creature before.

“There are eight kinds of anthropoid apes known to science,” said Professor Baylor, “but this ape belongs to none of them. It has some of the characteristics of several, but resembles no single kind greatly. It is either a freak or of a species unknown until now.”

Professor Baylor has ordered the animal embalmed and intends to send it to fellow-students of natural history in Chicago.

(From the Smith City Mirror, June 29, 1937)

James Brock, private secretary of Dr. J. E. Lawlor, 2100 Van Ness Avenue, was placed under arrest today to face charges of kidnapping and possibly murder of his employer last Saturday.

The arrest took place following the reading of papers purporting to be a journal of an experiment performed by the doctor, which Brock turned over to the police upon his employer’s disappearance. Brock had been held for questioning, but was given his liberty Saturday.

The contents of the journal were not made public, but Chief John Walton described them as “preposterous and unbelievable, a forgery by Brock to cover a very evident crime.”

(Extracts from the papers given to police by James Brock as the journal of Dr. James Everett Lawlor)

June 15—All is in readiness for my experiment—the final step in my great work that will afford scientists a true glimpse of how man appeared in the dim past. The narrow persons who refuse to believe in evolution will be forced to see the truth, for we will confront them, not with theories, but with proofs.

I have material now that would fill a great book—notes telling how I first discovered the combination of elements that induces deterioration and of my experiments with it, first on the lowest forms of life, then on more complex animals, with surprising and enlightening results. Years have been consumed in this study, but soon they will be paid for when I reveal what I have learned.

The elements for the two serums, products of nearly a lifetime of labor and observation, are at hand. One serum is the deteriorator, which when properly mingled and administered will make vital changes in the organs and tissues of an animal, changes which finally result in giving it the appearance of its ancestors untold ages ago. This change can be arrested by the administration of the counter-agent, which will restore the transformed creature to its former condition.

I do not suppose that any person less determined or less scientific in mind than I would dare perform this experiment upon himself; but after all, it is as safe as such a thing can be. I have studied its effects and powers too much and too long to go wrong now, and I know that I shall not be mentally incapable of handling it. The change is physiological, not psychological. Foretelling the course of the whole process is a mere matter of rationalization.

As I plan it, I will let the deteriorator work in my blood for five days, then the counter-agent for five days, to make sure that the effects of the experiment are completely dissipated. Thus I expect to see in my mirror what my ancestors were like five thousand centuries ago, and then return to the body and semblance of Dr. Lawlor, all within two weeks at the least.

I have locked my door for ten days. Brock, a sound, sensible fellow who obeys my orders without questioning, will see to it that I am undisturbed. And after this private experiment, I shall present my findings to my fellow-scientists as the proof of their theories. Who can say that my name shall not be numbered with those of the great evolutionists?

June 16—For twenty-four hours I have had the serum in my blood. With what care I compounded it and injected it into the vein of my arm, you may well imagine. The effects were noticeable at once. My blood flowed faster and for a few moments I felt strangely lightheaded, as if I had been drinking. This latter feeling passed away and I perspired freely, but felt no unpleasant sensations. Throughout the day I have taken notes on the progress of the experiment, and tonight my mirror shows me that it is a success.

The change in my appearance has not been so great as I expected, but it is very evident, I am florid and ruddy where I have generally been pale. I am far more robust and all over my body my hair has grown out, especially on the breast and shoulders and outsides of the arms—a strange condition for me, always smooth-skinned and of late years partly bald. I never felt better physically in my life, and I look, not the fine-drawn and slender scientist, but a full-bodied, really splendid savage.

In excess of well-being and in joy at the certain fulfilment of my expectations, I danced and leaped up and down this evening. Then, a little ashamed of myself, I sat down to write.

June 17—The effects of the serum are more pronounced today. Where yesterday I was but a primitive man, still decidedly human, I am today a man with a pronounced bestial look. My forehead has receded, my jaw is heavy, with sharp-pointed teeth. The change works in me every moment; I can feel it in my flesh and bones. Among other things, I am positively shaggy. The hair makes my clothes a discomfort and I have left them completely off.

I am never weary of watching my body as it changes almost before my very eyes. It is especially interesting to see how springy and flexible my joints have become, and how my feet have a tendency to turn their palms inward. This is because of the great toe, which is beginning to stand out from the others like a thumb; excellent proof that our ancestors were tree-dwellers and could get a grip with their feet.

June 18—When I awoke on my cot this morning, my first glance was toward the mirror. It was unable to recognize myself, unable to recognize even the thing I had been last night. In the broad, coarse face, with flat nose, splay nostrils, little beady eyes under beetling brows, wide mouth and brutal jaws, in the hairy, hulking body, there was no reminder of what had once been Dr. Lawlor. Some scholars would be frightened at the speed and effectiveness with which the serum has worked, but I can think of nothing save the triumph to science.

I am stooped considerably and stand unsteadily on my legs; not that they are not strong, but the tendency of my feet to turn inward has increased, so that I walk for the most part on the outer edges. Their prehensile powers are developed, too, and they ean pick up objects quite easily.

It is also interesting to note that my mental processes have not changed one whit—I can think as clearly and as deeply as ever, As I predicted, the serum does not effect the brain tissues; or, if it does, it does not keep them from functioning properly.

I have been hungry all day. The food Brock sent to me was not sufficient, especially as regards meat, and I must send up a note with the empty dishes for him to increase the amount.

June 19—This part of the experiment will stop tomorrow, for I shall then mix and administer the counter-agent.

Tonight I see myself to be an eery creature, half beast, half man. I am hard put to it to walk without supporting myself on the table and the backs of the chairs. So must our ancestors have looked when they swung down from the trees to achieve their first adventures on the ground and to conquer the world.

These five days, what with the many notes I have taken, will provide a fitting climax for the scientific book that I contemplate. How it will astound the world! What honors and distinctions may descend upon me! Fame is mine, certainly; fortune, if I wish it, may follow.

So good night and goodbye, my primitive self yonder in the mirror. Tomorrow I shall commence the journey back to the appearance of Dr. Lawlor, that I may immortalize you in all your fascinating grotesqueness.

June 20—How could I—oh, how could I not provide against this? With all the machinery of my experimentation evidently flawless, I must forget a single item—an item maddeningly simple, maddeningly obvious, and yet a thing that has proved my undoing.

Let me remain sane for a moment and marshal the incidents as they occurred, There is not much to tell. This morning I went to my shelf of chemicals for the ingredients to compound into the counteracting serum. My hands, which of course had become clumsy and primitive, seemed to have trouble in picking up the little vials, but this did not worry me as I began the combining of my materials. Two of them I mixed in a graduated glass and then reached for a pipette to administer the third.

But my unsteady manipulation did not allow the proper proportion to flow in. I released a drop too much, and though there was a corresponding effervescence, I could see that the mixture was a failure. I poured it out and tried again, with the same result. With growing uneasiness I made a third attempt, and again my clumsy hands failed me.

Too late, I realized that the mingling of the elements in the proper proportions and manner had been a task that required all the delicacy of a skilled chemist. My hands, no longer the deft, steady hands of Dr. Lawlor, were those of a subhuman creature, and as such not equal to the feat!

Horrible, horrible! I moaned aloud when I realized what had happened and what would follow. Without the counter-agent I could not neutralize, or even halt, the progress of the deteriorator. Down I must go, back along the road up which the human race has struggled for untold centuries!

Again and again I desperately tried to mix the dose, until I had used up pl my materials. Once or twice I thought that I had approximated the proper mingling, but when I injected it, there was no effect.

I sit here tonight, a rung farther toward the beast from whence we sprang, instead of on the road back toward man. Like one lowered into a well, I see above me a circle of light growing smaller and dimmer as I descend into darkness and horror! What shall I do?

[From this point forward, the journal is written in an almost unintelligible scrawl.]

June 24—For three days I have not written. I have not slept and have eaten only when the pangs of hunger roused me from my half-trance of misery. Horror has closed over my head like water.

At first I searched frantically for more materials for the counter-agent, literally wrecking my laboratory, but to no avail. I had used it all in trying to mix the saving dose three days ago.

Today was to have been the last day of my experiment. Perhaps the servants will force the lock if I do not come out. And then?

I could never make them understand. I have no more power of speech than any other beast, for a beast I have surely become. I can not bear to look in the mirror, for I see only a dark, hairy form, hunched over the table, a pencil clutched in its paw. And that is I, James Lawlor! What wonder that I border on the edge of insanity?

Let whoever reads these words take warning from my plight. Do not meddle with the scheme of things as nature has planned—delve not into her mysterious past. I have done that, and it was my complete and dreadful undoing. If it had not come in this way it would have come in another, I do not doubt for a moment.

June 25—Morning. I have not budged from the chair where I sat to write last evening. I heard Brock’s voice outside the door, asking me if I was coming out. I dared not make a sound in reply, and he went away.

Is existence bearable in such a condition? Even now, the sliding back into lower and lower form continues. It will not be long before I am no longer even the ape-thing I appear. Perhaps the serum will carry me back through the ages until I am the slimy sea-crawler from which all life had its beginning. Oh, God! …

And as if in answer to that name, comes the memory of what still remains in a drawer of my table. Arsenic—not an easy death, but a quick one. So shall I die, for if ever a creature was justified in taking its own life, that creature is myself.

I will leave this journal as an account of what has happened, and as a warning to others. The formulas for my serums and all that pertains to them I will destroy. Never shall another scientist meet with my fate if I can order it otherwise. There, the papers are flaming in the grate. Now for the arsenic—so much, in a glass of water—farewell!

[Here the journal ends.]

The Invading Asteroid

I

Higher and higher through the night mounted the small, trim space-launch. Far below the lights of St. Louis, capital of the Terrestrial League, shone as myriad stars and reflected gleams on the flat surfaces and soaring spires of the uppermost levels. From a great height the city resembled a rambling building of tremendous size, wherein little specks of surface-cars scampered over miniature traffic-ways and clouds of air and space-vehicles danced around and over the town like midges.

It was a fighting ship that was mounting upward, one of the many that sped through space in the days of 2675, when Earth and Mars were in the throes of that gigantic and regrettable conflict, the Interplanetary War. However, the disintegrating ray apparatus, a deadly weapon that enabled Terrestrial forces to compete on something like equal terms with the overwhelming numbers of the space-navies of Mars, had been removed from bow and stern. Most of the space inside the cigar-shaped hull was occupied by engines to insure highest maneuverability and speed, but in the center was a cushioned chamber large enough to allow its three occupants to ride in comfort.

They were in Terrestrial uniform, but did not look like the sternest of warriors. A year ago they had been students together at the International University in St. Louis, looking forward to graduation in 2675. But 2675 was here, and already they had participated in the bitter conflicts that marked the beginnings of the war. Even now, when the two worlds had drawn far apart in their orbits and the interplanetary passage was too far for war parties to travel, they were kept in intensive training and their school days seemed memories of a thousand years ago.

“This is a squadron-commander’s gig, at the very least,” chuckled Bull Mike Tishinev, former star athlete of his university, as he squared his colossal shoulders. “We’ll never have a softer trip, nor a freer one, so long as we’re in the service.”

“And, inasmuch as we are in the service, we’re apt to catch it for absence without leave, and also for using property of the Terrestrial government for private purposes,” suggested Neil Andresson, slim and handsome.

“I wouldn’t have suggested it if I had thought there would be danger,” assured Sukune, the little Japanese, his young Oriental face shining with a smile. “However, I had free run of the rocketport for my experimentation, and nobody thought anything of it when I checked the ship out. And we have all had two days’ liberty and won’t be missed. They won’t check the rocketport until the day after tomorrow, so we’ll have full forty-eight hours in space—first chance we’ve had to do such a thing without some officer on our necks, directing every move of our fingers.”

Into the stratosphere, with the speed steadily and carefully increasing, the ship made its way. The broad Mississippi lay across the terrain beneath them, shrunk to the apparent dimensions of a silver thread. St. Louis was now only a varicolored, light-flecked blotch lying across the river’s course, with the smaller dark areas of suburbs close at hand.

“What a lot of Martian culture could be spread by dropping two or three roving bombs down there!” observed Sukune.

“Where is Mars from here?” asked Neil. The Japanese spun the dial of the television, showing an orange disk blotched with gray-green.

“There you are—seat of Earth’s troubles,” he said.

“What’s that lump traveling along between us and Mars?” was Bull Mike’s question.

“That appears to be the asteroid that strayed from its path, the astronomers say,” replied Sukune. “It’s not more than a mile or so in diameter, and its distance has been computed to be about a hundred and twelve million miles from the sun. That puts it nearly twenty million miles beyond the Earth’s orbit, or halfway between us and Mars. However, science doesn’t know much more about the thing. It’s a bit too far away for exploration just now, especially since all ships are now built for war-service. It ought to come into opposition with us in the spring of 2676.”

He delivered this little lecture with the utmost fluency, and his companions, less versed in sky-lore than he, listened admiringly. Bull Mike grinned and patted the Japanese on the back.

“Never knew you to be stumped by anything yet,” he cried. “No wonder the ancients used to be afraid that your people would conquer the world!”

Returning to the television, the three young men looked curiously at the new phenomenon in the heavens. They knew, of course, about the asteroids—fragments of exploded planets revolving just inside the path of mighty Jupiter—but this one, so far from its fellows, presented a different problem.

Leaving the atmospheric envelope, the ship sailed beyond danger of overheating from friction. Like a comet it rose through empty space. A glance from one port showed Earth at quarter-full, a warm, gleaming crescent that clasped a round globe of shadowy blue. Beside and beyond, glowed the white incandescence of the sun, its light intensified by the soft blackness of space. Jewel-like stars were scattered in all directions.

“If Commander Raws could only see us now!” said Bull Mike, boyishly delighted by a sense of freedom.

“If he could, he’d order us all into confinement,” Sukune reminded him. “Eh, Neil?”

Before them hung the full moon. Toward this they laid their course and, after twelve hours’ flight, they slowed down to drift like a vagrant bit of thistledown above the silent, dead valleys and mountain ranges. Once they dropped down and rested on the ashy surface of the satellite. In a few moments they were able to appreciate the depressed spirits that afflicted the occasional explorers of the lunar wilderness.

For, despite the heavenly-aspiring peaks, the abysmal depths, the far-reaching plains, there was a certain sameness about the moon’s scenery. They could see no movement save the shadow of their own craft sliding along beneath them. No green of grass, no brilliant color of flowers showed. No creatures scampered, crept or flew. There was not so much as a heat-flurry in the atmosphere—for there was no atmosphere. Nothing but the glaring white of sun-drenched rock, the inky black of airless shade.

“I wouldn’t live here for all the money in St. Louis,” said Bull Mike. “As far as that goes, I couldn’t.”

“I don’t see why not,” argued Sukune. “Mars’ two moons are smaller and rockier than this, and haven’t any more air, water or natural comfort. Yet the Martians have built cities under glass domes; pumped in artificial air, and settled right down to keep house.”

“That’s because they’re crowded at home,” was Bull Mike’s rebuttal. “Well, there’s room enough on Earth for me just now. Plenty of girls to keep me company and wine to keep me healthy and excitement to keep me occupied.”

They gladly left the Moon behind and continued their journey. They passed the time by eating part of the provisions they had brought along, by observing the heavens and by working practise problems in astronautics and space-maneuvers. At last they idled, a little more than half a million miles from Earth—twenty hours by direct space flight at top speed.

Neil was at the television. Suddenly he started violently and gestured to his comrades.

“Look here!” he cried. “A ship!”

“A patrol scout from the army,” groaned Bull Mike. “Now we’re in for it.”

“That’s no army craft!” declared Sukune when he saw the image. “Look at the lines of its hull, see that emblem on the side—it’s an armed Martian scout!”

“You’re right,” said Neil. “It’s just about on top of us, too. Let’s shake on out of here.”

Sukune jumped to the control board and began to strike a combination of keys. As quickly as possible he turned the nose of their ship back toward Earth. A glance through a port showed the Martian already within sight of the naked eye.

From the enemy ship came a sudden streak of flame. Desperately Sukune rattled the keys on the board. The Terrestrial craft writhed to one side, barely escaping the explosion of a roving bomb.

“The ratty lizard!” yelled Bull Mike, clenching a mammoth fist. “He sees that we’re not armed for space-fighting!”

“What’s he doing here, with Mars so far out of travel-shot, anyway?” demanded Neil.

Nobody answered, for another bomb exploded at that moment, seemingly just outside. It was soundless in the vacuum of space, but the force of the detonation shook the ship like a leaf in a gust of wind.

“No chance for escape,” said Sukune. He tapped the combination for a halt and rose from his seat.

“Now he’ll think he hit us,” he told the others. “Let’s play dead.”

“Why?” asked Bull Mike.

“It’s our only hope. Another bomb will do the business if we try to run. But he’ll want to capture our ship. If he sees it idling, he’ll figure that we’re washed out. He’ll come on board, and then—”

“And then!” repeated the giant, grinning. “Then we’ll have a fair shake with him!”

Quickly the three threw themselves down in attitudes of unconsciousness. Neil flung himself on the sill of the port nearest the Martian, in such a position that he could keep a cautious lookout.

Closer and closer came the enemy. Slowing down, he almost scraped against their side. Peeping out, Neil could see a port directly opposite. A Martian face, swarthy and skeleton-lean, was looking into the interior.

What the fellow discovered evidently reassured him. He could be seen pulling on a heavy spacesuit over his scrawny limbs and clasping a helmet into place. Then a long jointed arm of metal extended from his ship to grapple and hold the supposedly disabled Terrestrial. A moment later a lock-panel opened and the Martian emerged to jump lightly across the few feet of intervening space.

They heard him working at their own entrance panel, evidently with some sort of ray apparatus. Soon he had negotiated the lock and entered. Fastening the panel behind him, he stepped over to where Bull Mike lay. He did not even trouble to draw his automatic pistol from its holster as he bent down to examine the silent form.

Easily, effortlessly, Bull Mike shot out his big hand and yanked the Martian’s feet out from under him.

Down crashed the Martian. His gloved hand fumbled with the butt of his pistol, but Sukune was there first and snatched the weapon away. Bull Mike sat up quickly, cradling the struggling enemy in his arms as though he were a baby.

“Got him!” snorted the big fellow. “Let’s appoint me as a committee of one to break him in two across my knee.”

“Wait a minute,” said Sukune, flinging out a restraining hand. “I want to question him first.”

“What about?” asked Bull Mike.

“Lots of things. About where he came from, for instance.”

“That’s an easy one. He came from Mars,” said Bull Mike. “Hi, you, lie still or I’ll do your legs in a braid!” This last to the prisoner.

“Not directly, he didn’t come from Mars,” said Neil. “He couldn’t travel that far. He must have a base somewhere near. Perhaps he’s a survivor from that bunch that was rubbed out on the Moon after they landed their big spaceship there last spring.”

“Thunder, that’s so,” admitted Bull Mike, as with no gentle hand he unfastened and plucked away the space helmet. The prisoner grimaced in impotent rage.

“You’re a heroic customer, attacking a defenseless ship!” scolded Bull Mike in very bad Martian. “What brought you here? Where’s your headquarters?”

They rose to their feet and allowed the prisoner to do likewise. He looked at each in turn, undaunted by the reversal of fortunes.

“I’ll tell you nothing,” he said shortly in their own language. “Kill me if you want to.”

II

An Incredible Story

Bull Mike’s open hand drove at him, its hard heel striking his chin. With a gasp the Martian collapsed and would have fallen had not Neil caught and supported him.

“Here, none of that, Bull Mike!” barked Sukune. “You don’t know your own strength—and very little else, either. Pour water on the fellow, Neil.”

The Martian revived. He fingered his bruised face and glared up at the three Terrestrials. He still refused to answer questions.

But he couldn’t have come all the way from home. “How far is it to Mars?” queried Bull Mike.

“We’ll see,” said Neil, turning to the television and checking the distance-finding device on it. “H’m, Mars is nearly on the other side of the sun. ’Way out of flight-shot. That little asteroid shows at about a hundred and fifty million miles.”

“That asteroid!” repeated the Martian in a frightened voice. All three stared at him in surprise. He recovered himself. “What asteroid?” he queried more calmly.

“Asking, are you?” said Neil. “Well, I think you know. Where does that asteroid come in?”

“I’m not talking,” said the Martian doggedly.

“We’ll remedy that,” announced Sukune grimly. “Get that spacesuit off of him, you two.”

The prisoner struggled fiercely, but his puny strength was futile against their muscles, attuned to Earth’s greater gravity. Quickly they overpowered him and stripped away his armor of metal and insulated fabric.

“Make him lie down on his face—so!” The Japanese had a hard gleam in his eye. “Hold him by the wrists, Neil. And you, Bull Mike, hold his ankles.”

They did so. “Will you talk now?” Sukune asked the Martian.

“I’ll not!”

“Well,” sighed Sukune, “this may seem a little crude, my friend, but it’s necessary. Earth needs the information—and, if you’ll remember, you did attack an unarmed ship.”

Kneeling, he laid the tips of his fingers on the prisoner’s flanks. It seemed no more than the lightest touch, yet the Martian shrieked out as if in an ecstasy of pain.

“You’ll talk?” prompted the torturer.

“I’ll talk! I’ll talk!”

“A little spot of jiujitsu,” Sukune said to his friends, rising. “It is strange how much the Martian nerve centers resemble the Terrestrial in position and response to stimuli. Let him up again.”

The Martian dropped weakly on a seat, the defiance gone out of him. Sukune produced a metal flask and unscrewed the stopper.

“Here, drink this,” he told the captive. “It’s Terrestrial wine, it’ll strengthen you. There, feel better? All right, tell us where you came from.”

The Martian licked his lips with his dark, pointed tongue. “You guessed it at once,” he said. “I’m from the asteroid. I was on a lone scout, like you; got too far away from home and ran out of fuel. I thought I’d capture you and fill my tanks.”

“Nonsense!” said Sukune. “That asteroid isn’t as large as lots of mountains on Earth. If a body of Martians had dwellings and fortifications on it, our astronomers would have made them out. You don’t mean to tell us that you’ve been living on it.”

The captive frowned and hesitated until he saw Sukune’s wiry fingers crook suggestively. Then he made haste to reply.

“Not on it. Inside it. It’s an artificial asteroid.”

They looked at him in astonishment, only half-comprehending.

“Already you know about the giant ship on the Moon, that housed so many men—”

“You mean,” said Neil, “that the asteroid is a giant ship also?”

“It’s more than one. On Mars we built four tremendous craft, each about one of your Earth miles in length and shaped like a quarter-slice from a round fruit. Then we took the four into space, one at a time, to the point where we wanted the asteroid’s orbit to be. There we joined them together, like the quarters of the fruit fitted into shape again. The outer surfaces of them are roughcast to represent the natural rocky landscape of a little planet. And there we have a little world of our own, midway between Mars and your Earth.”

The three Terrestrials were still mute with amazement. The Martian had recovered enough of his courage to laugh at them.

“I know that it sounds impossible. And so it must be, to such as you. Only on Mars, where we have the greatest metal resources, the most skillful mechanics, the wisest scientists in all the great universe, could such a thing be possible.”

“Well,” said Sukune, “what about it?”

“The Earth revolves around the sun every three hundred and sixty-five days, Mars in twice that. They will not come into opposition again for fully an Earth year from now. Naturally, Earth feels secure. Her mighty ships of war are idle, her millions of manpower loll in peaceful repose. They do not dream that this little artificial world may be dangerous. But it makes its journey around the sun in approximately four hundred and eighty days, and that can be speeded or slowed somewhat by means of tremendous rocket-engines. It will come into opposition with unthinking Earth in one hundred and fifty days, as I approximate it.”

“Next April!” figured Neil quickly. “And then?”

“And then the little world will empty itself. It can bring forth two thousand heavily-armed ships, manned by six hundred thousand picked men. The space armies of Earth with their ships and weapons will be mighty and many, but unwary. Those two thousand Martian raiders will sell themselves at the highest cost, crippling and destroying Earth’s defenses and cities to the utmost of their power. If they are lucky, you and your comrades will be prostrated, so that, months later, the expeditionary force from Mars can capture the planet without serious opposition.”

The Martian bowed slightly, as if he were concluding a public address.

“I wonder if he’s lying,” said Bull Mike.

“Not at all, gentlemen,” said the Martian. “Do you give me credit for inventing such a wonderful tale?”

“Let’s get back to Earth,” suggested Neil.

“Right,” seconded Sukune. “Back there we’ll turn ourselves in for being absent without leave, but they’ll forget about us when they check this lad’s veracity under the truth-ray.”

The three agreed. First they bound their prisoner hand and foot. Bull Mike was told off to mount guard over him and Sukune returned to the controls. Putting on the Martian’s spacesuit, Neil hopped out and across the abyss to the other ship where it still clung by its automatic grapple. Transferring some new fuel to its tanks, he sent it speeding along in the wake of Sukune’s craft.

In the stratosphere above St. Louis a patrol sighted and hailed them. The Martian craft was instantly boarded and seized, and the commander of the patrol bombarded the occupants of the two vessels with sharp, suspicious questions. At last he listened to the pleadings of the young Terrestrials and took them and their prisoner direct to their home rocketport, where Commander Scholom Raws, the officer of the space-scout squadron to which they belonged, was called to hear their story.

His first sharp accusation of truancy was stilled as they poured out their strange tale. When they had finished he ordered them to form a guard for the Martian and led the way at once to staff headquarters of the Intelligence Department many levels below.

The group of intelligence officers who heard the report was deadly serious. First it held a whispered conference behind closed doors. Then the officers emerged again to question Neil, Bull Mike and Sukune, one at a time. The three were sworn not to discuss their adventure, even among themselves, and directed to return to their quarters.

The Martian prisoner also repeated his story. Subjected to the truth-rays, which, properly administered, eliminate the power of lying, he answered all questions in substantially the same manner as before. He was prevailed upon to draw diagrams of the artificial planetoid in which his fellows were whirling ever nearer to their opposition with Earth.

Finally he was imprisoned and a trusted guard set over him, with every precaution taken to insure absolute secrecy. Should Martian spies, still thick in every Terrestrial community, despite the ceaseless war waged upon them, find out the facts of the man’s capture, the plans of the Terrestrial high command might go for naught.

Commander Raws mentioned the affair once only. That was when he called Neil and his two friends into his quarters; and first making sure that nobody could hear them, spoke as follows:

“I do not condone your absence without leave although it may have chanced to bring fortune to our cause. Yet the high command feels that there is some reward due you.”

He paused and studied the three young faces.

“That reward will be the knowledge of what your part will be in further action against this Martian force,” he continued. “Well, I have asked for and received permission for my squadron to be included in the raiding group that is going to tackle them. No, ask no questions. Dismiss!”

Thereafter nothing more was said and no further hint of the nature of the plan of campaign was forthcoming. Only here and there, all over Earth’s surface, isolated flights and squadrons of war-craft were given extra-duty training, were led in longer and more intricate maneuvers than their fellows; were ordered to install fighting equipment on their ships and to practice its use.

The number of Martians inside the round hull of the asteroid, according to the prisoner, was about six hundred thousand. The asteroid would have several thousand swift, light raiding ships, all fully armed and, in addition, the sham world would assuredly be defended and fortified to a high degree. Undoubtedly it was well guarded and observers with television and astronomical equipment would keep close watch on Earth as they approached. A fleet of spaceships could hardly steal upon that mile-size ball through coverless space—surprise would be out of the question. And chances seemed hardly better that the battle could be won by sheer force of arms.

However, a group of six thousand spaceships was organized for the attempt, ranging in size and model from small scouts such as were included in Commander Raws’ squadron to huge and powerful dreadnaughts of space. Since these larger, heavier craft were less fitted for long journeys, the start of the expedition was delayed until the middle of January, 2676. Should the group start from Earth at that time, computations showed, the Martian asteroid would be met at a point some seventy million miles away, shortly after the first of March. Even for that comparatively short journey the big ships would have to be refitted with special tanks for reserve fuel and the crews would have to be cut down accordingly. In the end, barely three hundred thousand men were included in the plans.

III

The Deserter

Yaxa, the prisoner, was of course ignorant of all these things as he sat alone in his secret prison. Food came to him by dumbwaiter and he did not see a human face. It was not until the middle of January that the door of his cell opened and admitted a Terrestrial—a Terrestrial whom he recognized as one of the three who had captured him.

“Courage!” said Neil Andresson. “We’re getting out of here.”

Yaxa looked at him levely. They made a striking contrast; the saddle-colored Martian—with his puffy body, his spidery legs and his head that, except for the brilliant eyes, seemed to be a high-craniumed skull covered only with skin—looked like a weird cartoon of the Terrestrial with his fine, muscular proportions, his smooth cheeks and his smiling countenance.

“Are you going to torture me further?” demanded Yaxa.

“Not I,” said Neil. “If you’ll remember, I never offered you violence at any time. I was not in sympathy with the measures taken to wring information from you, though I was in the minority and had to countenance them. For that matter, I’m not in sympathy with the Terrestrial cause at all.”

“Then what are you doing here?” asked the Martian.

“I succeeded in being detailed to guard you. I’m going to set you free.”

Yaxa made a helpless gesture. “What can I do if I am freed? I’ll be a stranger in a hostile world. Terrestrials will recognize me for an enemy as far as they can see me. I’ll be hunted down and killed or injured or, at the very least, brought back to prison.”

“I’ve provided for that, else I would not have made the suggestion,” said Neil. “Here, take this pistol. And see the cloak I am wearing. Take it, drape it about you. At first glance you might pass for a Terrestrial. Come, I know where your ship is kept. We’ll escape in it.”

“We?” repeated the captive.

“Yes, I’m going with you, back to your asteroid. It’s within space-shot now. I cannot remain here, I would be punished as a traitor.”

His eyes shining with new hope, Yaxa donned Neil’s cape and followed him into a deserted hallway, then out into a street where a closed surface-car awaited them. They entered this and traveled, by traffic-way and by lift, to the very top level of the city.

When Neil opened the door Yaxa peeped out and saw that they had reached a rocketport. Hangars stood at every hand, with rows of space craft, large and small, on all sides. But nearest to them and isolated from the others was the fast Martian scout which had been his when he had flown to his capture.

“Quick, we have no time to lose,” Neil urged him, and they left the car. A dozen steps took them to the side of the spaceship. A lock-panel was open and the two of them entered the inner compartment.

Sukune and Bull Mike looked up curiously from their seats inside. The leveled pistols of the two intruders prompted the young guards to raise their hands. “What’s the meaning of this?” asked Sukune.

“It’s what you Terrestrials call poetic justice,” smiled Yaxa. “You captured me—now I have captured you.”

“Neil, you traitor!” fumed Bull Mike.

“I wouldn’t call names if I were in your shoes,” rejoined Neil, crossing to the panel which led into the storeroom, and opening it. “Yaxa, this ship is well supplied with everything we need on the voyage. Shall we leave?”

“Yes, of course. What shall we do with these friends of yours?”

“Don’t call me a friend of his,” growled Bull Mike.

“We’ll take them along,” replied Neil, taking no notice of his former chum’s remark. “If we let them go now they’ll rouse the whole planet on us. As it is, the force that is tackling your asteroid doesn’t leave for two days yet. That ought to be head start enough for us.”

It seemed that nobody at the rocketport noticed the departure of the Martian ship. If notice was taken, perhaps it was reflected that there were Terrestrial guards on board and that all must be well. Unhindered, the craft went up and out, cleared the atmospheric envelope and headed for the bright speck in the sky that marked the sham world which was its goal.

For a few hours there was silence aboard between the captives and the captors, but at length Sukune spoke up with a smile.

“Why be unreasonable about this thing?” he said. “If we’re to be together for two months or so in space, we might as well be pleasant about it. I, for one, will accept defeat gracefully if you’ll let me.”

“Gladly,” said Yaxa.

“Me, too,” said Bull Mike.

“That settles it,” said Yaxa. “We’ll get along together, I’m sure.”

“Senator W. L. Marcy of our United States once said, ‘To the victors belong the spoils,’ ” continued Sukune. “We’ll admit for the time being that you are victors and we’re the spoils. Until the situation reverses itself we’ll be model prisoners.”

They gathered in friendly fashion around the television screen and dialed in the image of the asteroid. It appeared half light, half dark, like a moon at the half. They could pick out the roughnesses of mountains, ravines and plains, all made in miniature by clever Martian artisans. They discussed what they saw like real comrades, all enmity apparently forgotten.

When two days had passed they watched the diminishing Earth by television and, sure enough, sighted great clouds of shining specks—the hundreds of flights of spaceships that were taking the ether. They saw how some flew slowly, others swiftly, so that in a short time they had formed into the conventional “curtain front”—an open order formation of three dimensions, roughly disk-like in shape and perpendicular to the line of advance. It was about a thousand miles in diameter and about as thick through as the distance in which three or four ships could fly in single column. Against the black sky it looked like a moving galaxy of runaway stars.

In front of this formation danced several flights of speedy scouts. “Raws and the boys are among those,” said Sukune.

“Don’t the Martians inside the asteroid see that attacking force?” asked Bull Mike. “They can fly away, can’t they? Well, why don’t they?”

“A body of that size could hardly carry enough fuel for a long, sustained trip,” Yaxa explained. “It just boosts itself along occasionally as it follows the orbit to which it is held by the sun’s gravitational pull. That being the case, it could hardly hope to escape from those lighter, further-traveling ships. My companions inside doubtless figure that they might as well face the attack first as last.”

There was something uncanny in the thought of what was being done and decided inside that floating globe, so like a lifeless planetoid and yet the work of mortal hands. Brimful of men and weapons it was destined to destroy whatever of Earth it might.

A month passed. And then another week. Larger and ever larger grew the mock asteroid until it filled a sizeable portion of the television screen that reflected it. At last they swooped down toward it, a great uneven globe the color of clay that spun slowly upon its tilted axis. Lightly as a falling leaf the ship descended. Neil was at the controls inside, while Yaxa sent code messages by radio. A great black opening suddenly appeared. Into this the craft slipped.

It fitted into the end of a long tube, like a nut dropped into a mouse-hole. As it came to a stop Yaxa opened the lock-panel to the outside. At once several Martians, all heavily armed, looked in. At the sight of the Terrestrials they levelled automatic rifles and pistols.

“It’s all right,” said Yaxa. “One of these is a friend, the other two are prisoners.”

Still suspicious, a guard took the four to an officer. There Yaxa made a long report in an undertone. The three Terrestrials were questioned next, one at a time. In the end Sukune and Bull Mike were sent away to be confined.

“As for you,” the officer said to Neil, “I find that you have done a great service to us and that at a great personal sacrifice. Consider yourself one of us. We are prepared to offer you whatever reward you ask within reason.”

“Thank you,” replied Neil. “I know nothing that I would like at present except a chance to inspect your wonderful asteroid.”

“We will gladly grant you such a chance,” he was assured.

Some conversation about the oncoming Terrestrial force then followed, but Neil, a simple scout in rank, was unable to give much information. At last he was allowed to go away with Yaxa, who by this time looked upon him as a close friend.

They walked through long, high corridors, walled with gray metal and flanked by doors opening into compartments of various styles and equipment. Aided by Yaxa’s explanations. Neil was not long in visualizing the whole structure as a series of spherical surfaces, one within another, each surface utilized as the floor of a level. Artificial gravity was set up at the core and elevators and sloping runways permitted the garrison to progress from one level to another.

“Most of all,” said Neil, “I want to view this wonderful mechanism which holds the four parts of your asteroid together.”

“A trifle, nothing but a trifle,” Yaxa replied with a deprecatory gesture. “The principal is a simple magnetic one. The four sections—the fruit slices, I once described them—bring their inner angles together along a common line. That common line is a long, thin cable made of six different kinds of metal, each of the six connected with a special motor at either end. They set up the current among themselves, and the cable acts as the pole of our world.”

“And if the current was cut off?”

“Then the four sections would float apart. But the current will endure as long as the cable is not cut clean in two.”

“Then where is the center of gravity?”

“At the very midpoint of the cable, which is also the center of the asteroid and of each concentric sphere within it.”

“I would greatly like to see this cable,” said Neil again.

“That is the only request I cannot grant you,” the Martian replied. “It is the most sacred, the most jealously fenced object of all. Every foot is guarded by trusted men, each one sworn to defend it with his last drop of blood. Only the commander of this garrison can be admitted to the tubular compartment which surrounds its central emanator of gravity, or to the shops where the motors run. But don’t feel disappointed over such a prohibition. Come, we’ll go to a theater and on the way we’ll pass as close to the cable as we’re likely to get.”

Sure enough, as they walked down the corridor they came to a juncture of four wide passages. Here was a small concourse, thronged with pedestrians, and in its very center a stout metal pillar rose from the flooring to the roof. Two sentries stood vigilantly on opposite sides of it.

“We are now at the point where the four sections meet on this level,” Yaxa pointed out. “As you see, the walls are cut well away to allow the passages to cross. That pillar is made of four pieces—the edges of the sections. Enclosed by them is the cable I told you about. The pillar and the cable extend above and below here, from one pole of the asteroid to the other.”

Neil looked at the arrangement as if fascinated but Yaxa urged him on. They came to the spot where opposite partitions of two adjoining sections came together. There was not enough space to insert a knife-blade, so accurately had the structure been made.

“Not very thick for outer walls,” observed Neil, measuring the partitions with his eye. “A Terrestrial disintegrator-ray could easily pierce them.”

“Of course, but these are only inner walls, after all. The real strong, thick partition is the outside, the tough rind of the fruit. That is too much for the strongest ray or bomb ever made.”

“There aren’t any bolts to hold the sections together.”

“Have you forgotten what I told you about the artificial gravity? That holds everything in place. But here’s the theater. Let’s get inside or we’ll be late.”

IV

The Great Battle

The television drama broadcast from the Martian pleasure city of Pulambar, was one of the cynical tragicomedies that the men of Mars love so well. As it unfolded certain gases were released in the auditorium. They seemed pungent, even acrid, to Neil, who was not used to Martian luxuries, but those around him sniffed the fumes with every evidence of pleasure. He watched the drama progress and was careful to applaud and laugh whenever Yaxa did.

From there they went to an eating-compartment, where a group of young officers first looked askance at the Terrestrial stranger, but crowded around with exclamations of welcome when Yaxa explained his presence in the asteroid. Neil made the best of his limited command of the Martian language. The party seemed to be having a fine time, not the slightest bit worried by the fact that a strong force from Earth was due to attack within a few hours.

“We have only to remain inside our defenses,” said one. “They can hammer away on our surface forever without effect, while we can bomb them out of existence one by one.”

“It’ll be a way to break the tedium of existence,” offered another.

“And excellent practice for our coming raid on Earth,” added a third.

“Will you fight on our side?” the first speaker asked Neil.

“No, I’ll be a noncombatant,” grinned the Terrestrial. “After all, I’ve some old comrades in those ships. However,” he continued, “I’ll drink in the fashion of my planet to your success and that of your friends.”

He was loudly applauded and several raised their glasses in imitation of his courtesy.

The gathering broke up late and Neil confessing himself tired, was allowed to go to bed in quarters near those of Yaxa. Yet he did not sleep for hours and, when he dozed off at last, it seemed but a moment before Yaxa knocked at his door to waken him.

He dressed and went out into the wide passage that served as a street. The carefree attitude of the Martians was gone now; everywhere he saw bodies of troops drawn up into formation, while here and there sped vehicles laden with munitions and supplies.

“The enemy is almost here and we’re getting ready,” explained Yaxa. “The commander has told me to bring you to him, that he may ask what part you want to take in the action.”

“I’ve already said that I don’t want to fight,” said Neil. “As a matter of fact, I think that I’d do best as a guard over the Terrestrial prisoners who came with us. I’m built along the same mental and physical lines that they are, and so I ought to be ideal for the job.”

When he faced the Martian chief he made the same suggestion and it was accepted on the spot. Yaxa conducted him to an elevator and they descended, it seemed for miles. At last they stepped out into a narrow corridor the floor of which was sharply curved.

In front of a nearby panel a Martian soldier stood, armed with automatic rifle, pistol and bomb-thrower. Yaxa explained their errand and showed a stamped bit of metal as badge of authority. The fellow saluted and opened the door.

Inside, Sukune and Bull Mike rose from the pallets on which they sat. They were courteous, even cheerful, in their greeting to the newcomers.

“We’ve been getting ourselves an eyeful of the show that’s coming,” said the Japanese, pointing to the television screen that was part of the chamber’s furnishings. Sure enough, he had dialed in a viewpoint in space from which the artificial asteroid appeared as a sphere about two feet in diameter, while in the distance the “curtain front” of the Terrestrial ships’ advance could be seen like a puff of luminous dust.

“There’s a lot of friends of ours in that mob,” added Bull Mike. “They’ll take this little pill of yours without so much as a swallow of water. Then we’ll be free, speaking a good word for you, Yaxa.”

“That’s kind of you,” smiled the Martian. “However, I don’t think that there will be that much of a reverse.”

“We’ll soon know,” said Neil. “Look, the Terrestrials are about ready to close in.”

The attacking fleet had indeed drawn near its objective. They could see the face of the “curtain” changing, the edges coming forward and the center receding. This was the first move toward the gradual formation of a great net or basket in which to snare the apparently lifeless ball. That accomplished, the open face of the net would close and the ships of Earth would settle like a cloud around their quarry. An hour more, at least, and the thing would be done.

But, as the Terrestrials drew near, a hundred hidden panels flew wide all over the asteroid, exposing dark recesses. From each of these, shot ship after ship, like angry hornets disturbed in their nests, hurtling silently and fiercely to battle.

What followed might seem but a small engagement compared to the later and final conflict between Earth and Mars, wherein full two million ships took part. Yet, for display of grim courage, desperate endeavor and in proportion to the casualties, the fight that ensued around and within the asteroid has no parallel in the history of either planet.

Records show that the Martian commander of the garrison in the huge hull foresaw and planned his part of the battle from the moment the enemy group left Earth. He hoped to launch a surprise attack that it would have been impossible for the Terrestrials to forestall, and to that end he awaited the very instant when the attacking party bunched to close in. Then he sent his entire space-force, something more than two thousand fighting craft, out and at them. Only the smallest possible crews were at the battle stations of these ships and the bulk of the asteroid garrison, more than five hundred thousand strong, remained inside.

The four at the television watched eagerly the miniature reflection of the engagement. The Martians, less in number and lighter in craft, did their best to take advantage of every opportunity. Bunching close together in fours and fives, they hurled into action. They were all raiding models, more maneuverable than most of the battleships and heavy cruisers among the Terrestrials. A quick dash through the ranks of the oncoming enemy, and they might be able to effect an equally quick turn and an attack from the rear.

From every Martian ship streaked forth a volley of roving bombs. These projectiles propelled by ultra-swift rocket-engines, were aimed and guided by radio controls so that they could be turned to seek a target missed at first attempt. Some of the foremost Terrestrial ships were silently exploded into nothingness before they could fight or avoid the enemy. The others, frantically plied their disintegrator rays, swinging the lean, glowing fingers of flame back and forth in an attempt to blot out the whizzing bombs and the ships that were launching them.

“Say, I’m missing some wonderful fighting,” said Yaxa suddenly. “You three will excuse me.”

“We three will do nothing of the sort,” replied Neil with the utmost calm. “You’re staying here with us.”

The young Martian looked up with wondering eyes, first at Neil, who stood with drawn pistol, then at Bull Mike and Sukune, who had risen to bar the door. His hand dropped to his belt in search of a weapon.

“Stand still, Yaxa, or I’ll kill you,” called Neil warningly. Yaxa’s hand ceased its motion. Bull Mike reached out and possessed himself of the Martian’s weapon. Then, holding the prisoner by the shoulder, he walked toward the door, which Sukune was opening.

Outside the startled sentry brought up his rifle, but paused when he saw Bull Mike interpose the body of Yaxa as a shield.

“Shoot, fool!” screamed the latter. “Don’t mind me, destroy these men before they escape!”

The sentry still hesitated for a moment and in that moment Neil shot him down. Sukune sprang out and possessed himself of the fallen man’s rifle, pistol and bomb-thrower.

Neil still remained at the television screen for a moment before following the men he had liberated. “Our battleships are already raying the outside,” he said, as he came away at last. “We haven’t a minute to lose.”

“What are you going to do?” demanded Yaxa in a voice that still reflected overwhelming astonishment. “I don’t understand—”

“It’s perfectly simple,” said Sukune. “We were deathly afraid that you’d guess before this, but now you may as well know. The whole business of your rescue, our capture, the flight from Earth, was arranged by our intelligence staff. They wanted to get three determined men inside this shell, where we could in some way lay the innards open to Terrestrial disintegrators.”

“That’s why you were so curious about the cable,” Yaxa accused Neil.

“Right,” admitted the other. “Well, we have little time to lose. Follow me.”

Suddenly Yaxa began to struggle. “Help! Help!” he yelled at the top of his lungs, and at his cry a little group of Martians came running to view from a side-passage. Bull Mike clouted Yaxa with his fist and the prisoner fell insensible, while the three Terrestrials ran swiftly up the corridor. Behind them came a summons to stop, followed by a scatter of shots. A few leaps, however, left the pursuit well behind.

“There’s the cable-pillar, ahead of us,” said Neil, pointing ahead. Sure enough they were approaching a pole on their level.

The two guards on duty by the device looked up at the sound of hurriedly approaching feet. Before they could challenge, however, they fell beneath a volley from the Terrestrials. Ignoring the still quivering bodies, the three comrades gathered around the pillar.

“How can we cut it?” panted Sukune.

“I smuggled this along,” said Neil, producing a hand disintegrator appliance, about the size of a pistol. With it he began to fuse the metal facings of the pillar.

The Martians who had come at Yaxa’s call were approaching now. Bull Mike sent a stream of bullets at them from the rifle of one of the cable-guards. Sukune did likewise. Several of the pursuers fell while the others ducked into sheltering doorways without returning the fire.

“They’re afraid they’ll hit and damage this pillar,” said Neil. “Hang close to it, you two.”

He had cut well into one facing of the great upright. Still he had not pierced the layer of metal that protected the cable. On he worked while his comrades faced in opposite directions, rifles at the ready.

The shots had attracted groups in other corridors, and from all four directions bodies of Martian soldiery could be seen stealthily approaching. As they came close enough to be good targets Sukune and Bull Mike sprayed bullets on them. The survivors all sought shelter for a moment, then resumed steady advance from doorway to doorway along the passages. A rush from all quarters seemed imminent.

At last a great oxidized chip fell away from the pillar and Neil gave a triumphant exclamation. He had pierced the metal and inside he could plainly see the cable—a taut, gleaming cord of varicolored strands, barely six inches in diameter. It was hard to realize that this slender line was the source of the powerful gravity that controlled this synthetic world. He aimed his disintegrator at it anew, but no ray answered his touch on the button. The charge had been exhausted in forcing a way through the pillar.

He sent a pistol bullet in at the cable. It struck at an angle and glanced away. His action was seen by the Martians in all directions, who gave vent to a loud chorus of desperate shouts and charged forward as if driven by one single impulse.

The rattle of Sukune’s and Bull Mike’s rifles sounded, but this burst of fire could not stem the rush. In a second the Martians were upon them—dozens of them. Bull Mike clubbed his weapon, swung it like a flail and cleared a space. Half a dozen pistols were fired at him, their muzzles almost against him as they were discharged. He reeled but did not collapse, fighting on with undiminished strength.

Sukune did not fare so well, and out of the tail of his eye Neil saw the Japanese go down and lie still as vengeful Martians showered blows upon him. In desperation he reached a hand through the hole in the cable, grasped the cable and gave it a powerful jerk at the same moment. A moment later he fell sprawling, his body convulsed by a current that gripped and tore at him as though it would rend his every muscle to shreds. He tried to rise again, but the shock had paralyzed him. His ears were dull to the din around him and his eyes were blurred as if with weariness, but he could see that a loop of the cable had been pulled out by his attempt.

Bull Mike, last of the three Terrestrials still on his feet, saw it, too. Hurling his weapon into the midst of the Martians, he sprang to the side of the pillar and thrust his arm through the exposed loop. Clasping his great hands, he hurled his giant body outward with all his strength.

For a moment he seemed to glow as if illuminated from within by a powerful white flame. Then he flew through the air and crashed to the floor. The Martians fairly riddled his fallen form with their bullets. Neil slipped into insensibility, and the last thing he was conscious of was that the cable’s loop had been parted, its two frayed ends protruding from the hole in the pillar, fully six inches of space between them.

The mission of the trio had been accomplished.

When he regained his senses at last he could not open his eyes. He moved his hands, and it was as if they were sheathed in massy lead. His very breathing was a distinct effort.

“Bull Mike!” he called. “Sukune!”—but then he remembered that Bull Mike and Sukune had been killed.

“Lie still,” said a female voice. “You’re all right.”

“Where am I?” he asked.

“In a hospital,” answered the voice.

“A hospital? Where? On Earth?”

“Of course,” the voice laughed. “You’re in Base Hospital Number 61-X, at Delhi. I’m your nurse.”

“I see. The battle’s over, then.”

“Months ago. After our ships fired blasts between sections of the asteroid and then destroyed them, you were one of the few survivors found floating in space among the wreckage. It’s been a fight to keep you alive.”

He lay still and thought silently.

“Am I blind?” he asked at length.

“No, but leave that bandage on your eyes alone. Plenty of time to see everything when the doctor takes it off.”

“I understand,” he said. “And am I—badly hurt?”

“You were. But we’ve put you together, as good as new. It will take many days more, but you’ll walk and talk and see and fly again. And you’ll still have your good looks, too.”

Again he was quiet. The nurse broke the silence.

“Something was left here for you.”

He heard the rattle of a paper wrapping. Then a small object was placed in his palm. It seemed to be a bit of metal, cut into the shape of a many-pointed star and depending from a strip of ribbon.

“The president of the Terrestrial League brought you that with his own hands,” the nurse told him. “Shall I read the citation?”

“Do.”

“Very well, listen. ‘In recognition of the intelligent and loyal service rendered in capturing an enemy scout and securing from him information of paramount importance to the Terrestrial arms on or about the first day of October, 2675; and for courageous and successful attempts and actions against and in the presence of a superior armed force of the enemy on or about the third day of March, 2676; I, Silas Parrish, president of the Terrestrial League, by authority vested in me by the government of the planet Earth, do confer upon Captain Neil Andresson, unattached, the highest award for valor and service that is within the gift of the body I represent; to wit, the Medal of Honor of the Terrestrial League.’ ”

She stopped reading. “But it calls me a captain!” exclaimed Neil. “I’m only a scout.”

“You have the rank of captain now. It’s honorary, of course. You’ll be out of the hospital before the beginning of the year, but you won’t be able to go into action again before the whole mess is settled.”

He heard her lay the medal and document down. Then her footsteps went echoing away.

“Hello, Neil,” said a voice he knew.

“Yaxa!” he cried. “You here?”

“In the cot next to you. They picked us up together, I’m told.”

“Badly wounded?”

“Worse than you. Both my legs have been taken off.”

Neil said nothing for a moment. “It could be worse,” he ventured at last.

“Oh yes. Life is worth living, even with artificial limbs.”

“Can you see, Yaxa.”

“Perfectly.”

“Here then. The war’s over, at least so far as we’re concerned. Let’s call it quits.”

He painfully stretched out his hand toward the place from which Yaxa’s voice came. After a moment he felt the Martian’s spidery fingers on it.

“Quits it is, then,” agreed Yaxa. “We’ll get well together.”

Both of them relaxed. The fierce conflict they had both gone through now seemed far away and vague, as if it had been the experience of other men. They felt peaceful and in some measure content.

For they had both fought a good fight. Both had done their best. Both would be honored for their efforts. And, best of all, neither of them would ever need to fight again.

The Golgotha Dancers

I had come to the Art Museum to see the special show of Goya prints, but that particular gallery was so crowded that I could hardly get in, much less see or savor anything; wherefore I walked out again. I wandered through the other wings with their rows and rows of oils, their Greek and Roman sculptures, their stern ranks of medieval armors, their Oriental porcelains, their Egyptian gods. At length, by chance and not by design, I came to the head of a certain rear stairway. Other habitués of the museum will know the one I mean when I remind them that Arnold Böcklin’s The Isle of the Dead hangs on the wall of the landing.

I started down, relishing in advance the impression Böcklin’s picture would make with its high brown rocks and black poplars, its midnight sky and gloomy film of sea, its single white figure erect in the bow of the beach-nosing skiff. But, as I descended, I saw that The Isle of the Dead was not in its accustomed position on the wall. In that space, arresting even in the bad light and from the up-angle of the stairs, hung a gilt-framed painting I had never seen or heard of in all my museum-haunting years.

I gazed at it, one will imagine, all the way down to the landing. Then I had a close, searching look, and a final appraising stare from the lip of the landing above the lower half of the flight. So far as I can learn—and I have been diligent in my research—the thing is unknown even to the best-informed of art experts. Perhaps it is as well that I describe it in detail.

It seemed to represent action upon a small plateau or table rock, drab and bare, with a twilight sky deepening into a starless evening. This setting, restrainedly worked up in blue-grays and blue-blacks, was not the first thing to catch the eye, however. The front of the picture was filled with lively dancing creatures, as pink, plump and naked as cherubs and as patently evil as the meditations of Satan in his rare idle moments.

I counted those dancers. There were twelve of them, ranged in a half-circle, and they were cavorting in evident glee around a central object—a prone cross, which appeared to be made of two stout logs with some of the bark still upon them. To this cross a pair of the pink things—that makes fourteen—kneeling and swinging blocky-looking hammers or mauls, spiked a human figure.

I say “human” when I speak of that figure, and I withhold the word in describing the dancers and their hammer-wielding fellows. There is a reason. The supine victim on the cross was a beautifully represented male body, as clear and anatomically correct as an illustration in a surgical textbook. The head was writhed around, as if in pain, and I could not see the face or its expression; but in the tortured tenseness of the muscles, in the slaty white sheen of the skin with jagged streaks of vivid gore upon it, agonized nature was plain and doubly plain. I could almost see the painted limbs writhe against the transfixing nails.

By the same token, the dancers and hammerers were so dynamically done as to seem half in motion before my eyes. So much for the sound skill of the painter. Yet, where the crucified prisoner was all clarity, these others were all fog. No lines, no angles, no muscles—their features could not be seen or sensed. I was not even sure if they had hair or not. It was as if each was picked out with a ray of light in that surrounding dusk, light that revealed and yet shimmered indistinctly; light, too, that had absolutely nothing of comfort or honesty in it.

“Hold on, there!” came a sharp challenge from the stairs behind and below me. “What are you doing? And what’s that picture doing?”

I started so that I almost lost my footing and fell upon the speaker—one of the Museum guards. He was a slight old fellow and his thin hair was gray, but he advanced upon me with all the righteous, angry pluck of a beefy policeman. His attitude surprised and nettled me.

“I was going to ask somebody that same question,” I told him as austerely as I could manage. “What about this picture? I thought there was a Böcklin hanging here.”

The guard relaxed his forbidding attitude at first sound of my voice. “Oh, I beg your pardon, sir. I thought you were somebody else—the man who brought that thing.” He nodded at the picture, and the hostile glare came back into his eyes. “It so happened that he talked to me first, then to the curator. Said it was art—great art—and the Museum must have it.” He lifted his shoulders, in a shrug or a shudder. “Personally, I think it’s plain beastly.”

So it was, I grew aware as I looked at it again. “And the Museum has accepted it at last?” I prompted.

He shook his head. “Oh, no, sir. An hour ago he was at the back door, with that nasty daub there under his arm. I heard part of the argument. He got insulting, and he was told to clear out and take his picture with him. But he must have got in here somehow, and hung it himself.” Walking close to the painting, as gingerly as though he expected the pink dancers to leap out at him, he pointed to the lower edge of the frame. “If it was a real Museum piece, we’d have a plate right there, with the name of the painter and the title.”

I, too, came close. There was no plate, just as the guard had said. But in the lower left-hand corner of the canvas were sprawling capitals, pale paint on the dark, spelling out the word Golgotha. Beneath these, in small, barely readable script:

I sold my soul that I might paint a living picture.

No signature or other clue to the artist’s identity.

The guard had discovered a great framed rectangle against the wall to one side. “Here’s the picture he took down,” he informed me, highly relieved. “Help me put it back, will you, sir? And do you suppose,” here he grew almost wistful, “that we could get rid of this other thing before someone finds I let the crazy fool slip past me?”

I took one edge of The Isle of the Dead and lifted it to help him hang it once more.

“Tell you what,” I offered on sudden impulse; “I’ll take this Golgotha piece home with me, if you like.”

“Would you do that?” he almost yelled out in his joy at the suggestion. “Would you, to oblige me?”

“To oblige myself,” I returned. “I need another picture at my place.”

And the upshot of it was, he smuggled me and the unwanted painting out of the Museum. Never mind how. I have done quite enough as it is to jeopardize his job and my own welcome up there.

It was not until I had paid off my taxi and lugged the unwieldy parallelogram of canvas and wood upstairs to my bachelor apartment that I bothered to wonder if it might be valuable. I never did find out, but from the first I was deeply impressed.

Hung over my own fireplace, it looked as large and living as a scene glimpsed through a window or, perhaps, on a stage in a theater. The capering pink bodies caught new lights from my lamp, lights that glossed and intensified their shape and color but did not reveal any new details. I pored once more over the cryptic legend: I sold my soul that I might paint a living picture.

A living picture—was it that? I could not answer. For all my honest delight in such things, I cannot be called expert or even knowing as regards art. Did I even like the Golgotha painting? I could not be sure of that, either. And the rest of the inscription, about selling a soul; I was considerably intrigued by that, and let my thoughts ramble on the subject of Satanist complexes and the vagaries of half-crazy painters. As I read, that evening, I glanced up again and again at my new possession. Sometimes it seemed ridiculous, sometimes sinister. Shortly after midnight I rose, gazed once more, and then turned out the parlor lamp. For a moment, or so it seemed, I could see those dancers, so many dim-pink silhouettes in the sudden darkness. I went to the kitchen for a bit of whisky and water, and thence to my bedroom.

I had dreams. In them I was a boy again, and my mother and sister were leaving the house to go to a theater where—think of it!—Richard Mansfield would play Beau Brummell. I, the youngest, was told to stay at home and mind the troublesome furnace. I wept copiously in my disappointed loneliness, and then Mansfield himself stalked in, in full Brummell regalia. He laughed goldenly and stretched out his hand in warm greeting. I, the lad of my dreams, put out my own hand, then was frightened when he would not loosen his grasp. I tugged, and he laughed again. The gold of his laughter turned suddenly hard, cold. I tugged with all my strength, and woke.

Something held me tight by the wrist.

In my first half-moment of wakefulness I was aware that the room was filled with the pink dancers of the picture, in nimble, fierce-happy motion. They were man-size, too, or nearly so, visible in the dark with the dim radiance of fox-fire. On the small scale of the painting they had seemed no more than babyishly plump; now they were gross, like huge erect toads. And, as I awakened fully, they were closing in, a menacing ring of them, around my bed. One stood at my right side, and its grip, clumsy and rubbery-hard like that of a monkey, was closed upon my arm.

I saw and sensed all this, as I say, in a single moment. With the sensing came the realization of peril, so great that I did not stop to wonder at the uncanniness of my visitors. I tried frantically to jerk loose. For the moment I did not succeed and as I thrashed about, throwing my body nearly across the bed, a second dancer dashed in from the left. It seized and clamped my other arm. I felt, rather than heard, a wave of soft, wordless merriment from them all. My heart and sinews seemed to fail, and briefly I lay still in a daze of horror, pinned down crucifix-fashion between my two captors.

Was that a hammer raised above me as I sprawled?

There rushed and swelled into me the sudden startled strength that sometimes favors the desperate. I screamed like any wild thing caught in a trap, rolled somehow out of bed and to my feet. One of the beings I shook off and the other I dashed against the bureau. Freed, I made for the bedroom door and the front of the apartment, stumbling and staggering on fear-weakened legs.

One of the dim-shining pink things barred my way at the very threshold, and the others were closing in behind, as if for a sudden rush. I flung my right fist with all my strength and weight. The being bobbed back unresistingly before my smash, like a rubber toy floating through water. I plunged past, reached the entry and fumbled for the knob of the outer door.

They were all about me then, their rubbery palms fumbling at my shoulders, my elbows, my pajama jacket. They would have dragged me down before I could negotiate the lock. A racking shudder possessed me and seemed to flick them clear. Then I stumbled against a stand, and purely by good luck my hand fell upon a bamboo walking-stick. I yelled again, in truly hysterical fierceness, and laid about me as with a whip. My blows did little or no damage to those unearthly assailants, but they shrank back, teetering and dancing, to a safe distance. Again I had the sense that they were laughing, mocking. For the moment I had beaten them off, but they were sure of me in the end. Just then my groping free hand pressed a switch. The entry sprang into light.

On the instant they were not there.

Somebody was knocking outside, and with trembling fingers I turned the knob of the door. In came a tall, slender girl with a blue lounging-robe caught hurriedly around her. Her bright hair was disordered as though she had just sprung from her bed.

“Is someone sick?” she asked in a breathless voice. “I live down the hall—I heard cries.” Her round blue eyes were studying my face, which must have been ghastly pale. “You see, I’m a trained nurse, and perhaps—”

“Thank God you did come!” I broke in, unceremoniously but honestly, and went before her to turn on every lamp in the parlor.

It was she who, without guidance, searched out my whisky and siphon and mixed for me a highball of grateful strength. My teeth rang nervously on the edge of the glass as I gulped it down. After that I got my own robe—a becoming one, with satin facings—and sat with her on the divan to tell of my adventure. When I had finished, she gazed long at the painting of the dancers, then back at me. Her eyes, like two chips of the April sky, were full of concern and she held her rosy lower lip between her teeth. I thought that she was wonderfully pretty.

“What a perfectly terrible nightmare!” she said.

“It was no nightmare,” I protested.

She smiled and argued the point, telling me all manner of comforting things about mental associations and their reflections in vivid dreams.

To clinch her point she turned to the painting.

“This line about a ‘living picture’ is the peg on which your slumbering mind hung the whole fabric,” she suggested, her slender fingertip touching the painted scribble. “Your very literal subconscious self didn’t understand that the artist meant his picture would live only figuratively.”

“Are you sure that’s what the artist meant?” I asked, but finally I let her convince me. One can imagine how badly I wanted to be convinced.

She mixed me another highball, and a short one for herself. Over it she told me her name—Miss Dolby—and finally she left me with a last comforting assurance. But, nightmare or no, I did not sleep again that night. I sat in the parlor among the lamps, smoking and dipping into book after book. Countless times I felt my gaze drawn back to the painting over the fireplace, with the cross and the nail-pierced wretch and the shimmering pink dancers.

After the rising sun had filled the apartment with its honest light and cheer I felt considerably calmer. I slept all morning, and in the afternoon was disposed to agree with Miss Dolby that the whole business had been a bad dream, nothing more. Dressing, I went down the hall, knocked on her door and invited her to dinner with me.

It was a good dinner. Afterward we went to an amusing motion picture, with Charles Butterworth in it as I remember. After bidding her good night, I went to my own place. Undressed and in bed, I lay awake. My late morning slumber made my eyes slow to close. Thus it was that I heard the faint shuffle of feet and, sitting up against my pillows, saw the glowing silhouettes of the Golgotha dancers. Alive and magnified, they were creeping into my bedroom.

I did not hesitate or shrink this time. I sprang up, tense and defiant.

“No, you don’t!” I yelled at them. As they seemed to hesitate before the impact of my wild voice, I charged frantically. For a moment I scattered them and got through the bedroom door, as on the previous night. There was another shindy in the entry; this time they all got hold of me, like a pack of hounds, and wrestled me back against the wall. I writhe even now when I think of the unearthly hardness of their little gripping paws. Two on each arm were spread-eagling me upon the plaster. The cruciform position again!

I swore, yelled and kicked. One of them was in the way of my foot. He floated back, unhurt. That was their strength and horror—their ability to go flabby and nonresistant under smashing, flattening blows. Something tickled my palm, pricked it. The point of a spike. …

“Miss Dolby!” I shrieked, as a child might call for its mother. “Help! Miss D——”

The door flew open; I must not have locked it. “Here I am,” came her unafraid reply.

She was outlined against the rectangle of light from the hall. My assailants let go of me to dance toward her. She gasped but did not scream. I staggered along the wall, touched a light-switch, and the parlor just beyond us flared into visibility. Miss Dolby and I ran in to the lamp, rallying there as stone-age folk must have rallied at their fire to face the monsters of the night. I looked at her; she was still fully dressed, as I had left her, apparently had been sitting up. Her rouge made flat patches on her pale cheeks, but her eyes were level.

This time the dancers did not retreat or vanish; they lurked in the comparative gloom of the entry, jigging and trembling as if mustering their powers and resolutions for another rush at us.

“You see,” I chattered out to her, “it wasn’t a nightmare.”

She spoke, not in reply, but as if to herself. “They have no faces,” she whispered. “No faces!” In the half-light that was diffused upon them from our lamp they presented the featurelessness of so many huge gingerbread boys, covered with pink icing. One of them, some kind of leader, pressed forward within the circle of the light. It daunted him a bit. He hesitated, but did not retreat.

From my center table Miss Dolby had picked up a bright paper-cutter. She poised it with the assurance of one who knows how to handle cutting instruments.

“When they come,” she said steadily, “let’s stand close together. We’ll be harder to drag down that way.”

I wanted to shout my admiration of her fearless front toward the dreadful beings, my thankfulness for her quick run to my rescue. All I could mumble was, “You’re mighty brave.”

She turned for a moment to look at the picture above my dying fire. My eyes followed hers. I think I expected to see a blank canvas—find that the painted dancers had vanished from it and had grown into the living ones. But they were still in the picture, and the cross and the victim were there, too. Miss Dolby read aloud the inscription:

“ ‘A living picture …’ The artist knew what he was talking about, after all.”

“Couldn’t a living picture be killed?” I wondered.

It sounded uncertain, and a childish quibble to boot, but Miss Dolby exclaimed triumphantly, as at an inspiration.

“Killed? Yes!” she shouted. She sprang at the picture, darting out with the paper-cutter. The point ripped into one of the central figures in the dancing semicircle.

All the crowd in the entry seemed to give a concerted throb, as of startled protest. I swung, heart racing, to front them again. What had happened? Something had changed, I saw. The intrepid leader had vanished. No, he had not drawn back into the group. He had vanished.

Miss Dolby, too, had seen. She struck again, gashed the painted representation of another dancer. And this time the vanishing happened before my eyes, a creature at the rear of the group went out of existence as suddenly and completely as though a light had blinked out.

The others, driven by their danger, rushed.

I met them, feet planted. I tried to embrace them all at once, went over backward under them. I struck, wrenched, tore. I think I even bit something grisly and bloodless, like fungoid tissue, but I refuse to remember for certain. One or two of the forms struggled past me and grappled Miss Dolby. I struggled to my feet and pulled them back from her. There were not so many swarming after me now. I fought hard before they got me down again. And Miss Dolby kept tearing and stabbing at the canvas—again, again. Clutches melted from my throat, my arms. There were only two dancers left. I flung them back and rose. Only one left. Then none.

They were gone, gone into nowhere.

“That did it,” said Miss Dolby breathlessly.

She had pulled the picture down. It was only a frame now, with ragged ribbons of canvas dangling from it.

I snatched it out of her hands and threw it upon the coals of the fire.

“Look,” I urged her joyfully. “It’s burning! That’s the end. Do you see?”

“Yes, I see,” she answered slowly. “Some fiend-ridden artist—his evil genius brought it to life.”

“The inscription is the literal truth, then?” I supplied.

“Truth no more.” She bent to watch the burning. “As the painted figures were destroyed, their incarnations faded.”

We said nothing further, but sat down together and gazed as the flames ate the last thread of fabric, the last splinter of wood. Finally we looked up again and smiled at each other.

All at once I knew that I loved her.

The Hairy Ones Shall Dance

Foreword

To Whom It May Concern:

Few words are best, as Sir Philip Sidney once wrote in challenging an enemy. The present account will be accepted as a challenge by the vast army of skeptics of which I once made one. Therefore I write it brief and bald. If my story seems unsteady in spots, that is because the hand that writes it still quivers from my recent ordeal.

Shifting the metaphor from duello to military engagement, this is but the first gun of the bombardment. Even now sworn statements are being prepared by all others who survived the strange and, in some degree, unthinkable adventure I am recounting. After that, every great psychic investigator in the country, as well as some from Europe, will begin researches. I wish that my friends and brother-magicians, Houdini and Thurston, had lived to bear a hand in them.

I must apologize for the strong admixture of the personal element in my narrative. Some may feel that I err against good taste. My humble argument is that I was not merely an observer, but an actor, albeit a clumsy one, throughout the drama.

As to the setting forth of matters which many will call impossible, let me smile in advance. Things happen and have always happened, that defy the narrow science of test-tube and formula. I can only say again that I am writing the truth, and that my statement will be supported by my companions in the adventure.

Talbot Wills.

November 15, 1937.

I

“Why Must the Burden of Proof Rest with the Spirits?”

“You don’t believe in psychic phenomena,” said Doctor Otto Zoberg yet again, “because you won’t.”

This with studied kindness, sitting in the most comfortable chair of my hotel room. I, at thirty-four, silently hoped I would have his health and charm at fifty-four—he was so rugged for all his lean length, so well groomed for all his tweeds and beard and joined eyebrows, so articulate for all his accent. Doctor Zoberg quite apparently liked and admired me, and I felt guilty once more that I did not entirely return the compliment.

“I know that you are a stage magician—” he began afresh.

“I was once,” I amended, a little sulkily. My early career had brought me considerable money and notice, but after the novelty of show business was worn off I had never rejoiced in it. Talboto the Mysterious—it had been impressive, but tawdry. Better to be Talbot Wills, lecturer and investigator in the field of exposing fraudulent mediums.

For six years I had known Doctor Otto Zoberg, the champion of spiritism and mediumism, as rival and companion. We had first met in debate under auspices of the Society for Psychical Research in London. I, young enough for enthusiasm but also for carelessness, had been badly out-thought and out-talked. But afterward, Doctor Zoberg had praised my arguments and my delivery, and had graciously taken me out to a late supper. The following day, there arrived from him a present of helpful books and magazines. Our next platform duel found me in a position to get a little of my own back; and he, afterward, laughingly congratulated me on turning to account the material he had sent me. After that, we were public foemen and personal inseparables. Just now we were touring the United States, debating, giving exhibitions, visiting mediums. The night’s program, before a Washington audience liberally laced with high officials, had ended in what we agreed was a draw; and here we were, squabbling good-naturedly afterward.

“Please, Doctor,” I begged, offering him a cigarette, “save your charges of stubbornness for the theater.”

He waved my case aside and bit the end from a villainous black cheroot. “I wouldn’t say it, here or in public, if it weren’t true, Talbot. Yet you sneer even at telepathy, and only half believe in mental suggestion. Ach, you are worse than Houdini.”

“Houdini was absolutely sincere,” I almost blazed, for I had known and worshipped that brilliant and kindly prince of conjurers and fraud-finders.

“Ach, to be sure, to be sure,” nodded Zoberg over his blazing match. “I did not say he was not. Yet, he refused proof—the proof that he himself embodied. Houdini was a great mystic, a medium. His power for miracles he did not know himself.”

I had heard that before, from Conan Doyle as well as Zoberg, but I made no comment. Zoberg continued:

“Perhaps Houdini was afraid—if anything could frighten so brave and wise a man it would assuredly come from within. And so he would not even listen to argument.” He turned suddenly somber. “Perhaps he knew best, ja. But he was stubborn, and so are you.”

“I don’t think you can say that of me,” I objected once more. The cheroot was alight now, and I kindled a cigarette to combat in some degree the gunpowdery fumes.

Teeth gleamed amiably through the beard, and Zoberg nodded again, in frank delight this time. “Oh, we have hopes of you, Wills, where we gave up Houdini.”

He had never said that before, not so plainly at any rate. I smiled back. “I’ve always been willing to be shown. Give me a foolproof, fake-proof, supernormal phenomenon, Doctor; let me convince myself; then I’ll come gladly into the spiritist camp.”

“Ach, so you always say!” he exploded, but without genuine wrath. “Why must the burden of proof rest with the spirits? How can you prove that they do not live and move and act? Study what Eddington has to say about that.”

“For five years,” I reminded him, “I have offered a prize of five thousand dollars to any medium whose spirit miracles I could not duplicate by honest sleight-of-hand.”

He gestured with slim fingers, as though to push the words back into me. “That proves absolutely nothing, Wills. For all your skill, do you think that sleight-of-hand can be the only way? Is it even the best way?”

“I’ve unmasked famous mediums for years, at the rate of one a month,” I flung back. “Unmasked them as the clumsiest of fakes.”

“Because some are dishonest, are all dishonest?” he appealed. “What specific thing would convince you, my friend?”

I thought for a moment, gazing at him through the billows of smoke. Not a gray hair to him—and I, twenty years his junior, had six or eight at either temple. I went on to admire and even to envy that pointed trowel of beard, the sort of thing that I, a magician, might have cultivated once. Then I made my answer.

“I’d ask for a materialization, Doctor. An ectoplasmic apparition, visible and solid to touch—in an empty room with no curtains or closets, all entrances sealed by myself, the medium and witnesses shackled.” He started to open his mouth, but I hurried to prevent him. “I know what you’ll say—that I’ve seen a number of impressive ectoplasms. So I have, perhaps, but not one was scientifically and dispassionately controlled. No, Doctor, if I’m to be convinced, I must make the conditions and set the stage myself.”

“And if the materialization was a complete success?”

“Then it would prove the claim to me—to the world. Materializations are the most important question in the whole field.”

He looked long at me, narrowing his shrewd eyes beneath the dark single bar of his brows. “Wills,” he said at length, “I hoped you would ask something like this.”

“You did?”

“Ja. Because—first, can you spare a day or so?”

I replied guardedly, “I can, I believe. We have two weeks or more before the New Orleans date.” I computed rapidly. “Yes, that’s December 8. What have you got up your sleeve, Doctor?”

He grinned once more, with a great display of gleaming white teeth, and flung out his long arms. “My sleeves, you will observe, are empty!” he cried. “No trickery. But within five hours of where we sit—five hours by fast automobile—is a little town. And in that town there is a little medium. No, Wills, you have never seen or heard of her. It is only myself who found her by chance, who studied her long and prayerfully. Come with me, Wills—she will teach you how little you know and how much you can learn!”

II

“You Can Almost Hear the Ghosts.”

I have sat down with the purpose of writing out, plainly and even flatly, all that happened to me and to Doctor Otto Zoberg in our impromptu adventure at psychic investigation; yet, almost at the start, I find it necessary to be vague about the tiny town where that adventure ran its course. Zoberg began by refusing to tell me its name, and now my friends of various psychical research committees have asked me to hold my peace until they have finished certain examinations without benefit of yellow journals or prying politicians.

It is located, as Zoberg told me, within five hours by fast automobile of Washington. On the following morning, after a quick and early breakfast, we departed at seven o’clock in my sturdy coupé. I drove and Zoberg guided. In the turtle-back we had stowed bags, for the November sky had begun to boil up with dark, heavy clouds, and a storm might delay us.

On the way Zoberg talked a great deal, with his usual charm and animation. He scoffed at my skepticism and prophesied my conversion before another midnight.

“A hundred years ago, realists like yourself were ridiculing hypnotism,” he chuckled. “They thought that it was a fantastic fake, like one of Edgar Poe’s amusing tales, ja? And now it is a great science, for healing and comforting the world. A few years ago, the world scorned mental telepathy—”

“Hold on,” I interrupted. “I’m none too convinced of it now.”

“I said just that, last night. However, you think that there is some grain of truth to it. You would be a fool to laugh at the many experiments in clairvoyance carried on at Duke University.”

“Yes, they are impressive,” I admitted.

“They are tremendous, and by no means unique,” he insisted. “Think of a number between one and ten,” he said suddenly.

I gazed at my hands on the wheel, thought of a joking reply, then fell in with his mood.

“All right,” I replied. “I’m thinking of a number. What is it?”

“It is seven,” he cried out at once, then laughed heartily at the blank look on my face.

“Look here, that’s a logical number for an average man to think of,” I protested. “You relied on human nature, not telepathy.”

He grinned and tweaked the end of his beard between manicured fingers. “Very good, Wills, try again. A color this time.”

I paused a moment before replying, “All right, guess what it is.”

He, too, hesitated, staring at me sidewise. “I think it is blue,” he offered at length.

“Go to the head of the class,” I grumbled. “I rather expected you to guess red—that’s most obvious.”

“But I was not guessing,” he assured me. “A flash of blue came before my mind’s eye. Come, let us try another time.”

We continued the experiment for a while. Zoberg was not always correct, but he was surprisingly close in nearly every case. The most interesting results were with the names of persons, and Zoberg achieved some rather mystifying approximations. Thus, when I was thinking of the actor Boris Karloff, he gave me the name of the actor Bela Lugosi. Upon my thinking of Gilbert K. Chesterton, he named Chesterton’s close friend Hilaire Belloc, and my concentration on George Bernard Shaw brought forth a shout of “Santa Claus.” When I reiterated my charge of psychological trickery and besought him to teach me his method, he grew actually angry and did not speak for more than half an hour. Then he began to discuss our destination.

“A most amazing community,” he pronounced. “It is old—one of the oldest inland towns of all America. Wait until you see the houses, my friend. You can almost hear the ghosts within them, in broad daylight. And their Devil’s Croft, that is worth seeing, too.”

“Their what?”

He shook his head, as though in despair. “And you set yourself up as an authority on occultism!” he sniffed. “Next you will admit that you have never heard of the Druids. A Devil’s Croft, my dull young friend, used to be part of every English or Scots village. The good people would set aside a field for Satan, so that he would not take their own lands.”

“And this settlement has such a place?”

“Ja wohl, a grove of the thickest timber ever seen in this over-civilized country, and hedged in to boot. I do not say that they believe, but it is civic property and protected by special order from trespassers.”

“I’d like to visit that grove,” I said.

“I pray you!” he cried, waving in protest. “Do not make us unwelcome.”

We arrived shortly before noon. The little town rests in a circular hollow among high wooded hills, and there is not a really good road into it, for two or three miles around. After listening to Zoberg, I had expected something grotesque or forbidding, but I was disappointed. The houses were sturdy and modest, in some cases poor. The greater part of them made a close-huddled mass, like a herd of cattle threatened by wolves, with here and there an isolated dwelling like an adventuresome young fighting-bull. The streets were narrow, crooked and unpaved, and for once in this age I saw buggies and wagons outnumbering automobiles. The central square, with a two-story town hall of red brick and a hideous cast-iron war memorial, still boasted numerous hitching-rails, brown with age and smooth with use. There were few real signs of modern progress. For instance, the drug store was a shabby clapboard affair with “Pharmacy” painted upon its windows, and it sold only drugs, soda and tobacco; while the one hotel was low and rambling and bore the title “Luther Inn.” I heard that the population was three hundred and fifty, but I am inclined to think it was closer to three hundred.

We drew up in front of the Luther Inn, and a group of roughly dressed men gazed at us with the somewhat hostile interrogation that often marks a rural American community at the approach of strangers. These men wore mail-order coats of corduroy or suede—the air was growing nippier by the minute—and plow shoes or high laced boots under dungaree pants. All of them were of Celtic or Anglo-Saxon type.

“Hello!” cried Zoberg jovially. “I see you there, my friend Mr. Gird. How is your charming daughter?”

The man addressed took a step forward from the group on the porch. He was a rawboned, grizzled native with pale, pouched eyes, and was a trifle better dressed than the others, in a rather ministerial coat of dark cloth and a wide black hat. He cleared his throat before replying.

“Hello, Doctor. Susan’s well, thanks. What do you want of us?”

It was a definite challenge, that would repel or anger most men, but Zoberg was not to be denied. He scrambled out of the car and cordially shook the hand of the man he had called Mr. Gird. Meanwhile he spoke in friendly fashion to one or two of the others.

“And here,” he wound up, “is a very good friend of mine, Mr. Talbot Wills.”

All eyes—and very unfriendly eyes they were, as a whole—turned upon me. I got out slowly, and at Zoberg’s insistence shook hands with Gird. Finally the grizzled man came with us to the car.

“I promised you once,” he said glumly to Zoberg, “that I would let you and Susan dig as deeply as you wanted to into this matter of spirits. I’ve often wished since that I hadn’t, but my word was never broken yet. Come along with me; Susan is cooking dinner, and there’ll be enough for all of us.”

He got into the car with us, and as we drove out of the square and toward his house he conversed quietly with Zoberg and me.

“Yes,” he answered one of my questions, “the houses are old, as you can see. Some of them have stood since the Revolutionary War with England, and our town’s ordinances have stood longer than that. You aren’t the first to be impressed, Mr. Wills. Ten years ago a certain millionaire came and said he wanted to endow us, so that we would stay as we are. He had a lot to say about native color and historical value. We told him that we would stay as we are without having to take money from him, or from anybody else for that matter.”

Gird’s home was large but low, all one story, and of darkly painted clapboards over heavy timbers. The front door was hung on the most massive hand-wrought hinges. Gird knocked at it, and a slender, smallish girl opened to us.

She wore a woolen dress, as dark as her father’s coat, with white at the neck and wrists. Her face, under masses of thunder-black hair, looked Oriental at first glance, what with high cheekbones and eyes set aslant; then I saw that her eyes were a bright gray like worn silver, and her skin rosy, with a firm chin and a generous mouth. The features were representatively Celtic, after all, and I wondered for perhaps the fiftieth time in my life if there was some sort of blood link between Scot and Mongol. Her hand, on the brass knob of the door, showed as slender and white as some evening flower.

“Susan,” said Gird, “here’s Doctor Zoberg. And this is his friend, Mr. Wills.”

She smiled at Zoberg, then nodded to me, respectfully and rather shyly.

“My daughter,” Gird finished the introduction. “Well, dinner must be ready.”

She led us inside. The parlor was rather plainer than in most old-fashioned provincial houses, but it was comfortable enough. Much of its furniture would have delighted antique dealers, and one or two pieces would have impressed museum directors. The dining-room beyond had plate-racks on the walls and a long table of dark wood, with high-backed chairs. We had some fried ham, biscuits, coffee and stewed fruit that must have been home-canned. Doctor Zoberg and Gird ate heartily, talking of local trifles, but Susan Gird hardly touched her food. I, watching her with stealthy admiration, forgot to take more than a few mouthfuls.

After the repast she carried out the dishes and we men returned to the parlor. Gird faced us.

“You’re here for some more hocus-pocus?” he hazarded gruffly.

“For another séance,” amended Zoberg, suave as ever.

“Doctor,” said Gird, “I think this had better be the last time.”

Zoberg held out a hand in pleading protest, but Gird thrust his own hands behind him and looked sternly stubborn. “It’s not good for the girl,” he announced definitely.

“But she is a great medium—greater than Eusapia Paladino, or Daniel Home,” Zoberg argued earnestly. “She is an important figure in the psychic world, lost and wasted here in this backwater—”

“Please don’t miscall our town,” interrupted Gird. “Well, Doctor, I agree to a final séance, as you call it. But I’m going to be present.”

Zoberg made a gesture as of refusal, but I sided with Gird.

“If this is to be my test, I want another witness,” I told Zoberg.

“Ach! If it is a success, you will say that he helped to deceive.”

“Not I. I’ll arrange things so there will be no deception.”

Both Zoberg and Gird stared at me. I wondered which of them was the more disdainful of my confidence.

Then Susan Gird joined us, and for once I wanted to speak of other subjects than the occult.

III

“That Thing Isn’t My Daughter—”

It was Zoberg who suggested that I take Susan Gird for a relaxing drive in my car. I acclaimed the idea as a brilliant one, and she, thanking me quietly, put on an archaic-seeming cloak, black and heavy. We left her father and Zoberg talking idly and drove slowly through the town.

She pointed out to me the Devil’s Croft of which I had heard from the doctor, and I saw it to be a grove of trees, closely and almost rankly set. It stood apart from the sparser timber on the hills, and around it stretched bare fields. Their emptiness suggested that all the capacity for life had been drained away and poured into that central clump. No road led near to it, and I was obliged to content myself by idling the car at a distance while we gazed and she talked.

“It’s evergreen, of course,” I said. “Cedar and a little juniper.”

“Only in the hedge around it,” Susan Gird informed me. “It was planted by the town council about ten years ago.”

I stared. “But surely there’s greenness in the center, too,” I argued.

“Perhaps. They say that the leaves never fall, even in January.”

I gazed at what appeared to be a little fluff of white mist above it, the whiter by contrast with the black clouds that lowered around the hilltops. To my questions about the town council, Susan Gird told me some rather curious things about the government of the community. There were five councilmen, elected every year, and no mayor. Each of the five presided at a meeting in turn. Among the ordinances enforced by the council was one providing for support of the single church.

“I should think that such an ordinance could be set aside as illegal,” I observed.

“I think it could,” she agreed, “but nobody has ever wished to try.”

The minister of the church, she continued, was invariably a member of the council. No such provision appeared on the town records, nor was it even urged as a “written law,” but it had always been deferred to. The single peace officer of the town, she continued, was the duly elected constable. He was always commissioned as deputy sheriff by officials at the county seat, and his duties included census taking, tax collecting and similar matters. The only other officer with a state commission was the justice; and her father, John Gird, had held that post for the last six years.

“He’s an attorney, then?” I suggested, but Susan Gird shook her head.

“The only attorney in this place is a retired judge, Keith Pursuivant,” she informed me. “He came from some other part of the world, and he appears in town about once a month—lives out yonder past the Croft. As a matter of fact, an ordinary experience of law isn’t enough for our peculiar little government.”

She spoke of her fellow-townsmen as quiet, simple folk who were content for the most part to keep to themselves, and then, yielding to my earnest pleas, she told me something of herself.

The Gird family counted its descent from an original settler—though she was not exactly sure of when or how the settlement was made—and had borne a leading part in community affairs through more than two centuries. Her mother, who had died when Susan Gird was seven, had been a stranger; an “outlander” was the local term for such, and I think it is used in Devonshire, which may throw light on the original founders of the community. Apparently this woman had shown some tendencies toward psychic power, for she had several times prophesied coming events or told neighbors where to find lost things. She was well loved for her labors in caring for the sick, and indeed she had died from a fever contracted when tending the victims of an epidemic.

“Doctor Zoberg had known her,” Susan Gird related. “He came here several years after her death, and seemed badly shaken when he heard what had happened. He and Father became good friends, and he has been kind to me, too. I remember his saying, the first time we met, that I looked like Mother and that it was apparent that I had inherited her spirit.”

She had grown up and spent three years at a teachers’ college, but left before graduation, refusing a position at a school so that she could keep house for her lonely father. Still idiotically mannerless, I mentioned the possibility of her marrying some young man of the town. She laughed musically.

“Why, I stopped thinking of marriage when I was fourteen!” she cried. Then, “Look, it’s snowing.”

So it was, and I thought it time to start for her home. We finished the drive on the best of terms, and when we reached her home in midafternoon, we were using first names.

Gird, I found, had capitulated to Doctor Zoberg’s genial insistence. From disliking the thought of a séance, he had come to savor the prospect of witnessing it—Zoberg had always excluded him before. Gird had even picked up a metaphysical term or two from listening to the doctor, and with these he spiced his normally plain speech.

“This ectoplasm stuff sounds reasonable,” he admitted. “If there is any such thing, there could be ghosts, couldn’t there?”

Zoberg twinkled, and tilted his beard-spike forward. “You will find that Mr. Wills does not believe in ectoplasm.”

“Nor do I believe that the production of ectoplasm would prove existence of a ghost,” I added. “What do you say, Miss Susan?”

She smiled and shook her dark head. “To tell you the truth, I’m aware only dimly of what goes on during a séance.”

“Most mediums say that,” nodded Zoberg sagely.

As the sun set and the darkness came down, we prepared for the experiment.

The dining-room was chosen, as the barest and quietest room in the house. First I made a thorough examination, poking into corners, tapping walls and handling furniture, to the accompaniment of jovial taunts from Zoberg. Then, to his further amusement, I produced from my grip a big lump of sealing-wax, and with this I sealed both the kitchen and parlor doors, stamping the wax with my signet ring. I also closed, latched and sealed the windows, on the sills of which little heaps of snow had begun to collect.

“You’re kind of making sure, Mr. Wills,” said Gird, lighting a patent carbide lamp.

“That’s because I take this business seriously,” I replied, and Zoberg clapped his hands in approval.

“Now,” I went on, “off with your coats and vests, gentlemen.”

Gird and Zoberg complied, and stood up in their shirtsleeves. I searched and felt them both all over. Gird was a trifle bleak in manner, Zoberg gay and bright-faced. Neither had any concealed apparatus, I made sure. My next move was to set a chair against the parlor door, seal its legs to the floor, and instruct Gird to sit in it. He did so, and I produced a pair of handcuffs from my bag and shackled his left wrist to the arm of the chair.

“Capital!” cried Zoberg. “Do not be so sour, Mr. Gird. I would not trust handcuffs on Mr. Wills—he was once a magician and knows all the escape tricks.”

“Your turn’s coming, Doctor,” I assured him.

Against the opposite wall and facing Gird’s chair I set three more chairs, melting wax around their legs and stamping it. Then I dragged all other furniture far away, arranging it against the kitchen door. Finally I asked Susan to take the central chair of the three, seated Zoberg at her left hand and myself at her right. Beside me, on the floor, I set the carbide lamp.

“With your permission,” I said, and produced more manacles. First I fastened Susan’s left ankle to Zoberg’s right, then her left wrist to his right. Zoberg’s left wrist I chained to his chair, leaving him entirely helpless.

“What thick wrists you have!” I commented. “I never knew they were so sinewy.”

“You never chained them before,” he grinned.

With two more pairs of handcuffs I shackled my own left wrist and ankle to Susan on the right.

“Now we are ready,” I pronounced.

“You’ve treated us like bank robbers,” muttered Gird.

“No, no, do not blame Mr. Wills,” Zoberg defended me again. He looked anxiously at Susan. “Are you quite prepared, my dear?”

Her eyes met his for a long moment; then she closed them and nodded. I, bound to her, felt a relaxation of her entire body. After a moment she bowed her chin upon her breast.

“Let nobody talk,” warned Zoberg softly. “I think that this will be a successful venture. Wills, the light.”

With my free hand I turned it out.

All was intensely dark for a moment. Then, as my eyes adjusted themselves, the room seemed to lighten. I could see the deep gray rectangles of the windows, the snow at their bottoms, the blurred outline of the man in his chair across the floor from me, the form of Susan at my left hand. My ears, likewise sharpening, detected the girl’s gentle breathing, as if she slept. Once or twice her right hand twitched, shaking my own arm in its manacle. It was as though she sought to attract my attention.

Before and a little beyond her, something pale and cloudy was making itself visible. Even as I fixed my gaze upon it, I heard something that sounded like a gusty panting. It might have been a tired dog or other beast. The pallid mist was changing shape and substance, too, and growing darker. It shifted against the dim light from the windows, and I had a momentary impression of something erect but misshapen—misshapen in an animal way. Was that a head? And were those pointed ears, or part of a headdress? I told myself determinedly that this was a clever illusion, successful despite my precautions.

It moved, and I heard a rattle upon the planks. Claws, or perhaps hobnails. Did not Gird wear heavy boots? Yet he was surely sitting in his chair; I saw something shift position at that point. The grotesque form had come before me, crouching or creeping.

Despite my self-assurance that this was a trick, I could not govern the chill that swept over me. The thing had come to a halt close to me, was lifting itself as a hound that paws its master’s knees. I was aware of an odor, strange and disagreeable, like the wind from a great beast’s cage. Then the paws were upon my lap—indeed, they were not paws. I felt them grip my legs, with fingers and opposable thumbs. A sniffing muzzle thrust almost into my face, and upon its black snout a dim, wet gleam was manifest.

Then Gird, from his seat across the room, screamed hoarsely.

“That thing isn’t my daughter—”

In the time it took him to rip out those five words, the huddled monster at my knees whirled back and away from me, reared for a trice like a deformed giant, and leaped across the intervening space upon him. I saw that Gird had tried to rise, his chained wrist hampering him. Then his voice broke in the midst of what he was trying to say; he made a choking sound and the thing emitted a barking growl.

Tearing loose from its wax fastenings, the chair fell upon its side. There was a struggle and a clatter, and Gird squealed like a rabbit in a trap. The attacker fell away from him toward us.

It was all over before one might ask what it was about.

IV

“I Don’t Know What Killed Him.”

Just when I got up I do not remember, but I was on my feet as the grapplers separated. Without thinking of danger—and surely danger was there in the room—I might have rushed forward; but Susan Gird, lying limp in her chair, hampered me in our mutual shackles. Standing where I was, then, I pawed in my pocket for something I had not mentioned to her or to Zoberg; an electric torch.

It fitted itself into my hand, a compact little cylinder, and I whipped it out with my finger on the switch. A cone of white light spurted across the room, making a pool about and upon the motionless form of Gird. He lay crumpled on one side, his back toward us, and a smudge of black wetness was widening about his slack head and shoulders.

With the beam I swiftly quartered the room, probing it into every corner and shadowed nook. The creature that had attacked Gird had utterly vanished. Susan Gird now gave a soft moan, like a dreamer of dreadful things. I flashed my light her way.

It flooded her face and she quivered under the impact of the glare, but did not open her eyes. Beyond her I saw Zoberg, doubled forward in his bonds. He was staring blackly at the form of Gird, his eyes protruding and his clenched teeth showing through his beard.

“Doctor Zoberg!” I shouted at him, and his face jerked nervously toward me. It was fairly crosshatched with tense lines, and as white as fresh pipe-clay. He tried to say something, but his voice would not command itself.

Dropping the torch upon the floor, I next dug keys from my pocket and with trembling haste unlocked the irons from Susan Gird’s wrist and ankle on my side. Then, stepping hurriedly to Zoberg, I made him sit up and freed him as speedily as possible. Finally I returned, found my torch again and stepped across to Gird.

My first glance at close quarters was enough; he was stone-dead, with his throat torn brutally out. His cheeks, too, were ripped in parallel gashes, as though by the grasp of claws or nails. Radiance suddenly glowed behind me, and Zoberg moved forward, holding up the carbide lamp.

“I found this beside your chair,” he told me unsteadily. “I found a match and lighted it.” He looked down at Gird, and his lips twitched, as though he would be hysterical.

“Steady, Doctor,” I cautioned him sharply, and took the lamp from him. “See what you can do for Gird.”

He stooped slowly, as though he had grown old. I stepped to one side, putting the lamp on the table. Zoberg spoke again:

“It is absolutely no use, Wills. We can do nothing. Gird has been killed.”

I had turned my attention to the girl. She still sagged in her chair, breathing deeply and rhythmically as if in untroubled slumber.

“Susan,” I called her. “Susan!”

She did not stir, and Doctor Zoberg came back to where I bent above her. “Susan,” he whispered penetratingly, “wake up, child.”

Her eyes unveiled themselves slowly, and looked up at us. “What—” she began drowsily.

“Prepare yourself,” I cautioned her quickly. “Something has happened to your father.”

She stared across at Gird’s body, and then she screamed, tremulously and long. Zoberg caught her in his arms, and she swayed and shuddered against their supporting circle. From her own wrists my irons still dangled, and they clanked as she wrung her hands in aimless distraction.

Going to the dead man once more, I unchained him from the chair and turned him upon his back. Susan’s black cloak lay upon one of the other chairs, and I picked it up and spread it above him. Then I went to each door in turn, and to the windows.

“The seals are unbroken,” I reported. “There isn’t a space through which even a mouse could slip in or out. Yet—”

“I did it!” wailed Susan suddenly. “Oh, my God, what dreadful thing came out of me to murder my father!”

I unfastened the parlor door and opened it. Almost at the same time a loud knock sounded from the front of the house.

Zoberg lifted his head, nodding to me across Susan’s trembling shoulder. His arms were still clasped around her, and I could not help but notice that they seemed thin and ineffectual now. When I had chained them, I had wondered at their steely cording. Had this awful calamity drained him of strength?

“Go,” he said hoarsely. “See who it is.”

I went. Opening the front door, I came face to face with a tall, angular silhouette in a slouch hat with snow on the brim.

“Who are you?” I jerked out, startled.

“O’Bryant,” boomed back an organ-deep bass. “What’s the fuss here?”

“Well—” I began, then hesitated.

“Stranger in town, ain’t you?” was the next question. “I saw you when you stopped at the Luther Inn. I’m O’Bryant—the constable.”

He strode across the doorsill, peered about him in the dark, and then slouched into the lighted dining-room. Following, I made him out as a stern, roughly dressed man of forty or so, with a lean face made strong by a salient chin and a simitar nose. His light blue eyes studied the still form of John Gird, and he stooped to draw away the cloak. Susan gave another agonized cry, and I heard Zoberg gasp as if deeply shocked. The constable, too, flinched and replaced the cloak more quickly than he had taken it up.

“Who done that?” he barked at me.

Again I found it hard to answer. Constable O’Bryant sniffed suspiciously at each of us in turn, took up the lamp and herded us into the parlor. There he made us take seats.

“I want to know everything about this business,” he said harshly. “You,” he flung at me, “you seem to be the closest to sensible. Give me the story, and don’t leave out a single bit of it.”

Thus commanded, I made shift to describe the séance and what had led up to it. I was as uneasy as most innocent people are when unexpectedly questioned by peace officers. O’Bryant interrupted twice with a guttural “Huh!” and once with a credulous whistle.

“And this killing happened in the dark?” he asked when I had finished. “Well, which of you dressed up like a devil and done it?”

Susan whimpered and bowed her head. Zoberg, outraged, sprang to his feet.

“It was a creature from another world,” he protested angrily. “None of us had a reason to kill Mr. Gird.”

O’Bryant emitted a sharp, equine laugh. “Don’t go to tell me any ghost stories, Doctor Zoberg. We folks have heard a lot about the hocus-pocus you’ve pulled off here from time to time. Looks like it might have been to cover up some kind of rough stuff.”

“How could it be?” demanded Zoberg. “Look here, Constable, these handcuffs.” He held out one pair of them. “We were all confined with them, fastened to chairs that were sealed to the floor. Mr. Gird was also chained, and his chair made fast out of our reach. Go into the next room and look for yourself.”

“Let me see them irons,” grunted O’Bryant, snatching them.

He turned them over and over in his hands, snapped them shut, tugged and pressed, then held out a hand for my keys. Unlocking the cuffs, he peered into the clamping mechanism.

“These are regulation bracelets,” he pronounced. “You were all chained up, then?”

“We were,” replied Zoberg, and both Susan and I nodded.

Into the constable’s blue eyes came a sudden shrewd light. “I guess you must have been, at that. But did you stay that way?” He whipped suddenly around, bending above my chair to fix his gaze upon me. “How about you, Mr. Wills?”

“Of course we stayed that way,” I replied.

“Yeh? Look here, ain’t you a professional magician?”

“How did you know that?” I asked.

He grinned widely and without warmth. “The whole town’s been talking about you, Mr. Wills. A stranger can’t be here all day without his whole record coming out.” The grin vanished. “You’re a magician, all right, and you can get out of handcuffs. Ain’t that so?”

“Of course it’s so,” Zoberg answered for me. “But why should that mean that my friend has killed Mr. Gird?”

O’Bryant wagged his head in triumph. “That’s what we’ll find out later. Right now it adds up very simple. Gird was killed, in a room that was all sealed up. Three other folks was in with him, all handcuffed to their chairs. Which of them got loose without the others catching on?” He nodded brightly at me, as if in answer to his own question.

Zoberg gave me a brief, penetrating glance, then seemed to shrivel up in his own chair. He looked almost as exhausted as Susan. I, too, was feeling near to collapse.

“You want to own up, Mr. Wills?” invited O’Bryant.

“I certainly do not,” I snapped at him. “You’ve got the wrong man.”

“I thought,” he made answer, as though catching me in a damaging admission, “that it was a devil, not a man, who killed Gird.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know what killed him.”

“Maybe you’ll remember after a while.” He turned toward the door, “You come along with me. I’m going to lock you up.”

I rose with a sigh of resignation, but paused for a moment to address Zoberg. “Get hold of yourself,” I urged him. “Get somebody in here to look after Miss Susan, and then clarify in your mind what happened. You can help me prove that it wasn’t I.”

Zoberg nodded very wearily, but did not look up.

“Don’t neither of you go into that room where the body is,” O’Bryant warned them. “Mr. Wills, get your coat and hat.”

I did so, and we left the house. The snow was inches deep and still falling. O’Bryant led me across the street and knocked on the door of a peak-roofed house. A swarthy little man opened to us.

“There’s been a murder, Jim,” said O’Bryant importantly. “Over at Gird’s. You’re deputized—go and keep watch. Better take the missus along, to look after Susan. She’s bad cut up about it.”

We left the new deputy in charge and walked down the street, then turned into the square. Two or three men standing in front of the “Pharmacy” stared curiously, then whispered as we passed. Another figure paused to give me a searching glance. I was not too stunned to be irritated.

“Who are those?” I asked the constable.

“Town fellows,” he informed me. “They’re mighty interested to see what a killer looks like.”

“How do they know about the case?” I almost groaned.

He achieved his short, hard laugh.

“Didn’t I say that news travels fast in a town like this? Half the folks are talking about the killing this minute.”

“You’ll find you made a mistake,” I assured him.

“If I have, I’ll beg your pardon handsome. Meanwhile, I’ll do my duty.”

We were at the red brick town hall by now. At O’Bryant’s side I mounted the granite steps and waited while he unlocked the big double door with a key the size of a can-opener.

“We’re a kind of small town,” he observed, half apologetically, “but there’s a cell upstairs for you. Take off your hat and overcoat—you’re staying inside till further notice.”

V

“They Want to Take the Law Into Their Own Hands.”

The cell was an upper room of the town hall, with a heavy wooden door and a single tiny window. The walls were of bare, unplastered brick, the floor of concrete and the ceiling of whitewashed planks. An oil lamp burned in a bracket. The only furniture was an iron bunk hinged to the wall just below the window, a wire-bound straight chair and an unpainted table. On top of this last stood a bowl and pitcher, with playing-cards scattered around them.

Constable O’Bryant locked me in and peered through a small grating in the door. He was all nose and eyes and wide lips, like a sardonic Punchinello.

“Look here,” I addressed him suddenly, for the first time controlling my frayed nerves; “I want a lawyer.”

“There ain’t no lawyer in town,” he boomed sourly.

“Isn’t there a Judge Pursuivant in the neighborhood?” I asked, remembering something that Susan had told me.

“He don’t practise law,” O’Bryant grumbled, and his beaked face slid out of sight.

I turned to the table, idly gathered up the cards into a pack and shuffled them. To steady my still shaky fingers, I produced a few simple sleight-of-hand effects, palming of aces, making a king rise to the top, and springing the pack accordion-wise from one hand to the other.

“I’d sure hate to play poker with you,” volunteered O’Bryant, who had come again to gaze at me.

I crossed to the grating and looked through at him. “You’ve got the wrong man,” I said once more. “Even if I were guilty, you couldn’t keep me from talking to a lawyer.”

“Well, I’m doing it, ain’t I?” he taunted me. “You wait until tomorrow and we’ll go to the county seat. The sheriff can do whatever he wants to about a lawyer for you.”

He ceased talking and listened. I heard the sound, too—a hoarse, dull murmur as of coal in a chute, or a distant, lowing herd of troubled cattle.

“What’s that?” I asked him.

O’Bryant, better able to hear in the corridor, cocked his lean head for a moment. Then he cleared his throat. “Sounds like a lot of people talking, out in the square,” he replied. “I wonder—”

He broke off quickly and walked away. The murmur was growing. I, pressing close to the grating to follow the constable with my eyes, saw that his shoulders were squared and his hanging fists doubled, as though he were suddenly aware of a lurking danger.

He reached the head of the stairs and clumped down, out of my sight. I turned back to the cell, walked to the bunk and, stepping upon it, raised the window. To the outside of the wooden frame two flat straps of iron had been securely bolted to act as bars. To these I clung as I peered out.

I was looking from the rear of the hall toward the center of the square, with the war memorial and the far line of shops and houses seen dimly through a thick curtain of falling snow. Something dark moved closer to the wall beneath, and I heard a cry, as if of menace.

“I see his head in the window!” bawled a voice, and more cries greeted this statement. A moment later a heavy missile hit the wall close to the frame.

I dropped back from the window and went once more to the grating of the door. Through it I saw O’Bryant coming back, accompanied by several men. They came close and peered through at me.

“Let me out,” I urged. “That’s a mob out there.”

O’Bryant nodded dolefully. “Nothing like this ever happened here before,” he said, as if he were responsible for the town’s whole history of violence. “They act like they want to take the law into their own hands.”

A short, fat man spoke at his elbow. “We’re members of the town council, Mr. Wills. We heard that some of the citizens were getting ugly. We came here to look after you. We promise full protection.”

“Amen,” intoned a thinner specimen, whom I guessed to be the preacher.

“There are only half a dozen of you,” I pointed out. “Is that enough to guard me from a violent mob?”

As if to lend significance to my question, from below and in front of the building came a great shout, compounded of many voices. Then a loud pounding echoed through the corridor, like a bludgeon on stout panels.

“You locked the door, Constable?” asked the short man.

“Sure I did,” nodded O’Bryant.

A perfect rain of buffets sounded from below, then a heavy impact upon the front door of the hall. I could hear the hinges creak.

“They’re trying to break the door down,” whispered one of the council.

The short man turned resolutely on his heel. “There’s a window at the landing of the stairs,” he said. “Let’s go and try to talk to them from that.”

The whole party followed him away, and I could hear their feet on the stairs, then the lifting of a heavy window-sash. A loud and prolonged yelling came to my ears, as if the gathering outside had sighted and recognized a line of heads on the sill above them.

“Fellow citizens!” called the stout man’s voice, but before he could go on a chorus of cries and hoots drowned him out. I could hear more thumps and surging shoves at the creaking door.

Escape I must. I whipped around and fairly ran to the bunk, mounting it a second time for a peep from my window. Nobody was visible below; apparently those I had seen previously had run to the front of the hall, there to hear the bellowings of the officials and take a hand in forcing the door.

Once again I dropped to the floor and began to tug at the fastenings of the bunk. It was an open oblong of metal, a stout frame of rods strung with springy wire netting. It could be folded upward against the wall and held with a catch, or dropped down with two lengths of chain to keep it horizontal. I dragged the mattress and blankets from it, then began a close examination of the chains. They were stoutly made, but the screw-plates that held them to the brick wall might be loosened. Clutching one chain with both my hands, I tugged with all my might, a foot braced against the wall. A straining heave, and it came loose.

At the same moment an explosion echoed through the corridor at my back, and more shouts rang through the air. Either O’Bryant or the mob had begun to shoot. Then a rending crash shook the building, and I heard one of the councilmen shouting: “Another like that and the door will be down!”

His words inspired additional speed within me. I took the loose end of the chain in my hand. Its links were of twisted iron, and the final one had been sawed through to admit the loop of the screw-plate, then clamped tight again. But my frantic tugging had widened this narrow cut once more, and quickly I freed it from the dangling plate. Then, folding the bunk against the wall, I drew the chain upward. It would just reach to the window—that open link would hook around one of the flat bars.

The noise of breakage rang louder in the front of the building. Once more I heard the voice of the short councilman: “I command you all to go home, before Constable O’Bryant fires on you again!”

“We got guns, too!” came back a defiant shriek, and in proof of this statement came a rattle of shots. I heard an agonized moan, and the voice of the minister: “Are you hit?”

“In the shoulder,” was O’Bryant’s deep, savage reply.

My chain fast to the bar, I pulled back and down on the edge of the bunk. It gave some leverage, but not enough—the bar was fastened too solidly. Desperate, I clambered upon the iron framework. Gaining the sill, I moved sidewise, then turned and braced my back against the wall. With my feet against the edge of the bunk, I thrust it away with all the strength in both my legs. A creak and a ripping sound, and the bar pulled slowly out from its bolts.

But a roar and thunder of feet told me that the throng outside had gained entrance to the hall at last.

I heard a last futile flurry of protesting cries from the councilmen as the steps echoed with the charge of many heavy boots. I waited no longer, but swung myself to the sill and wriggled through the narrow space where the bar had come out. A lapel of my jacket tore against the frame, but I made it. Clinging by the other bar, I made out at my side a narrow band of perpendicular darkness against the wall, and clutched at it. It was a tin drainpipe, by the feel of it.

An attack was being made upon the door of the cell. The wood splintered before a torrent of blows, and I heard people pushing in.

“He’s gone!” yelled a rough voice, and, a moment later: “Hey, look at the window!”

I had hold of the drainpipe, and gave it my entire weight. Next instant it had torn loose from its flimsy supports and bent sickeningly outward. Yet it did not let me down at once, acting rather as a slender sapling to the top of which an adventuresome boy has sprung. Still holding to it, I fell sprawling in the snow twenty feet beneath the window I had quitted. Somebody shouted from above and a gun spoke.

“Get him!” screamed many voices. “Get him, you down below!”

But I was up and running for my life. The snow-filled square seemed to whip away beneath my feet. Dodging around the war memorial, I came face to face with somebody in a bearskin coat. He shouted for me to halt, in the reedy voice of an ungrown lad, and the fierce-set face that shoved at me had surely never felt a razor. But I, who dared not be merciful even to so untried an enemy, struck with both fists even as I hurtled against him. He whimpered and dropped, and I, springing over his falling body, dashed on.

A wind was rising, and it bore to me the howls of my pursuers from the direction of the hall. Two or three more guns went off, and one bullet whickered over my head. By then I had reached the far side of the square, hurried across the street and up an alley. The snow, still falling densely, served to baffle the men who ran shouting in my wake. Too, nearly everyone who had been on the streets had gone to the front of the hall, and except for the boy at the memorial none offered to turn me back.

I came out upon a street beyond the square, quiet and ill-lit. Along this way, I remembered, I could approach the Gird home, where my automobile was parked. Once at the wheel, I could drive to the county seat and demand protection from the sheriff. But, as I came cautiously near the place and could see through the blizzard the outline of the car, I heard loud voices. A part of the mob had divined my intent and had branched off to meet me.

I ran down a side street, but they had seen me. “There he is!” they shrieked at one another. “Plug him!” Bullets struck the wall of a house as I fled past it, and the owner, springing to the door with an angry protest, joined the chase a moment later.

I was panting and staggering by now, and so were most of my pursuers. Only three or four, lean young athletes, were gaining and coming even close to my heels. With wretched determination I maintained my pace, winning free of the close-set houses of the town, wriggling between the rails of a fence and striking off through the drifting snow of a field.

“Hey, he’s heading for the Croft!” someone was wheezing, not far behind.

“Let him go in,” growled another runner. “He’ll wish he hadn’t.”

Yet again someone fired, and yet again the bullet went wide of me; moving swiftly, and half veiled by the dark and the wind-tossed snowfall, I was a bad target that night. And, lifting my head, I saw indeed the dense timber of the Devil’s Croft, its tops seeming to toss and fall like the black waves of a high-pent sea.

It was an inspiration, helped by the shouts of the mob. Nobody went into that grove—avoidance of it had become a community habit, almost a community instinct. Even if my enemies paused only temporarily I could shelter well among the trunks, catch my breath, perhaps hide indefinitely. And surely Zoberg would be recovered, would back up my protest of innocence. With two words for it, the fantasy would not seem so ridiculous. All this I sorted over in my mind as I ran toward the Devil’s Croft.

Another rail fence rose in my way. I feared for a moment that it would baffle me, so fast and far had I run and so greatly drained away was my strength. Yet I scrambled over somehow, slipped and fell beyond, got up and ran crookedly on. The trees were close now. Closer. Within a dozen yards. Behind me I heard oaths and warning exclamations. The pursuit was ceasing at last.

I found myself against close-set evergreens; that would be the hedge of which Susan Gird had told me. Pushing between and through the interlaced branches, I hurried on for five or six steps, cannoned from a big tree-trunk, went sprawling, lifted myself for another brief run and then, with my legs like strips of paper, dropped once more. I crept forward on hands and knees. Finally I collapsed upon my face. The weight of all I had endured—the séance, the horrible death of John Gird, my arrest, my breaking from the cell and my wild run for life—overwhelmed me as I lay.

Thus I must lie, I told myself hazily, until they came and caught me. I heard, or fancied I heard, movement near by, then a trilling whistle. A signal? It sounded like the song of a little frog. Odd thought in this blizzard. I was thinking foolishly of frogs, while I sprawled face down in the snow. …

But where was the snow?

There was damp underneath, but it was warm damp, like that of a riverside in July. In my nostrils was a smell of green life, the smell of parks and hothouses. My fists closed upon something.

Two handfuls of soft, crisp moss!

I rose to my elbows. A white flower bobbed and swayed before my nose, shedding perfume upon me.

Far away, as though in another world, I heard the rising of the wind that was beating the snow into great drifts—but that was outside the Devil’s Croft.

VI

“Eyes of Fire!”

It proves something for human habit and narcotic-dependence that my first action upon rising was to pull out a cigarette and light it.

The match flared briefly upon rich greenness. I might have been in a subtropical swamp. Then the little flame winked out and the only glow was the tip of my cigarette. I gazed upward for a glimpse of the sky, but found only darkness. Leafy branches made a roof over me. My brow felt damp. It was sweat—warm sweat.

I held the coal of the cigarette to my wristwatch. It seemed to have stopped, and I lifted it to my ear. No ticking—undoubtedly I had jammed it into silence, perhaps at the séance, perhaps during my escape from prison and the mob. The hands pointed to eighteen minutes past eight, and it was certainly much later than that. I wished for the electric torch that I had dropped in the dining-room at Gird’s, then was glad I had not brought it to flash my position to possible watchers outside the grove.

Yet the tight cedar hedge and the inner belts of trees and bushes, richly foliaged as they must be, would certainly hide me and any light I might make. I felt considerably stronger in body and will by now, and made shift to walk gropingly toward the center of the timber-clump. Once, stooping to finger the ground on which I walked, I felt not only moss but soft grass. Again, a hanging vine dragged across my face. It was wet, as if from condensed mist, and it bore sweet flowers that showed dimly like little pallid trumpets in the dark.

The frog-like chirping that I had heard when first I fell had been going on without cessation. It was much nearer now, and when I turned in its direction, I saw a little glimmer of water. Two more careful steps, and my foot sank into wet, warm mud. I stooped and put a hand into a tiny stream, almost as warm as the air. The frog, whose home I was disturbing, fell silent once more.

I struck a match, hoping to see a way across. The stream was not more than three feet in width, and it flowed slowly from the interior of the grove. In that direction hung low mists, through which broad leaves gleamed wetly. On my side its brink was fairly clear, but on the other grew lush, dripping bushes. I felt in the stream once more, and found it was little more than a finger deep. Then, holding the end of the match in my fingers, I stooped as low as possible, to see what I could of the nature of the ground beneath the bushes.

The small beam carried far, and I let myself think of Shakespeare’s philosophy anent the candle and the good deed in a naughty world. Then philosophy and Shakespeare flew from my mind, for I saw beneath the bushes the feet of—of what stood behind them.

They were two in number, those feet; but not even at first glimpse did I think they were human. I had an impression of round pedestals and calfless shanks, dark and hairy. They moved as I looked, moved cautiously closer, as if their owner was equally anxious to see me. I dropped the match into the stream and sprang up and back.

No pursuer from the town would have feet like that.

My heart began to pound as it had never pounded during my race for life. I clutched at the low limb of a tree, hoping to tear it loose for a possible weapon of defense; the wood was rotten, and almost crumpled in my grasp.

“Who’s there?” I challenged, but most unsteadily and without much menace in my voice. For answer the bushes rustled yet again, and something blacker than they showed itself among them.

I cannot be ashamed to say that I retreated again, farther this time; let him who has had a like experience decide whether to blame me. Feeling my way among the trees, I put several stout stems between me and that lurker by the waterside. They would not fence it off, but might baffle it for a moment. Meanwhile, I heard the water splash. It was wading cautiously through—it was going to follow me.

I found myself standing in a sort of lane, and did not bother until later to wonder how a lane could exist in that grove where no man ever walked. It was a welcome avenue of flight to me, and I went along it at a swift, crouching run. The footing, as everywhere, was damp and mossy, and I made very little noise. Not so my unchancy companion of the brook, for I heard a heavy body crashing among twigs and branches to one side. I began to ask myself, as I hurried, what the beast could be—for I was sure that it was a beast. A dog from some farmhouse, that did not know or understand the law against entering the Devil’s Croft? That I had seen only two feet did not preclude two more, I now assured myself, and I would have welcomed a big, friendly dog. Yet I did not know that this one was friendly, and could not bid myself to stop and see.

The lane wound suddenly to the right, and then into a clearing.

Here, too, the branches overhead kept out the snow and the light, but things were visible ever so slightly. I stood as if in a room, earth-floored, trunk-walled, leaf-thatched. And I paused for a breath—it was more damply warm than ever. With that breath came some strange new serenity of spirit, even an amused self-mockery. What had I seen and heard, indeed? I had come into the grove after a terrific hour or so of danger and exertion, and my mind had at once busied itself in building grotesque dangers where no dangers could be. Have another smoke, I said to myself, and get hold of your imagination; already that pursuit-noise you fancied has gone. Alone in the clearing and the dark, I smiled as though to mock myself back into self-confidence. Even this little patch of summer night into which I had blundered from the heart of the blizzard—even it had some good and probably simple explanation. I fished out a cigarette and struck a light.

At that moment I was facing the bosky tunnel from which I had emerged into the open space. My matchlight struck two sparks in that tunnel, two sparks that were pushing stealthily toward me. Eyes of fire!

Cigarette and match fell from my hands. For one wild half-instant I thought of flight, then knew with a throat-stopping certainty that I must not turn my back on this thing. I planted my feet and clenched my fists.

“Who’s there?” I cried, as once before at the side of the brook.

This time I had an answer. It was a hoarse, deep-chested rumble, it might have been a growl or an oath. And a shadow stole out from the lane, straightening up almost within reach of me.

I had seen that silhouette before, misshapen and point-eared, in the dining-room of John Gird.

VII

“Had the Thing Been So Hairy?”

It did not charge at once, or I might have been killed then, like John Gird, and the writing of this account left to another hand. While it closed cautiously in, I was able to set myself for defense. I also made out some of its details, and hysterically imagined more.

Its hunched back and narrow shoulders gave nothing of weakness to its appearance, suggesting rather an inhuman plenitude of bone and muscle behind. At first it was crouched, as if on all-fours, but then it reared. For all its legs were bent, its great length of body made it considerably taller than I. Upper limbs—I hesitate at calling them arms—sparred questingly at me.

I moved a stride backward, but kept my face to the enemy.

“You killed Gird!” I accused it, in a voice steady enough but rather strained and shrill. “Come on and kill me! I promise you a damned hard bargain of it.”

The creature shrank away in turn, as though it understood the words and was momentarily daunted by them. Its head, which I could not make out, sank low before those crooked shoulders and swayed rhythmically like the head of a snake before striking. The rush was coming, and I knew it.

“Come on!” I dared it again. “What are you waiting for? I’m not chained down, like Gird. I’ll give you a devil of a fight.”

I had my fists up and I feinted, boxer-wise, with a little weaving jerk of the knees. The blot of blackness started violently, ripped out a snarl from somewhere inside it, and sprang at me.

I had an impression of paws flung out and a head twisted sidewise, with long teeth bared to snap at my throat. Probably it meant to clutch my shoulders with its fingers—it had them, I had felt them on my knee at the séance. But I had planned my own campaign in those tense seconds. I slid my left foot forward as the enemy lunged, and my left fist drove for the muzzle. My knuckles barked against the huge, inhuman teeth, and I brought over a roundabout right, with shoulder and hip driving in back of it. The head, slanted as it was, received this right fist high on the brow. I felt the impact of solid bone, and the body floundered away to my left. I broke ground right, turned and raised my hands as before.

“Want any more of the same?” I taunted it, as I would a human antagonist after scoring.

The failure of its attack had been only temporary. My blows had set it off balance, but could hardly have been decisive. I heard a coughing snort, as though the thing’s muzzle was bruised, and it quartered around toward me once more. Without warning and with amazing speed it rushed.

I had no time to set myself now. I did try to leap backward, but I was not quick enough. It had me; gripping the lapels of my coat and driving me down and over with its flying weight. I felt the wet ground spin under my heels, and then it came flying up against my shoulders. Instinctively I had clutched upward at a throat with my right hand, clutched a handful of skin, loose and rankly shaggy. My left, also by instinct, flew backward to break my fall. It closed on something hard, round and smooth.

The rank odor that I had known at the séance was falling around me like a blanket, and the clashing white teeth shoved nearer, nearer. But the rock in my left hand spelled sudden hope. Without trying to roll out from under, I smote with that rock. My clutch on the hairy throat helped me to judge accurately where the head would be. A moment later, and the struggling bulk above me went limp under the impact. Shoving it aside, I scrambled free and gained my feet once more.

The monster lay motionless where I had thrust it from me. Every nerve a-tingle, I stooped. My hand poised the rock for another smashing blow, but there was no sign of fight from the fallen shape. I could hear only a gusty breathing, as of something in stunned pain.

“Lie right where you are, you murdering brute,” I cautioned it, my voice ringing exultant as I realized I had won. “If you move, I’ll smash your skull in.”

My right hand groped in my pocket for a match, struck it on the back of my leg. I bent still closer for a clear look at my enemy.

Had the thing been so hairy? Now, as I gazed, it seemed only sparsely furred. The ears, too, were blunter than I thought, and the muzzle not so—

Why, it was half human! Even as I watched, it was becoming more human still, a sprawled human figure! And, as the fur seemed to vanish in patches, was it clothing I saw, as though through the rents in a bearskin overcoat?

My senses churned in my own head. The fear that had ridden me all night became suddenly unreasoning. I fled as before, this time without a thought of where I was going or what I would do. The forbidden grove, lately so welcome as a refuge, swarmed with evil. I reached the edge of the clearing, glanced back once. The thing I had stricken down was beginning to stir, to get up. I ran from it as from a devil.

Somehow I had come to the stream again, or to another like it. The current moved more swiftly at this point, with a noticeable murmur. As I tried to spring across I landed short, and gasped in sudden pain, for the water was scalding hot. Of such are the waters of hell. …

I cannot remember my flight through that steaming swamp that might have been a corner of Satan’s own park. Somewhere along the way I found a tough, fleshy stem, small enough to rend from its rooting and wield as a club. With it in my hand I paused, with a rather foolish desire to return along my line of retreat for another and decisive encounter with the shaggy being. But what if it would foresee my coming and lie in wait? I knew how swiftly it could spring, how strong was its grasp. Once at close quarters, my club would be useless, and those teeth might find their objective. I cast aside the impulse, that had welled from I know not what primitive core of me, and hurried on.

Evergreens were before me on a sudden, and through them filtered a blast of cold air. The edge of the grove, and beyond it the snow and the open sky, perhaps a resumption of the hunt by the mob; but capture and death at their hands would be clean and welcome compared to—

Feet squelched in the dampness behind me.

I pivoted with a hysterical oath, and swung up my club in readiness to strike. The great dark outline that had come upon me took one step closer, then paused. I sprang at it, struck and missed as it dodged to one side.

“All right then, let’s have it out,” I managed to blurt, though my voice was drying up in my throat. “Come on, show your face.”

“I’m not here to fight you,” a good-natured voice assured me. “Why, I seldom even argue, except with proven friends.”

I relaxed a trifle, but did not lower my club. “Who are you?”

“Judge Keith Pursuivant,” was the level response, as though I had not just finished trying to kill him. “You must be the young man they’re so anxious to hang, back in town. Is that right?”

I made no answer.

“Silence makes admission,” the stranger said. “Well, come along to my house. This grove is between it and town, and nobody will bother us for the night, at least.”

VIII

“A Trick That Almost Killed You.”

When I stepped into the open with Judge Keith Pursuivant, the snow had ceased and a full moon glared through a rip in the clouds, making diamond dust of the sugary drifts. By its light I saw my companion with some degree of plainness—a man of great height and girth, with a wide black hat and a voluminous gray ulster. His face was as round as the moon itself, at least as shiny, and much warmer to look at. A broad bulbous nose and broad bulbous eyes beamed at me, while under a drooping blond mustache a smile seemed to be lurking. Apparently he considered the situation a pleasant one.

“I’m not one of the mob,” he informed me reassuringly. “These pastimes of the town do not attract me. I left such things behind when I dropped out of politics and practise—oh, I was active in such things, ten years ago up North—and took up meditation.”

“I’ve heard that you keep to yourself,” I told him.

“You heard correctly. My black servant does the shopping and brings me the gossip. Most of the time it bores me, but not today, when I learned about you and the killing of John Gird—”

“And you came looking for me?”

“Of course. By the way, that was a wise impulse, ducking into the Devil’s Croft.”

But I shuddered, and not with the chill of the outer night. He made a motion for me to come along, and we began tramping through the soft snow toward a distant light under the shadow of a hill. Meanwhile I told him something of my recent adventures, saving for the last my struggle with the monster in the grove.

He heard me through, whistling through his teeth at various points. At the end of my narrative he muttered to himself:

“The hairy ones shall dance—”

“What was that, sir?” I broke in, without much courtesy.

“I was quoting from the prophet Isaiah. He was speaking of ruined Babylon, not a strange transplanted bit of the tropics, but otherwise it falls pat. Suggestive of a demon-festival. ‘The hairy ones shall dance there.’ ”

“Isaiah, you say? I used to be something of a Bible reader, but I’m afraid I don’t remember the passage.”

He smiled sidewise at me. “But I’m translating direct from the original, Mr.—Wills is the name, eh? The original Hebrew of the prophet Isaiah, whoever he was. The classic-ridden compilers of the King James Version have satyrs dancing, and the prosaic Revised Version offers nothing more startling than goats. But Isaiah and the rest of the ancient peoples knew that there were ‘hairy ones.’ Perhaps you encountered one of that interesting breed tonight.”

“I don’t want to encounter it a second time,” I confessed, and again I shuddered.

“That is something we will talk over more fully. What do you think of the Turkish bath accommodations you have just left behind?”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t know what to think. Growing green stuff and a tropical temperature, with snow outside—”

He waved the riddle away. “Easily and disappointingly explained, Mr. Wills. Hot springs.”

I stopped still, shin-deep in wet snow. “What!” I ejaculated.

“Oh, I’ve been there many times, in defiance of local custom and law—I’m not a native, you see.” Once more his warming smile. “There are at least three springs, and the thick growth of trees makes a natural enclosure, roof and walls, to hold in the damp heat. It’s not the only place of its kind in the world, Mr. Wills. But the thing you met there is a trifle more difficult of explanation. Come on home—we’ll both feel better when we sit down.”

We finished the journey in half an hour. Judge Pursuivant’s house was stoutly made of heavy hewn timbers, somewhat resembling certain lodges I had seen in England. Inside was a large, low-ceilinged room with a hanging oil lamp and a welcome open fire. A fat blond cat came leisurely forward to greet us. Its broad, good-humored face, large eyes and drooping whiskers gave it somewhat of a resemblance to its master.

“Better get your things off,” advised the judge. He raised his voice. “William!”

A squat negro with a sensitive brown face appeared from a door at the back of the house.

“Bring in a bathrobe and slippers for this gentleman,” ordered Judge Pursuivant, and himself assisted me to take off my muddy jacket. Thankfully I peeled off my other garments, and when the servant appeared with the robe I slid into it with a sigh.

“I’m in your hands, Judge Pursuivant,” I said. “If you want to turn me over—”

“I might surrender you to an officer,” he interrupted, “but never to a lawless mob. You’d better sit here for a time—and talk to me.”

Near the fire was a desk, with an armchair at either side of it. We took seats, and when William returned from disposing of my wet clothes, he brought along a tray with a bottle of whisky, a siphon and some glasses. The judge prepared two drinks and handed one to me. At his insistence, I talked for some time about the séance and the events leading up to it.

“Remarkable,” mused Judge Pursuivant. Then his great shrewd eyes studied me. “Don’t go to sleep there, Mr. Wills. I know you’re tired, but I want to talk lycanthropy.”

“Lycanthropy?” I repeated. “You mean the science of the werewolf?” I smiled and shook my head. “I’m afraid I’m no authority, sir. Anyway, this was no witchcraft—it was a bona fide spirit séance, with ectoplasm.”

“Hum!” snorted the judge. “Witchcraft, spiritism! Did it ever occur to you that they might be one and the same thing?”

“Inasmuch as I never believed in either of them, it never did occur to me.”

Judge Pursuivant finished his drink and wiped his mustache. “Skepticism does not become you too well, Mr. Wills, if you will pardon my frankness. In any case, you saw something very werewolfish indeed, not an hour ago. Isn’t that the truth?”

“It was some kind of a trick,” I insisted stubbornly.

“A trick that almost killed you and made you run for your life?”

I shook my head. “I know I saw the thing,” I admitted. “I even felt it.” My eyes dropped to the bruised knuckles of my right hand. “Yet I was fooled—as a magician, I know all about fooling. There can be no such thing as a werewolf.”

“Have a drink,” coaxed Judge Pursuivant, exactly as if I had had none yet. With big, deft hands he poured whisky, then soda, into my glass and gave the mixture a stirring shake. “Now then,” he continued, sitting back in his chair once more, “the time has come to speak of many things.”

He paused, and I, gazing over the rim of that welcome glass, thought how much he looked like a rosy blond walrus.

“I’m going to show you,” he announced, “that a man can turn into a beast, and back again.”

IX

“To a Terrified Victim He Is Doom Itself.”

He leaned toward the bookshelf beside him, pawed for a moment, then laid two sizable volumes on the desk between us.

“If this were a fantasy tale, Mr. Wills,” he said with a hint of one of his smiles, “I would place before you an unthinkably rare book—one that offered, in terms too brilliant and compelling for argument, the awful secrets of the universe, past, present and to come.”

He paused to polish a pair of pince-nez and to clamp them upon the bridge of his broad nose.

“However,” he resumed, “this is reality, sober if uneasy. And I give you, not some forgotten grimoire out of the mystic past, but two works by two recognized and familiar authorities.”

I eyed the books. “May I see?”

For answer he thrust one of them, some six hundred pages in dark blue cloth, across the desk and into my hands. “Thirty Years of Psychical Research, by the late Charles Richet, French master in the spirit-investigation field,” he informed me. “Faithfully and interestingly translated by Stanley De Brath. Published here in America, in 1923.”

I took the book and opened it. “I knew Professor Richet, slightly. Years ago, when I was just beginning this sort of thing, I was entertained by him in London. He introduced me to Conan Doyle.”

“Then you’re probably familiar with his book. Yes? Well, the other,” and he took up the second volume, almost as large as the Richet and bound in light buff, “is by Montague Summers, whom I call the premier demonologist of today. He’s gathered all the lycanthropy-lore available.”

I had read Mr. Summers’ Geography of Witchcraft and his two essays on the vampire, and I made bold to say so.

“This is a companion volume to them,” Judge Pursuivant told me, opening the book. “It is called The Werewolf.” He scrutinized the flyleaf. “Published in 1934—thoroughly modern, you see. Here’s a bit of Latin, Mr. Wills: Intrabunt lupi rapaces in vos, non parcentes gregi.”

I crinkled my brow in the effort to recall my high school Latin, then began slowly to translate, a word at a time: “ ‘Enter hungry wolves—’ ”

“Save that scholarship,” Judge Pursuivant broke in. “It’s more early Scripture, though not so early as the bit about the hairy ones—vulgate for a passage from the Acts of the Apostles, twentieth chapter, twenty-ninth verse. ‘Ravenous wolves shall enter among you, not sparing the flock.’ Apparently that disturbing possibility exists even today.”

He leafed through the book. “Do you know,” he asked, “that Summers gives literally dozens of instances of lycanthropy, things that are positively known to have happened?”

I took another sip of whisky and water. “Those are only legends, surely.”

“They are nothing of the sort!” The judge’s eyes protruded even more in his earnestness, and he tapped the pages with an excited forefinger. “There are four excellent cases listed in his chapter on France alone—sworn to, tried and sentenced by courts—”

“But weren’t they during the Middle Ages?” I suggested.

He shook his great head. “No, during the Sixteenth Century, the peak of the Renaissance. Oh, don’t smile at the age, Mr. Wills. It produced Shakespeare, Bacon, Montaigne, Galileo, Leonardo, Martin Luther; Descartes and Spinoza were its legitimate children, and Voltaire builded upon it. Yet werewolves were known, seen, convicted—”

“Convicted on what grounds?” I interrupted quickly, for I was beginning to reflect his warmth.

For answer he turned more pages. “Here is the full account of the case of Stubbe Peter, or Peter Stumpf,” he said. “A contemporary record, telling of Stumpf’s career in and out of wolf-form, his capture in the very act of shifting shape, his confession and execution—all near Cologne in the year 1589. Listen.”

He read aloud: “ ‘Witnesses that this is true. Tyse Artyne. William Brewar. Adolf Staedt. George Bores. With divers others that have seen the same.’ ” Slamming the book shut, he looked up at me, the twinkle coming back into his spectacled eyes. “Well, Mr. Wills? How do those names sound to you?”

“Why, like the names of honest German citizens.”

“Exactly. Honest, respectable, solid. And their testimony is hard to pass off with a laugh, even at this distance in time, eh?”

He had almost made me see those witnesses, leather-jerkined and broad-breeched, with heavy jaws and squinting eyes, taking their turn at the quill pen with which they set their names to that bizarre document. “With divers others that have seen the same”—perhaps too frightened to hold pen or make signature. …

“Still,” I said slowly, “Germany of the Renaissance, the Sixteenth Century; and there have been so many changes since.”

“Werewolves have gone out of fashion, you mean? Ah, you admit that they might have existed.” He fairly beamed his triumph. “So have beards gone out of fashion, but they will sprout again if we lay down our razors. Let’s go at it another way. Let’s talk about materialization—ectoplasm—for the moment.” He relaxed, and across his great girth his fingertips sought one another. “Suppose you explain, briefly and simply, what ectoplasm is considered to be.”

I was turning toward the back of Richet’s book. “It’s in here, Judge Pursuivant. To be brief and simple, as you say, certain mediums apparently exude an unclassified material called ectoplasm. This, at first light and vaporescent, becomes firm and takes shape, either upon the body of the medium or as a separate and living creature.”

“And you don’t believe in this phenomenon?” he prompted, with something of insistence.

“I have never said that I didn’t,” I replied truthfully, “even before my experience of this evening went so far toward convincing me. But, with the examples I have seen, I felt that true scientific control was lacking. With all their science, most of the investigators trust too greatly.”

Judge Pursuivant shook with gentle laughter. “They are doctors for the most part, and this honesty of theirs is a professional failing that makes them look for it in others. You—begging your pardon—are a magician, a professional deceiver, and you expect trickery in all whom you meet. Perhaps a good lawyer with trial experience, with a level head and a sense of competent material evidence for both sides, should attend these séances, eh?”

“You’re quite right,” I said heartily.

“But, returning to the subject, what else can be said about ectoplasm? That is, if it actually exists.”

I had found in Richet’s book the passage for which I had been searching. “It says here that bits of ectoplasm have been secured in rare instances, and that some of these have been examined microscopically. There were traces of fatty tissue, bacterial forms and epithelium.”

“Ah! Those were the findings of Schrenck-Notzing. A sound man and a brilliant one, hard to corrupt or fool. It makes ectoplasm sound organic, does it not?”

I nodded agreement, and my head felt heavy, as if full of sober and important matters. “As for me,” I went on, “I never have had much chance to examine the stuff. Whenever I get hold of an ectoplasmic hand, it melts like butter.”

“They generally do,” the judge commented, “or so the reports say. Yet they themselves are firm and strong when they touch or seize.”

“Right, sir.”

“It’s when attacked, or even frightened, as with a camera flashlight, that the ectoplasm vanishes or is reabsorbed?” he prompted further.

“So Richet says here,” I agreed once more, “and so I have found.”

“Very good. Now,” and his manner took on a flavor of the legal, “I shall sum up:

“Ectoplasm is put forth by certain spirit mediums, who are mysteriously adapted for it, under favorable conditions that include darkness, quiet, self-confidence. It takes form, altering the appearance of the medium or making up a separate body. It is firm and strong, but vanishes when attacked or frightened. Right so far, eh?”

“Right,” I approved.

“Now, for the word ‘medium’ substitute ‘wizard.’ ” His grin burst out again, and he began to mix a third round of drinks. “A wizard, having darkness and quiet and being disposed to change shape, exudes a material that gives him a new shape and character. Maybe it is bestial, to match a fierce or desperate spirit within. There may be a shaggy pelt, a sharp muzzle, taloned paws and rending fangs. To a terrified victim he is doom itself. But to a brave adversary, facing and fighting him—”

He flipped his way through Summers’ book, as I had with Richet’s. “Listen: ‘… the shape of the werewolf will be removed if he be reproached by name as a werewolf, or if again he be thrice addressed by his Christian name, or struck three blows on the forehead with a knife, or that three drops of blood should be drawn.’ Do you see the parallels, man? Shouted at, bravely denounced, or slightly wounded, his false beast-substance fades from him.” He flung out his hands, as though appealing to a jury. “I marvel nobody ever thought of it before.”

“But nothing so contrary to nature has a natural explanation,” I objected, and very idiotic the phrase sounded in my own ears.

He laughed, and I could not blame him. “I’ll confound you with another of your own recent experiences. What could seem more contrary to nature than the warmth and greenness of the inside of Devil’s Croft? And what is more simply natural than the hot springs that make it possible?”

“Yet, an envelope of bestiality, beast-muzzle on human face, beast-paws on human hands—”

“I can support that by more werewolf-lore. I don’t even have to open Summers, everyone has heard the story. A wolf attacks a traveler, who with his sword lops off a paw. The beast howls and flees, and the paw it leaves behind is a human hand.”

“That’s an old one, in every language.”

“Probably because it happened so often. There’s your human hand, with the beast-paw forming upon and around it, then vanishing like wounded ectoplasm. Where’s the weak point, Wills? Name it, I challenge you.”

I felt the glass shake in my hand, and a chilly wind brushed my spine. “There’s one point,” I made myself say. “You may think it a slender one, even a quibble. But ectoplasms make human forms, not animal.”

“How do you know they don’t make animal forms?” Judge Pursuivant crowed, leaning forward across the deck. “Because, of the few you’ve seen and disbelieved, only human faces and bodies showed? My reply is there in your hands. Open Richet’s book to page 545, Mr. Wills. Page 545 … got it? Now, the passage I marked, about the medium Burgik. Read it aloud.”

He sank back into his chair once more, waiting in manifest delight. I found the place, underscored with pencil, and my voice was hoarse as I obediently read:

“ ‘My trouser leg was strongly pulled and a strange, ill-defined form that seemed to have paws like those of a dog or small monkey climbed on my knee. I could feel its weight, very light, and something like the muzzle of an animal touched my cheek.’ ”

“There you are, Wills,” Judge Pursuivant was crying. “Notice that it happened in Warsaw, close to the heart of the werewolf country. Hmmm, reading that passage made you sweat a bit—remembering what you saw in the Devil’s Croft, eh?”

I flung down the book.

“You’ve done much toward convincing me,” I admitted. “I’d rather have the superstitious peasant’s belief, though, the one I’ve always scoffed at.”

“Rationalizing the business didn’t help, then? It did when I explained the Devil’s Croft and the springs.”

“But the springs don’t chase you with sharp teeth. And, as I was saying, the peasant had a protection that the scientist lacks—trust in his crucifix and his Bible.”

“Why shouldn’t he have that trust, and why shouldn’t you?” Again the judge was rummaging in his bookcase. “Those symbols of faith gave him what is needed, a strong heart to drive back the menace, whether it be wolf-demon or ectoplasmic bogey. Here, my friend.”

He laid a third book on the desk. It was a Bible, red-edged and leather-backed, worn from much use.

“Have a read at that while you finish your drink,” he advised me. “The Gospel According to St. John is good, and it’s already marked. Play you’re a peasant, hunting for comfort.”

Like a dutiful child I opened the Bible to where a faded purple ribbon lay between the pages. But already Judge Pursuivant was quoting from memory:

“ ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made. …’ ”

X

“Bloodlust and Compassion.”

It may seem incredible that later in the night I slept like a dead pig; yet I had reason.

First of all there was the weariness that had followed my dangers and exertions; then Judge Pursuivant’s whisky and logic combined to reassure me; finally, the leather couch in his study, its surface comfortably hollowed by much reclining thereon, was a sedative in itself. He gave me two quilts, very warm and very light, and left me alone. I did not stir until a rattle of breakfast dishes awakened me.

William, the judge’s servant, had carefully brushed my clothes. My shoes also showed free of mud, though they still felt damp and clammy. The judge himself furnished me with a clean shirt and socks, both items very loose upon me, and lent me his razor.

“Some friends of yours called during the night,” he told me dryly.

“Friends?”

“Yes, from the town. Five of them, with ropes and guns. They announced very definitely that they intended to decorate the flagpole in the public square with your corpse. There was also some informal talk about drinking your blood. We may have vampires as well as werewolves hereabouts.”

I almost cut my lip with the razor. “How did you get rid of them?” I asked quickly. “They must have followed my tracks.”

“Lucky there was more snow after we got in,” he replied, “and they came here only as a routine checkup. They must have visited every house within miles. Oh, turning them away was easy. I feigned wild enthusiasm for the manhunt, and asked if I couldn’t come along.”

He smiled reminiscently, his mustache stirring like a rather genial blond snake.

“Then what?” I prompted him, dabbing on more lather.

“Why, they were delighted. I took a rifle and spent a few hours on the trail. You weren’t to be found at all, so we returned to town. Excitement reigns there, you can believe.”

“What kind of excitement?”

“Bloodlust and compassion. Since Constable O’Bryant is wounded, his younger brother, a strong advocate of your immediate capture and execution, is serving as a volunteer guardian of the peace. He’s acting on an old appointment by his brother as deputy, to serve without pay. He told the council—a badly scared group—that he has sent for help to the county seat, but I am sure he did nothing of the kind. Meanwhile, the Croft is surrounded by scouts, who hope to catch you sneaking out of it. And the women of the town are looking after Susan Gird and your friend, the Herr Doktor.”

I had finished shaving. “How is Doctor Zoberg?” I inquired through the towel.

“Still pretty badly shaken up. I tried to get in and see him, but it was impossible. I understand he went out for a while, early in the evening, but almost collapsed. Just now he is completely surrounded by cooing old ladies with soup and herb tea. Miss Gird was feeling much better, and talked to me for a while. I’m not really on warm terms with the town, you know; people think it’s indecent for me to live out here alone and not give them a chance to gossip about me. So I was pleasurably surprised to get a kind word from Miss Susan. She told me, very softly for fear someone might overhear, that she hopes you aren’t caught. She is sure that you did not kill her father.”

We went into his dining-room, where William offered pancakes, fried bacon and the strongest black coffee I ever tasted. In the midst of it all, I put down my fork and faced the judge suddenly. He grinned above his cup.

“Well, Mr. Wills? ‘Stung by the splendor of a sudden thought’—all you need is a sensitive hand clasped to your inspired brow.”

“You said,” I reminded him, “that Susan Gird is sure that I didn’t kill her father.”

“So I did.”

“She told you that herself. She also seemed calm, self-contained, instead of in mourning for—”

“Oh, come, come!” He paused to shift a full half-dozen cakes to his plate and skilfully drenched them with syrup. “That’s rather ungrateful of you, Mr. Wills, suspecting her of parricide.”

“Did I say that?” I protested, feeling my ears turning bright red.

“You would have if I hadn’t broken your sentence in the middle,” he accused, and put a generous portion of pancake into his mouth. As he chewed he twinkled at me through his pince-nez, and I felt unaccountably foolish.

“If Susan Gird had truly killed her father,” he resumed, after swallowing, “she would be more adroitly theatrical. She would weep, swear vengeance on his murderer, and be glad to hear that someone else had been accused of the crime. She would even invent details to help incriminate that someone else.”

“Perhaps she doesn’t know that she killed him,” I offered.

“Perhaps not. You mean that a new mind, as well as a new body, may invest the werewolf—or ectoplasmic medium—at time of change.”

I jerked my head in agreement.

“Then Susan Gird, as she is normally, must be innocent. Come, Mr. Wills! Would you blame poor old Doctor Jekyll for the crimes of his alter ego, Mr. Hyde?”

“I wouldn’t want to live in the same house with Doctor Jekyll.”

Judge Pursuivant burst into a roar of laughter, at which William, bringing fresh supplies from the kitchen, almost dropped his tray. “So romance enters the field of psychic research!” the judge crowed at me.

I stiffened, outraged. “Judge Pursuivant, I certainly did not—”

“I know, you didn’t say it, but again I anticipated you. So it’s not the thought of her possible unconscious crime, but the chance of comfortable companionship that perplexes you.” He stopped laughing suddenly. “I’m sorry, Wills. Forgive me. I shouldn’t laugh at this, or indeed at any aspect of the whole very serious business.”

I could hardly take real offense at the man who had rescued and sheltered me, and I said so. We finished breakfast, and he sought his overcoat and wide hat.

“I’m off for town again,” he announced. “There are one or two points to be settled there, for your safety and my satisfaction. Do you mind being left alone? There’s an interesting lot of books in my study. You might like to look at a copy of Dom Calmet’s Dissertations, if you read French; also a rather slovenly Wicked Bible, signed by Pierre De Lancre. J. W. Wickwar, the witchcraft authority, thinks that such a thing does not exist, but I know of two others. Or, if you feel that you’re having enough of demonology in real life, you will find a whole row of light novels, including most of P. G. Wodehouse.” He held out his hand in farewell. “William will get you anything you want. There’s tobacco and a choice of pipes on my desk. Whisky, too, though you don’t look like the sort that drinks before noon.”

With that he was gone, and I watched him from the window. He moved sturdily across the bright snow to a shed, slid open its door and entered. Soon there emerged a sedan, old but well-kept, with the judge at the wheel. He drove away down a snow-filled road toward town.

I did not know what to envy most in him, his learning, his assurance or his good-nature. The assurance, I decided once; then it occurred to me that he was in nothing like the awkward position I held. He was only a sympathetic ally—but why was he that, even? I tried to analyze his motives, and could not.

Sitting down in his study, I saw on the desk the Montague Summers book on werewolves. It lay open at page 111, and my eyes lighted at once upon a passage underscored in ink—apparently some time ago, for the mark was beginning to rust a trifle. It included a quotation from Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, written by Richard Rowlands in 1605:

“… werewolves are certaine sorcerers, who hauvin annoynted their bodyes, with an oyntment which they make by the instinct of the deuil; and putting on a certain inchanted girdel, do not only vnto the view of others seeme as wolues, but to their own thinking haue both the shape and the nature of wolues, so long as they weare the said girdel. And they do dispose theselves as uery wolues, in wurrying and killing, and moste of humaine creatures.”

This came to the bottom of the page, where someone, undoubtedly Pursuivant, had written: “Ointment and girdle sound as if they might have a scientific explanation.” And, in the same script, but smaller, the following notes filled the margin beside:

Possible Werewolf Motivations

1. Involuntary lycanthropy.

1. Must have blood to drink (connection with vampirism?).

2. Must have secrecy.

3. Driven to desperation by contemplating horror of own position.

2. Voluntary lycanthropy.

1. Will to do evil.

2. Will to exert power through fear.

3. Contributing factors to becoming werewolf.

1. Loneliness and dissatisfaction.

2. Hunger for forbidden foods (human flesh, etc.).

3. Scorn and hate of fellow men, general or specific.

4. Occult curiosity.

5. Simon-pure insanity (Satanist complex).

Are any or all of these traits to be found in werewolf?

Find one and ask it.

That was quite enough lycanthropy for the present, so far as I was concerned. I drew a book of Mark Twain from the shelf—I seem to remember it as Tom Sawyer Abroad—and read all the morning. Noon came, and I was about to ask the judge’s negro servant for some lunch, when he appeared in the door of the study.

“Someone with a message, sah,” he announced, and drew aside to admit Susan Gird.

I fairly sprang to my feet, dropping my book upon the desk. She advanced slowly into the room, her pale face grave but friendly. I saw that her eyes were darkly circled, and that her cheeks showed gaunt, as if with strain and weariness. She put out a hand, and I took it.

“A message?” I repeated William’s words.

“Why, yes.” She achieved a smile, and I was glad to see it, for both our sakes. “Judge Pursuivant got me to one side and said for me to come here. You and I are to talk the thing over.”

“You mean, last night?” She nodded, and I asked further, “How did you get here?”

“Your car. I don’t drive very well, but I managed.”

I asked her to sit down and talk.

She told me that she remembered being in the parlor, with Constable O’Bryant questioning me. At the time she had had difficulty remembering even the beginning of the séance, and it was not until I had been taken away that she came to realize what had happened to her father. That, of course, distressed and distracted her further, and even now the whole experience was wretchedly hazy to her.

“I do recall sitting down with you,” she said finally, after I had urged her for the twentieth time to think hard. “You chained me, yes, and Doctor Zoberg. Then yourself. Finally I seemed to float away, as if in a dream. I’m not even sure about how long it was.”

“Had the light been out very long?” I asked craftily.

“The light out?” she echoed, patently mystified. “Oh, of course. The light was turned out, naturally. I don’t remember, but I suppose you attended to that.”

“I asked to try you,” I confessed. “I didn’t touch the lamp until after you had seemed to drop off to sleep.”

She did recall to memory her father’s protest at his manacles, and Doctor Zoberg’s gentle inquiry if she were ready. That was all.

“How is Doctor Zoberg?” I asked her.

“Not very well, I’m afraid. He was exhausted by the experience, of course, and for a time seemed ready to break down. When the trouble began about you—the crowd gathered at the town hall—he gathered his strength and went out, to see if he could help defend or rescue you. He was gone about an hour and then he returned, bruised about the face. Somebody of the mob had handled him roughly, I think. He’s resting at our place now, with a hot compress on his eye.”

“Good man!” I applauded. “At least he did his best for me.”

She was not finding much pleasure in her memories, however, and I suggested a change of the subject. We had lunch together, egg sandwiches and coffee, then played several hands of casino. Tiring of that, we turned to the books and she read aloud to me from Keats. Never has “The Eve of St. Agnes” sounded better to me. Evening fell, and we were preparing to take yet another meal—a meat pie, which William assured us was one of his culinary triumphs—when the door burst open and Judge Pursuivant came in.

“You’ve been together all the time?” he asked us at once.

“Why, yes,” I said.

“Is that correct, Miss Susan? You’ve been in the house, every minute?”

“That is right,” she seconded me.

“Then,” said the judge. “You two are cleared, at least.”

He paused, looking from Susan’s questioning face to mine, then went on:

“That rending beast-thing in the Croft got another victim, not more than half an hour ago. O’Bryant was feeling better, ready to get back on duty. His deputy-brother, anxious to get hold of Wills first, for glory or vengeance, ventured into the place, just at dusk. He came out in a little while, torn and bitten almost to pieces, and died as he broke clear of the cedar hedge.”

XI

“To Meet That Monster Face to Face!”

I think that both Susan and I fairly reeled before this news, like actors registering surprise in an old-fashioned melodrama. As for Judge Pursuivant, he turned to the table, cut a generous wedge of the meat pie and set it, all savory and steaming, on a plate for himself. His calm zest for the good food gave us others steadiness again, so that we sat down and even ate a little as he described his day in town.

He had found opportunity to talk to Susan in private, confiding in her about me and finally sending her to me; this, as he said, so that we would convince each other of our respective innocences. It was purely an inspiration, for he had had no idea, of course, that such conviction would turn out so final. Thereafter he made shift to enter the Gird house and talk to Doctor Zoberg.

That worthy he found sitting somewhat limply in the parlor, with John Gird’s coffin in the next room. Zoberg, the judge reported, was mystified about the murder and anxious to bring to justice the townsfolk—there were more than one, it seemed—who had beaten him. Most of all, however, he was concerned about the charges against me.

“His greatest anxiety is to prove you innocent,” Judge Pursuivant informed me. “He intends to bring the best lawyer possible for your defense, is willing even to assist in paying the fee. He also swears that character witnesses can be brought to testify that you are the most peaceable and law-abiding man in the country.”

“That’s mighty decent of him,” I said. “According to your reasoning of this morning, his attitude proves him innocent, too.”

“What reasoning was that?” asked Susan, and I was glad that the judge continued without answering her.

“I was glad that I had sent Miss Susan on. If your car had remained there, Mr. Wills, Doctor Zoberg might have driven off in it to rally your defenses.”

“Not if I know him,” I objected. “The whole business, what of the mystery and occult significances, will hold him right on the spot. He’s relentlessly curious and, despite his temporary collapse, he’s no coward.”

“I agree with that,” chimed in Susan.

As for my pursuers of the previous night, the judge went on, they had been roaming the snow-covered streets in twos and threes, heavily armed for the most part and still determined to punish me for killing their neighbor. The council was too frightened or too perplexed to deal with the situation, and the constable was still in bed, with his brother assuming authority, when Judge Pursuivant made his inquiries. The judge went to see the wounded man, who very pluckily determined to rise and take up his duties again.

“I’ll arrest the man who plugged me,” O’Bryant had promised grimly, “and that kid brother of mine can quit playing policeman.”

The judge applauded these sentiments, and brought him hot food and whisky, which further braced his spirits. In the evening came the invasion by the younger O’Bryant of the Devil’s Croft, and his resultant death at the claws and teeth of what prowled there.

“His throat was so torn open and filled with blood that he could not speak,” the judge concluded, “but he pointed back into the timber, and then tried to trace something in the snow with his finger. It looked like a wolf’s head, with pointed nose and ears. He died before he finished.”

“You saw him come out?” I asked.

“No. I’d gone back to town, but later I saw the body, and the sketch in the snow.”

He finished his dinner and pushed back his chair. “Now,” he said heartily, “it’s up to us.”

“Up to us to do what?” I inquired.

“To meet that monster face to face,” he replied. “There are three of us and, so far as I can ascertain, but one of the enemy.” Both Susan and I started to speak, but he held up his hand, smiling. “I know without being reminded that the odds are still against us, because the one enemy is fierce and blood-drinking, and can change shape and character. Maybe it can project itself to a distance—which makes it all the harder, both for us to face it and for us to get help.”

“I know what you mean by that last,” I nodded gloomily. “If there were ten thousand friendly constables in the neighborhood, instead of a single hostile one, they wouldn’t believe us.”

“Right,” agreed Judge Pursuivant. “We’re like the group of perplexed mortals in Dracula, who had only their own wits and weapons against a monster no more forbidding than ours.”

It is hard to show clearly how his constant offering of parallels and rationalizations comforted us. Only the unknown and unknowable can terrify completely. We three were even cheerful over a bottle of wine that William fetched and poured out in three glasses. Judge Pursuivant gave us a toast—“May wolves go hungry!”—and Susan and I drank it gladly.

“Don’t forget what’s on our side,” said the judge, putting down his glass. “I mean the steadfast and courageous heart, of which I preached to Wills last night, and which we can summon from within us any time and anywhere. The werewolf, dauntlessly faced, loses its dread; and I think we are the ones to face it. Now we’re ready for action.”

I said that I would welcome any kind of action whatsoever, and Susan touched my arm as if in endorsement of the remark, Judge Pursuivant’s spectacles glittered in approval.

“You two will go into the Devil’s Croft,” he announced. “I’m going back to town once more.”

“Into the Devil’s Croft!” we almost shouted, both in the same shocked breath.

“Of course. Didn’t we just get through with the agreement all around that the lycanthrope can and must be met face to face? Offense is the best defense, as perhaps one hundred thousand athletic trainers have reiterated.”

“I’ve already faced the creature once,” I reminded him. “As for appearing dauntless, I doubt my own powers of deceit.”

“You shall have a weapon,” he said. “A fire gives light, and we know that such things must have darkness—such as it finds in the midst of that swampy wood. So fill your pockets with matches, both of you.”

“How about a gun?” I asked, but he shook his head.

“We don’t want the werewolf killed. That would leave the whole business in mystery, and yourself probably charged with another murder. He’d return to his human shape, you know, the moment he was hurt even slightly.”

Susan spoke, very calmly: “I’m ready to go into the Croft, Judge Pursuivant.”

He clapped his hands loudly, as if applauding in a theater. “Bravo, my dear, bravo! I see Mr. Wills sets his jaw. That means he’s ready to go with you. Very well, let us be off.”

He called to William, who at his orders brought three lanterns—sturdy old-fashioned affairs, protected by strong wire nettings—and filled them with oil. We each took one and set out. It had turned clear and frosty once more, and the moon shone too brightly for my comfort, at least. However, as we approached the grove, we saw no sentinels; they could hardly be blamed for deserting, after the fate of the younger O’Bryant.

We gained the shadow of the outer cedars unchallenged. Here Judge Pursuivant called a halt, produced a match from his overcoat pocket and lighted our lanterns all around. I remember that we struck a fresh light for Susan’s lantern; we agreed that, silly as the three-on-a-match superstition might be, this was no time or place to tempt Providence.

“Come on,” said Judge Pursuivant then, and led the way into the darkest part of the immense thicket.

XII

“We Are Here at His Mercy.”

We followed Judge Pursuivant, Susan and I, without much of a thought beyond an understandable dislike for being left alone on the brink of the timber. It was a slight struggle to get through the close-set cedar hedge, especially for Susan, but beyond it we soon caught up with the judge. He strode heavily and confidently among the trees, his lantern held high to shed light upon broad, polished leaves and thick, wet stems. The moist warmth of the grove’s interior made itself felt again, and the judge explained again and at greater length the hot springs that made possible this surprising condition. All the while he kept going. He seemed to know his way in that forbidden fastness—indeed, he must have explored it many times to go straight to his destination.

That destination was a clearing, in some degree like the one where I had met and fought with my hairy pursuer on the night before. This place had, however, a great tree in its center, with branches that shot out in all directions to hide away the sky completely. By straining the ears one could catch a faint murmur of water—my scalding stream, no doubt. Around us were the thickset trunks of the forest, filled in between with brush and vines, and underfoot grew velvety moss.

“This will be our headquarters position,” said the judge. “Wills, help me gather wood for a fire. Break dead branches from the standing trees—never mind picking up wood from the ground, it will be too damp.”

Together we collected a considerable heap and, crumpling a bit of paper in its midst, he kindled it.

“Now, then,” he went on, “I’m heading for town. You two will stay here and keep each other company.”

He took our lanterns, blew them out and ran his left arm through the loops of their handles.

“I’m sure that nothing will attack you in the light of the fire. You’re bound to attract whatever skulks hereabouts, however. When I come back, we ought to be prepared to go into the final act of our little melodrama.”

He touched my hand, bowed to Susan, and went tramping away into the timber. The thick leafage blotted his lantern-light from our view before his back had been turned twenty seconds.

Susan and I gazed at each other, and smiled rather uneasily.

“It’s warm,” she breathed, and took off her cloak. Dropping it upon one of the humped roots of the great central tree, she sat down on it with her back to the trunk. “What kind of a tree is this?”

I gazed up at the gnarled stem, or as much of it as I could see in the firelight. Finally I shook my head.

“I don’t know—I’m no expert,” I admitted. “At least it’s very big, and undoubtedly very old—the sort of tree that used to mark a place of sacrifice.”

At the word “sacrifice,” Susan lifted her shoulders as if in distaste. “You’re right, Talbot. It would be something grim and Druid-like.” She began to recite, half to herself:

That tree in whose dark shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer
And shall himself be slain.

“Macaulay,” I said at once. Then, to get her mind off of morbid things, “I had to recite The Lays of Ancient Rome in school, when I was a boy. I wish you hadn’t mentioned it.”

“You mean, because it’s an evil omen?” She shook her head, and contrived a smile that lighted up her pale face. “It’s not that, if you analyze it. ‘Shall himself be slain’—it sounds as if the enemy’s fate is sealed.”

I nodded, then spun around sharply, for I fancied I heard a dull crashing at the edge of the clearing. Then I went here and there, gathering wood enough to keep our fire burning for some time. One branch, a thick, straight one, I chose from the heap and leaned against the big tree, within easy reach of my hand.

“That’s for a club,” I told Susan, and she half shrunk, half stiffened at the implication.

We fell to talking about Judge Pursuivant, the charm and the enigma that invested him. Both of us felt gratitude that he had immediately clarified our own innocence in the grisly slayings, but to both came a sudden inspiration, distasteful and disquieting. I spoke first:

“Susan! Why did the judge bring us here?”

“He said, to help face and defeat the monster. But—but—”

“Who is that monster?” I demanded. “What human being puts on a semi-bestial appearance, to rend and kill?”

“Y—you don’t mean the judge?”

As I say, it had been in both our minds. We were silent, and felt shame and embarrassment.

“Look here,” I went on earnestly after a moment, “perhaps we’re being ungrateful, but we mustn’t be unprepared. Think, Susan; nobody knows where Judge Pursuivant was at the time of your father’s death, at the time I saw the thing in these woods.” I broke off, remembering how I had met the judge for the first time, so shortly after my desperate struggle with the point-eared demon. “Nobody knows where he was when the constable’s brother was attacked and mortally wounded.”

She gazed about fearfully. “Nobody,” she added breathlessly, “knows where he is now.”

I was remembering a conversation with him; he had spoken of books, mentioning a rare, a supposedly nonexistent volume. What was it? … the Wicked Bible. And what was it I had once heard about that work?

It came back to me now, out of the subconscious brain-chamber where, apparently, one stores everything he hears or reads in idleness, and from which such items creep on occasion. It had been in Lewis Spence’s Encyclopedia of Occultism, now on the shelf in my New York apartment.

The Wicked Bible, scripture for witches and wizards, from which magic-mongers of the Dark Ages drew their inspiration and their knowledge! And Judge Pursuivant had admitted to having one!

What had he learned from it? How had he been so glib about the science—yes, and the psychology—of being a werewolf?

“If what we suspect is true,” I said to Susan, “we are here at his mercy. Nobody is going to come in here, not if horses dragged them. At his leisure he will fall upon us and tear us to pieces.”

But, even as I spoke, I despised myself for my weak fears in her presence. I picked up my club and was comforted by its weight and thickness.

“I met that devil once,” I said, studying cheer and confidence into my voice this time. “I don’t think it relished the meeting any too much. Next time won’t be any more profitable for it.”

She smiled at me, as if in comradely encouragement; then we both started and fell silent. There had risen, somewhere among the thickets, a long low whining.

I put out a foot, stealthily, as though fearful of being caught in motion. A quick kick flung more wood on the fire. I blinked in the light and felt the heat. Standing there, as a primitive man might have stood in his flame-guarded camp to face the horrors of the ancient world, I tried to judge by ear the direction of that whine.

It died, and I heard, perhaps in my imagination, a stealthy padding. Then the whining began again, from a new quarter and nearer.

I made myself step toward it. My shadow, leaping grotesquely among the tree trunks, almost frightened me out of my wits. The whine had changed into a crooning wail, such as that with which dogs salute the full moon. It seemed to plead, to promise; and it was coming closer to the clearing.

Once before I had challenged and taunted the thing with scornful words. Now I could not make my lips form a single syllable. Probably it was just as well, for I thought and watched the more. Something black and cautious was moving among the branches, just beyond the shrubbery that screened it from our firelight. I knew, without need of a clear view, what that black something was. I lifted my club to the ready.

The sound it made had become in some fashion articulate, though not human in any quality. There were no words to it, but it spoke to the heart. The note of plea and promise had become one of command—and not directed to me.

I found my own voice.

“Get out of here, you devil!” I roared at it, and threw my club. Even as I let go of it, I wished I had not. The bushes foiled my aim, and the missile crashed among them and dropped to the mossy ground. The creature fell craftily silent. Then I felt sudden panic and regret at being left weaponless, and I retreated toward the fire.

“Susan,” I said huskily, “give me another stick. Hurry!”

She did not move or stir, and I rummaged frantically among the heaped dry branches for myself. Catching up the first piece of wood that would serve, I turned to her with worried curiosity.

She was still seated upon the cloak-draped root, but she had drawn herself tense, like a cat before a mouse-hole. Her head was thrust forward, so far that her neck extended almost horizontally. Her dilated eyes were turned in the direction from which the whining and crooning had come. They had a strange clarity in them, as if they could pierce the twigs and leaves and meet there an answering, understanding gaze.

“Susan!” I cried.

Still she gave no sign that she heard me, if hear me she did. She leaned farther forward, as if ready to spring up and run. Once more the unbeastly wail rose from the place where our watcher was lurking.

Susan’s lips trembled. From them came slowly and softly, then louder, a long-drawn answering howl.

“Aoooooooooooooo! Aooooooooooooooooooo!”

The stick almost fell from my hands. She rose, slowly but confidently. Her shoulders hunched high, her arms hung forward as though they wanted to reach to the ground. Again she howled:

“Aoooooooooooooooooooo!”

I saw that she was going to move across the clearing, toward the trees—through the trees. My heart seemed to twist into a knot inside me, but I could not let her do such a thing. I made a quick stride and planted myself before her.

“Susan, you mustn’t!”

She shrank back, her face turning slowly up to mine. Her back was to the fire, yet light rose in her eyes, or perhaps behind them; a green light, such as reflects in still forest pools from the moon. Her hands lifted suddenly, as though to repel me. They were half closed and the crooked fingers drawn stiff, like talons.

“Susan!” I coaxed her, yet again, and she made no answer but tried to slip sidewise around me. I moved and headed her off, and she growled—actually growled, like a savage dog.

With my free hand I clutched her shoulder. Under my fingers her flesh was as taut as wire fabric. Then, suddenly, it relaxed into human tissue again, and she was standing straight. Her eyes had lost their weird light, they showed only dark and frightened.

“Talbot,” she stammered. “Wh—what have I been doing?”

“Nothing, my dear,” I comforted her. “It was nothing that we weren’t able to fight back.”

From the woods behind me came a throttling yelp, as of some hungry thing robbed of prey within its very grasp. Susan swayed, seemed about to drop, and I caught her quickly in my arms. Holding her thus, I turned my head and laughed over my shoulder.

“Another score against you!” I jeered at my enemy. “You didn’t get her, not with all your filthy enchantments!”

Susan was beginning to cry, and I half led, half carried her back to the fireside. At my gesture she sat on her cloak again, as tractable as a child who repents of rebellion and tries to be obedient.

There were no more sounds from the timber. I could feel an emptiness there, as if the monster had slunk away, baffled.

XIII

“Light’s Our Best Weapon.”

Neither of us said anything for a while after that. I stoked up the fire, to be doing something, and it made us so uncomfortably warm that we had to crowd away from it. Sitting close against the tree-trunk, I began to imagine something creeping up the black lane of shadow it cast behind us to the edge of the clearing; and yet again I thought I heard noises. Club in hand, I went to investigate, and I was not disappointed in the least when I found nothing.

Finally Susan spoke. “This,” she said, “is a new light on the thing.”

“It’s nothing to be upset about,” I tried to comfort her.

“Not be upset!” She sat straight up, and in the light of the fire I could see a single pained line between her brows, deep and sharp as a chisel-gash. “Not when I almost turned into a beast!”

“How much of that do you remember?” I asked her.

“I was foggy in my mind, Talbot, almost as at the séance, but I remember being drawn—drawn to what was waiting out there.” Her eyes sought the thickets on the far side of our blaze. “And it didn’t seem horrible, but pleasant and welcome and—well, as if it were my kind. You,” and she glanced quickly at me, then ashamedly away, “you were suddenly strange and to be avoided.”

“Is that all?”

“It spoke to me,” she went on in husky horror, “and I spoke to it.”

I forbore to remind her that the only sound she had uttered was a wordless howl. Perhaps she did not know that—I hoped not. We said no more for another awkward time.

Finally she mumbled, “I’m not the kind of woman who cries easily; but I’d like to now.”

“Go ahead,” I said at once, and she did, and I let her. Whether I took her into my arms, or whether she came into them of her own accord, I do not remember exactly; but it was against my shoulder that she finished her weeping, and when she had finished she did feel better.

“That somehow washed the fog and the fear out of me,” she confessed, almost brightly.

It must have been a full hour later that rustlings rose yet again in the timber. So frequently had my imagination tricked me that I did not so much as glance up. Then Susan gave a little startled cry, and I sprang to my feet. Beyond the fire a tall, gray shape had become visible, with a pale glare of light around it.

“Don’t be alarmed,” called a voice I knew. “It is I—Otto Zoberg.”

“Doctor!” I cried, and hurried to meet him. For the first time in my life, I felt that he was a friend. Our differences of opinion, once making companionship strained, had so dwindled to nothing in comparison to the danger I faced, and his avowed trust in me as innocent of murder.

“How are you?” I said, wringing his hand. “They say you were hurt by the mob.”

“Ach, it was nothing serious,” he reassured me. “Only this.” He touched with his forefinger an eye, and I could see that it was bruised and swollen half shut. “A citizen with too ready a fist and too slow a mind has that to answer for.”

“I’m partly responsible,” I said. “You were trying to help me, I understand, when it happened.”

More noise behind him, and two more shapes pushed into the clearing. I recognized Judge Pursuivant, nodding to me with his eyes bright under his wide hat-brim. The other man, angular, falcon-faced, one arm in a sling, I had also seen before. It was Constable O’Bryant. I spoke to him, but he gazed past me, apparently not hearing.

Doctor Zoberg saw my perplexed frown, and he turned back toward the constable. Snapping long fingers in front of the great hooked nose, he whistled shrilly. O’Bryant started, grunted, then glared around as though he had been suddenly and rudely awakened.

“What’s up?” he growled menacingly, and his sound hand moved swiftly to a holster at his side. Then his eyes found me, and with an oath he drew his revolver.

“Easy, Constable! Easy does it,” soothed Judge Pursuivant, his own great hand clutching O’Bryant’s wrist. “You’ve forgotten that I showed how Mr. Wills must be innocent.”

“I’ve forgotten what we’re here for at all,” snapped O’Bryant, gazing around the clearing. “Hey, have I been drunk or something? I said that I’d never—”

“I’ll explain,” offered Zoberg. “The judge met me in town, and we came together to see you. Remember? You said you would like to avenge your brother’s death, and came with us. Then, when you balked at the very edge of this Devil’s Croft, I took the liberty of hypnotizing you.”

“Huh? How did you do that?” growled the officer.

“With a look, a word, a motion of the hand,” said Zoberg, his eyes twinkling. “Then you ceased all objections and came in with us.”

Pursuivant clapped O’Bryant on the unwounded shoulder. “Sit down,” he invited, motioning toward the roots of the tree.

The five of us gathered around the fire, like picknickers instead of allies against a supernormal monster. There, at Susan’s insistence, I told of what had happened since Judge Pursuivant had left us. All listened with rapt attention, the constable grunting occasionally, the judge clicking his tongue, and Doctor Zoberg in absolute silence.

It was Zoberg who made the first comment after I had finished. “This explains many things,” he said.

“It don’t explain a doggone thing,” grumbled O’Bryant.

Zoberg smiled at him, then turned to Judge Pursuivant. “Your ectoplasmic theory of lycanthropy—such as you have explained it to me—is most interesting and, I think, valid. May I advance it a trifle?”

“In what way?” asked the judge.

“Ectoplasm, as you see it, forms the werewolf by building upon the medium’s body. But is not ectoplasm more apt, according to the observations of many people, to draw completely away and form a separate and complete thing of itself? The thing may be beastly, as you suggest. Algernon Blackwood, the English writer of psychic stories, almost hits upon it in one of his ‘John Silence’ tales. He described an astral personality taking form and threatening harm while its physical body slept.”

“I know the story you mean,” agreed Judge Pursuivant. “The Camp of the Dog, I think it’s called.”

“Very well, then. Perhaps, while Miss Susan’s body lay in a trance, securely handcuffed between Wills and myself—”

“Oh!” wailed Susan. “Then it was I, after all.”

“It couldn’t have been you,” I told her at once.

“But it was! And, while I was at the judge’s home with you, part of me met the constable’s brother in this wood.” She stared wildly around her.

“It might as well have been part of me,” I argued, and O’Bryant glared at me as if in sudden support of that likelihood. But Susan shook her head.

“No, for which of us responded to the call of that thing out there?”

For the hundredth time she gazed fearfully through the fire at the bushes behind which the commanding whine had risen.

“I have within me,” she said dully, “a nature that will break out, look and act like a beast-demon, will kill even my beloved father—”

“Please,” interjected Judge Pursuivant earnestly, “you must not take responsibility upon yourself for what happened. If the ectoplasm engendered by you made up the form of the killer, the spirit may have come from without.”

“How could it?” she asked wretchedly.

“How could Marthe Beraud exude ectoplasm that formed a bearded, masculine body?” Pursuivant looked across to Zoberg. “Doctor, you surely know the famous ‘Bien Boa’ séance, and how the materialized entity spoke Arabic when the medium, a Frenchwoman, knew little or nothing of that language?”

Zoberg sat with bearded chin on lean hand. His joined brows bristled the more as he corrugated his forehead in thought. “We are each a thousand personalities,” he said, sententiously if not comfortingly. “How can we rule them all, or rule even one of them?”

O’Bryant said sourly that all this talk was too high flown for him to understand or to enjoy. He dared hope, however, that the case could never be tied up to Miss Susan Gird, whom he had known and liked since her babyhood.

“It can never do that,” Zoberg said definitely. “No court or jury would convict her on the evidence we are offering against her.”

I ventured an opinion: “While you are attempting to show that Susan is a werewolf, you are forgetting that something else was prowling around our fire, just out of sight.”

“Ach, just out of sight!” echoed Zoberg. “That means you aren’t sure what it was.”

“Or even that there was anything,” added Susan, so suddenly and strongly that I, at least, jumped.

“There was something, all right,” I insisted. “I heard it.”

“You thought you heard a sound behind the tree,” Susan reminded me. “You looked, and there was nothing.”

Everyone gazed at me, rather like staid adults at a naughty child. I said, ungraciously, that my imagination was no better than theirs, and that I was no easier to frighten. Judge Pursuivant suggested that we make a search of the surrounding woods, for possible clues.

“A good idea,” approved Constable O’Bryant. “The ground’s damp. We might find some sort of footprints.”

“Then you stay here with Miss Susan,” the judge said to him. “We others will circle around.”

The gaunt constable shook his head. “Not much, mister. I’m in on whatever searching is done. I’ve got something to settle with whatever killed my kid brother.”

“But there are only three lanterns,” pointed out Judge Pursuivant. “We have to carry them—light’s our best weapon.”

Zoberg then spoke up, rather diffidently, to say that he would be glad to stay with Susan. This was agreed upon, and the other three of us prepared for the search.

I took the lantern from Zoberg’s hand, nodded to the others, and walked away among the trees.

XIV

“I Was—I Am—A Wolf.”

Deliberately I had turned my face toward the section beyond the fire, for, as I have said repeatedly, it was there that I had heard the movements and cries of the being that had so strongly moved and bewitched Susan. My heart whispered rather loudly that I must look for myself at its traces or lack of them, or forever view myself with scorn.

Almost at once I found tracks, the booted tracks of my three allies. Shaking my lantern to make it flare higher, I went deeper among the clumps, my eyes quartering the damp earth. After a few moments I found what I had come to look for.

The marks were round and rather vague as to toe-positions, yet not so clear-cut as to be made by hoofs. Rather they suggested a malformed stump or a palm with no fingers, and they were deep enough to denote considerable weight; the tracks of my own shoes, next to them, were rather shallower. I bent for a close look, then straightened up, looked everywhere at once, and held my torch above my head to shed light all around; for I had suddenly felt eyes upon me.

I caught just a glimpse as of two points of light, fading away into some leafage and in the direction of the clearing, and toward them I made my way; but there was nothing there, and the only tracks underfoot were of shod human beings, myself or one of the others. I returned to my outward search, following the round tracks.

They were plainly of only two feet—there were no double impressions, like those of a quadruped—but I must have stalked along them for ten minutes when I realized that I had no way of telling whether they went forward or backward. I might be going away from my enemy instead of toward it. A close examination did me little good, and I further pondered that the creature would lurk near the clearing, not go so straight away. Thus arguing within myself, I doubled back.

Coming again close to the starting-point, I thought of a quick visit to the clearing and a comforting word or two with Susan and Zoberg. Surely I was almost there; but why did not the fire gleam through the trees? Were they out of wood? Perplexed, I quickened my pace. A gnarled tree grew in my path, its low branches heavily bearded with vines. Beyond this rose only the faintest of glows. I paused to push aside some strands and peer.

The fire had almost died, and by its light I but half saw two figures, one tall and one slender, standing together well to one side. They faced each other, and the taller—a seeming statue of wet-looking gray—held its companion by a shoulder. The other gray hand was stroking the smaller one’s head, pouring grayness thereon.

I saw only this much, without stopping to judge or to wonder. Then I yelled, and sprang into the clearing. At my outcry the two fell apart and faced me. The smallest was Susan, who took a step in my direction and gave a little smothered whimper, as though she was trying to speak through a blanket. I ran to her side, and with a rough sweep of my sleeve I cleared from her face and head a mass of slimy, shiny jelly.

“You!” I challenged the other shape. “What have you been trying to do to her?”

For only a breathing-space it stood still, as featureless and clumsy as a half-formed figure of gray mud. Then darkness sprang out upon it, and hair. Eyes blazed at me, green and fearsome. A sharp muzzle opened to emit a snarl.

“Now I know you,” I hurled at it. “I’m going to kill you.”

And I charged.

Claws ripped at my head, missed and tore the cloth of my coat. One of my arms shot around a lean, hairy middle with powerful muscles straining under its skin, and I drove my other fist for where I judged the pit of the stomach to be. Grappled, we fell and rolled over. The beast smell I remembered was all about us, and I knew that jaws were shoving once again at my throat. I jammed my forearm between them, so far into the hinge of them that they could not close nor crush. My other hand clutched the skin of the throat, a great loose fistful, drew it taut and began to twist with all my strength. I heard a half-broken yelp of strangled pain, felt a slackening of the body that struggled against me, knew that it was trying to get away. But I managed to roll on top, straddling the thing.

“You’re not so good on defense,” I panted, and brought my other hand to the throat, for I had no other idea save to kill. Paws grasped and tore at my wrists. There was shouting at my back, in Susan’s voice and several others. Hands caught me by the shoulders and tried to pull me up and away.

“No!” I cried. “This is it, the werewolf!”

“It’s Doctor Zoberg, you idiot,” growled O’Bryant in my ear. “Come on, let him up.”

“Yes,” added Judge Pursuivant, “it’s Doctor Zoberg, as you say; but a moment ago it was the monster we have been hunting.”

I had been dragged upright by now, and so had Zoberg. He could only choke and glare for the time being, his fingers to his half-crushed throat. Pursuivant had moved within clutching distance of him, and was eyeing him as a cat eyes a mouse.

“Like Wills, I only pretended to search, then doubled back to watch,” went on the judge. “I saw Zoberg and Miss Susan talking. He spoke quietly, rhythmically, commandingly. She went into half a trance, and I knew she was hypnotized.

“As the fire died down, he began the change. Ectoplasm gushed out and over him. Before it took form, he began to smear some upon her. And Mr. Wills here came out of the woods and at him.”

O’Bryant looked from the judge to Zoberg. Then he fumbled with his undamaged hand in a hip pocket, produced handcuffs and stepped forward. The accused man grinned through his beard, as if admitting defeat in some trifling game. Then he held out his wrists with an air of resignation and I, who had manacled them once, wondered again at their corded strength. The irons clicked shut upon one, then the other.

“You know everything now,” said Zoberg, in a soft voice but a steady one. “I was—I am—a wolf; a wolf who hoped to mate with an angel.”

His bright eyes rested upon Susan, who shrank back. Judge Pursuivant took a step toward the prisoner.

“There is no need for you to insult her,” he said.

Zoberg grinned at him, with every long tooth agleam. “Do you want to hear my confession, or don’t you?”

“Sure we want to hear it,” grunted O’Bryant. “Leave him alone, judge, and let him talk.” He glanced at me. “Got any paper, Mr. Wills? Somebody better take this down in writing.”

I produced a wad of notepaper and a stub pencil. Placing it upon my knee, with the lantern for light, I scribbled, almost word for word, the tale that Doctor Zoberg told.

XV

“And That Is the End.”

“Perhaps I was born what I am,” he began. “At least, even as a lad I knew that there was a lust and a power for evil within me. Night called to me, where it frightens most children. I would slip out of my father’s house and run for miles, under the trees or across fields, with the moon for company. This was in Germany, of course, before the war.”

“During the war—” began Judge Pursuivant.

“During the war, when most men were fighting, I was in prison.” Again Zoberg grinned, briefly and without cheer. “I had found it easy and inspiring to kill persons, with a sense of added strength following. But they caught me and put me in what they called an asylum. I was supposed to be crazy. They confined me closely, but I, reading books in the library, grew to know what the change was that came upon me at certain intervals. I turned my attention to it, and became able to control the change, bringing it on or holding it off at will.”

He looked at Susan again. “But I’m ahead of my story. Once, when I was at school, I met a girl—an American student of science and philosophy. She laughed at my wooing, but talked to me about spirits and psychical phenomena. That, my dear Susan, was your mother. When the end of the war brought so many new things, it also brought a different viewpoint toward many inmates of asylums. Some Viennese doctors, and later Sigmund Freud himself, found my case interesting. Of course, they did not arrive at the real truth, or they would not have procured my release.”

“After that,” I supplied, writing swiftly, “you became an expert psychical investigator and journeyed to America.”

“Yes, to find the girl who had once laughed and studied with me. After some years I came to this town, simply to trace the legend of this Devil’s Croft. And here, I found, she had lived and died, and left behind a daughter that was her image.”

Judge Pursuivant cleared his throat. “I suspect that you’re leaving out part of your adventures, Doctor.”

Zoberg actually laughed. “Ja, I thought to spare you a few shocks. But if you will have them, you may. I visited Russia—and in 1922 a medical commission of the Soviet Union investigated several score mysterious cases of peasants killed—and eaten.” He licked his lips, like a cat who thinks of meat. “In Paris I founded and conducted a rather interesting night school, for the study of diabolism in its relationship to science. And in 1936, certain summer vacationists on Long Island were almost frightened out of their wits by a lurking thing that seemed half beast, half man.” He chuckled. “Your Literary Digest made much of it. The lurking thing was, of course, myself.”

We stared. “Say, why do you do these things?” the constable blurted.

Zoberg turned to him, head quizzically aslant. “Why do you uphold your local laws? Or why does Judge Pursuivant study ancient philosophies? Or why do Wills and Susan turn soft eyes upon each other? Because the heart of each so insists.”

Susan was clutching my arm. Her fingers bit into my flesh as Zoberg’s eyes sought her again.

“I found the daughter of someone I once loved,” he went on, with real gentleness in his voice. “Wills, at least, can see in her what I saw. A new inspiration came to me, a wish and a plan to have a comrade in my secret exploits.”

“A beast-thing like yourself?” prompted the judge.

Zoberg nodded. “A lupa to my lupus. But this girl—Susan Gird—had not inherited the psychic possibilities of her mother.”

“What!” I shouted. “You yourself said that she was the greatest medium of all time!”

“I did say so. But it was a lie.”

“Why, in heaven’s name—”

“It was my hope,” he broke in quietly, “to make of her a medium, or a lycanthrope—call the phenomenon which you will. Are you interested in my proposed method?” He gazed mockingly around, and his eyes rested finally upon me. “Make full notes, Wills. This will be interesting, if not stupefying, to the psychic research committees.

“It is, as you know, a supernormal substance that is exuded to change the appearance of my body. What, I wondered, would some of that substance do if smeared upon her?”

I started to growl out a curse upon him, but Judge Pursuivant, rapt, motioned for me to keep silent.

“Think back through all the demonologies you have read,” Zoberg was urging. “What of the strange ‘witch ointments’ that, spread over an ordinary human body, gave it beast-form and beast-heart? There, again, legend had basis in scientific fact.”

“By the thunder, you’re logical,” muttered Judge Pursuivant.

“And damnable,” I added. “Go on, Doctor. You were going to smear the change-stuff upon Susan.”

“But first, I knew, I must convince her that she had within her the essence of a wolf. And so, the séances.”

“She was no medium,” I said again.

“I made her think she was. I hypnotized her, and myself did weird wonders in the dark room. But she, in a trance, did not know. I needed witnesses to convince her.”

“So you invited Mr. Wills,” supplied Judge Pursuivant.

“Yes, and her father. They had been prepared to accept her as medium and me as observer. Seeing a beast-form, they would tell her afterward that it was she.”

“Zoberg,” I said between set teeth, “you’re convicted out of your own mouth of rottenness that convinces me of the existence of the Devil after whom this grove was named. I wish to heaven that I’d killed you when we were fighting.”

“Ach, Wills,” he chuckled, “you’d have missed this most entertaining autobiographical lecture.”

“He’s right,” grumbled O’Bryant; and, “Let him go on,” the judge pleaded with me.

“Once sure of this power within her,” Zoberg said deeply, “she would be prepared in heart and soul to change at touch of the ointment—the ectoplasm. Then, to me she must turn as a fellow-creature. Together, throughout the world, adventuring in a way unbelievable—”

His voice died, and we let it. He stood in the firelight, head thrown back, manacled hands folded. He might have been a martyr instead of a fiend for whom a death at the stake would be too easy.

“I can tell what spoiled the séance,” I told him after a moment. “Gird, sitting opposite, saw that it was you, not Susan, who had changed. You had to kill him to keep him from telling, there and then.”

“Yes,” agreed Zoberg. “After that, you were arrested, and, later, threatened. I was in an awkward position. Susan must believe herself, not you, guilty. That is why I have championed you throughout. I went then to look for you.”

“And attacked me,” I added.

“The beast-self was ascendant. I cannot always control it completely.” He sighed. “When Susan disappeared, I went to look for her on the second evening. When I came into this wood, the change took place, half automatically. Associations, I suppose. Constable, your brother happened upon me in an evil hour.”

“Yep,” said O’Bryant gruffly.

“And that is the end,” Zoberg said. “The end of the story and, I suppose, the end of me.”

“You bet it is,” the constable assured him. “You came with the judge to finish your rotten work. But we’re finishing it for you.”

“One moment,” interjected Judge Pursuivant, and his fire-lit face betrayed a perplexed frown. “The story fails to explain one important thing.”

“Does it so?” prompted Zoberg, inclining toward him with a show of negligent grace.

“If you were able to free yourself and kill Mr. Gird—”

“By heaven, that’s right!” I broke in. “You were chained, Zoberg, to Susan and to your chair. I’d go bail for the strength and tightness of those handcuffs.”

He grinned at each of us in turn and held out his hands with their manacles. “Is it not obvious?” he inquired.

We looked at him, a trifle blankly I suppose, for he chuckled once again.

“Another employment of the ectoplasm, that useful substance of change,” he said gently. “At will my arms and legs assume thickness, and hold the rings of the confining irons wide. Then, when I wish, they grow slender again, and—”

He gave his hands a sudden flirt, and the bracelets fell from them on the instant. He pivoted and ran like a deer.

“Shoot!” cried the judge, and O’Bryant whipped the big gun from his holster.

Zoberg was almost within a vine-laced clump of bushes when O’Bryant fired. I heard a shrill scream, and saw Zoberg falter and drop to his hands and knees.

We were all starting forward. I paused a moment to put Susan behind me, and in that moment O’Bryant and Pursuivant sprang ahead and came up on either side of Zoberg. He was still alive, for he writhed up to a kneeling position and made a frantic clutch at the judge’s coat. O’Bryant, so close that he barely raised his hand and arm, fired a second time.

Zoberg spun around somehow on his knees, stiffened and screamed. Perhaps I should say that he howled. In his voice was the inarticulate agony of a beast wounded to death. Then he collapsed.

Both men stooped above him, cautious but thorough in their examination. Finally Judge Pursuivant straightened up and faced toward us.

“Keep Miss Susan there with you,” he warned me. “He’s dead, and not a pretty sight.”

Slowly they came back to us. Pursuivant was thoughtful, while O’Bryant, Zoberg’s killer, seemed cheerful for the first time since I had met him. He even smiled at me, as Punch would smile after striking a particularly telling blow with his cudgel. Rubbing his pistol caressingly with his palm, he stowed it carefully away.

“I’m glad that’s over,” he admitted. “My brother can rest easy in his grave.”

“And we have our work cut out for us,” responded the judge. “We must decide just how much of the truth to tell when we make a report.”

O’Bryant dipped his head in sage acquiescence. “You’re right,” he rumbled. “Yes, sir, you’re right.”

“Would you believe me,” said the judge, “if I told you that I knew it was Zoberg, almost from the first?”

But Susan and I, facing each other, were beyond being surprised, even at that.

The Black Drama

Powers, passions, all I see in other beings,
Have been to me as rain unto the sands
Since that all-nameless hour.

Lord Byron: Manfred

Foreword

Unlike most actors, I do not consider my memoirs worth the attention of the public. Even if I did so consider them, I have no desire to carry my innermost dear secrets to market. Often and often I have flung aside the autobiography of some famous man or woman, crying aloud: “Surely this is the very nonpareil of bad taste!”

Yet my descendants—and, after certain despairful years, again I have hope of descendants—will want to know something about me. I write this record of utterly strange happenings while it is yet new and clear in my mind, and I shall seal it and leave it among my important possessions, to be found and dealt with at such time as I may die. It is not my wish that the paper be published or otherwise brought to the notice of any outside my immediate family and circle of close friends. Indeed, if I thought that such a thing would happen I might write less frankly.

Please believe me, you who will read; I know that part of the narrative will strain any credulity, yet I am ready with the now-threadbare retort of Lord Byron, of whose works more below: “Truth is stranger than fiction.” I have, too, three witnesses who have agreed to vouch for the truth of what I have set down. Their only criticism is that I have spoken too kindly of them. If anything, I have not spoken kindly enough.

Like Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I have rid my prolog like a rough colt. Perhaps, like Duke Theseus, you my readers will be assured thereby of my sincerity.

Signed,
Gilbert Connatt

New York City
August 1, 1938

We, the undersigned, having read the appended statement of Gilbert Connatt, do hereby declare it to be true in substance.

Signed,
Sigrid Holgar
Keith Hilary Pursuivant
Jacob A. Switz

I

Drafted

The counterman in the little hamburger stand below Times Square gazed at me searchingly.

“Haven’t I seen you somewhere?” he asked, and when I shook my head he made a gesture as of inspiration. “I got it, buddy. There was a guy in a movie like you—tall, thin—black mustache and eyes—”

“I’m not in pictures,” I told him, quite truthfully as concerned the moment. “Make me a double hamburger.”

“And coffee?”

“Yes.” Then I remembered that I had but fifteen cents, and that double hamburgers cost a dime. I might want a second sandwich. “Make it a single instead.”

“No, a double,” piped somebody at my elbow, and a short, plump figure climbed upon the next stool. “Two doubles, for me and my friend here, and I’m paying. Gilbert Connatt, at half-past the eleventh hour I run onto you by the luck of the Switzes. I am glad to see you like an old father to see his wandering boy.”

I had known that voice of old in Hollywood. Turning, I surveyed the fat, blob-nosed face, the crossed eyes behind shell-rimmed glasses, the thick, curly hair, the ingratiating smile. “Hello, Jake,” I greeted him without enthusiasm.

Jake Switz waved at the counterman. “Two coffees with those hamburgers.” His strange oblique gaze shifted back to me. “Gib, to me you are more welcome than wine at a wedding. In an uptown hotel who do you think is wondering about you with tears in her eyes as big as electric light bulbs?” He shrugged and extended his palms, as if pleased at being able to answer his own question. “Sigrid Holgar!”

I made no reply, but drew a frayed shirt-cuff back into the worn sleeve of my jacket. Jake Switz continued: “I’ve been wondering where to get hold of you, Gib. How would you like again to play leading man for Sigrid, huh?”

It is hard to look full into cross-eyes, but I managed it. “Go back to her,” I bade him, “and tell her I’m not taking charity from somebody who threw me down.”

Jake caught my arm and shook it earnestly. “But that ain’t true, Gib. It’s only that she’s been so successful she makes you look like a loser. Gib, you know as well as you know your own name that it was you that threw her down—so hard she ran like a silver dollar.”

“I won’t argue,” I said, “and I won’t have charity.”

I meant that. It hurt to think of Sigrid and myself as we had been five years ago—she an inspired but unsure newcomer from Europe, I the biggest star on the biggest lot in the motion-picture industry. We made a film together, another, became filmdom’s favorite lovers on and off screen. Then the quarrel; Jake was wrong, it was Sigrid’s fault. Or was it? Anyway, she was at the head of the class now, and I had been kicked away from the foot.

The counterman set our sandwiches before us. I took a hungry bite and listened to Jake’s pleadings.

“It would be you doing her and me a favor, Gib. Listen this one time—please, to give Jake Switz a break.” His voice quavered earnestly. “You know that Sigrid is going to do a stage play.”

“I’ve read about it in Variety,” I nodded. “Horror stuff, isn’t it? Like Dracula, I suppose, with women fainting and nurses dragging them out of the theater.”

“Nurses!” repeated Jake Switz scornfully. “Huh, doctors we’ll need. At our show Jack Dempsey himself would faint dead away on the floor, it’s so horrible!” He subsided and began to beg once more. “But you know how Sigrid is. Quiet and restrained—a genius. She wouldn’t warm up, no matter what leading man we suggested. Varduk, the producer, mentioned you. ‘Get Gilbert Connatt,’ he said to me. ‘She made a success with him once, maybe she will again.’ And right away Sigrid said yes.”

I went on eating, then swallowed a mouthful of scalding coffee. Jake did the same, but without relish. Finally he exploded into a last desperate argument.

“Gib, for my life I can’t see how you can afford to pass it up. Here you are, living on hamburgers—”

I whirled upon him so fiercely that the rest of the speech died on his open lips. Rising, I tossed my fifteen cents on the counter and started for the door. But Jake yelled in protest, caught my shoulder and fairly wrestled me back.

“No, no,” he was wailing. “Varduk would cut my heart out and feed it to the sparrows if I found you and lost you again. Gib, I didn’t mean bad manners. I don’t know nothing about manners, Gib, but have I ever treated you wrong?”

I had to smile. “No, Jake. You’re a creature of instincts, and the instincts are rather better than the reasonings of most people. I think you’re intrinsically loyal.” I thought of the years he had slaved for Sigrid, as press agent, business representative, confidential adviser, contract maker and breaker, and faithful hound generally. “I’m sorry myself, Jake, to lose my temper. Let’s forget it.”

He insisted on buying me another double hamburger, and while I ate it with unblunted appetite he talked more about the play Sigrid was to present.

“Horror stuff is due for a comeback, Gib, and this will be the start. A lovely, Gib. High class. Only Sigrid could do it. Old-fashioned, I grant you, but not a grain of corny stuff in it. It was written by that English guy, Lord Barnum—no, Byron. That’s it, Lord Byron.”

“I thought,” said I, “that there was some question about the real authorship.”

“So the papers say, but they holler ‘phony’ at their own grandmothers. Varduk is pretty sure. He knows a thing or two, that Varduk. You know what he is going to do? He is getting a big expert to read the play and make a report.” Jake, who was more press agent than any other one thing, licked his good-humored lips. “What a bust in the papers that will be!”

Varduk. … I had heard that name, that single name whereby a new, brilliant and mysteriously picturesque giant of the theatrical world was known. Nobody knew where he had come from. Yet, hadn’t Belasco been a riddle? And Ziegfeld? Of course, they had never courted the shadows like Varduk, had never refused to see interviewers or admirers. I meditated that I probably would not like Varduk.

“Send me a pass when your show opens,” I requested.

“But you’ll be in it, Gib. Passes of your own you’ll be putting out. Ha! Listen this once while I try to do you good in spite of yourself, my friend. You can’t walk out after eating up the hamburgers I bought.”

He had me there. I could not muster the price of that second sandwich, and somehow the shrewd little fellow had surmised as much. He chuckled in triumph as I shrugged in token of surrender.

“I knew you would, Gib. Now, here.” He wrote on a card. “This is Varduk’s hotel and room number. Be there at eight o’clock tonight, to read the play and talk terms. And here.”

His second proffer was a wad of money.

“Get some clothes, Gib. With a new suit and tie you’ll look like a million dollars come home to roost. No, no. Take the dough and don’t worry. Ain’t we friends? If you never pay me back, it will be plenty soon enough.”

He beamed my thanks away. Leaving the hamburger stand, we went in opposite directions.

II

Byron’s Lost Play

I did not follow Jake’s suggestion exactly. Instead of buying new garments throughout, I went to the pawnshop where I had of late raised money on the remnants of a once splendid wardrobe. Here I redeemed a blue suit that would become me best, and a pair of handmade Oxfords. Across the street I bought a fresh shirt and necktie. These I donned in my coffin-sized room on the top floor of a cheap hotel. After washing, shaving and powdering, I did not look so bad; I might even have been recognized as the Gilbert Connatt who made history in the lavish film version of Lavengro, that classic of gipsydom in which a newcomer named Sigrid Holgar had also risen to fame. …

I like to be prompt, and it was eight o’clock on the stroke when I tapped at the door of Varduk’s suite. There was a movement inside, and then a cheerful voice: “Who’s there?”

“Gilbert Connatt,” I replied.

The lock scraped and the door opened. I looked into the handsome, ruddy face of a heavy, towering man who was perhaps a year younger than I and in much better physical condition. His was the wide, good-humored mouth, the short, straight nose of the Norman Scot. His blond hair was beginning to grow thin and his blue eyes seemed anxious.

“Come in, Mr. Connatt,” he invited me, holding out his broad hand. “My name’s Davidson—Elmo Davidson.” And, as I entered, “This is Mr. Varduk.” He might have been calling my attention to a prince royal.

I had come into a parlor, somberly decorated and softly lighted. Opposite me, in a shadowed portion, gazed a pallid face. It seemed to hang, like a mask, upon the dark tapestry that draped the wall. I was aware first of a certain light-giving quality within or upon that face, as though it were bathed in phosphorescent oil. It would have been visible, plain even, in a room utterly dark. For the rest there were huge, deep eyes of a color hard to make sure of, a nose somewhat thick but finely shaped, a mouth that might have been soft once but now drew tight as if against pain, and a strong chin with a dimple.

“How do you do, Mr. Connatt,” said a soft, low voice, and the mask inclined politely. A moment later elbows came forward upon a desk, and I saw the rest of the man Varduk start out of his protective shadows. His dark, double-breasted jacket and the black scarf at his throat had blended into the gloom of the tapestry. So had his chestnut-brown curls. As I came toward him, Varduk rose—he was of middle height, but looked taller by reason of his slimness—and offered me a slender white hand that gripped like a smith’s tongs.

“I am glad that you are joining us,” he announced cordially, in the tone of a host welcoming a guest to dinner. “Miss Holgar needs old friends about her, for her new stage adventure is an important item in her splendid career. And this,” he dropped his hand to a sheaf of papers on the desk, “is a most important play.”

Another knock sounded at the door, and Elmo Davidson admitted a young woman, short and steady-eyed. She was Martha Vining, the character actress, who was also being considered for a role in the play.

“Only Miss Holgar to come,” Davidson said to me, with a smile that seemed to ask for friendship. “We’ve only a small cast, you know; five.”

“I am expecting one more after Miss Holgar,” amended Varduk, and Davidson made haste to add: “That’s right, an expert antiquary—Judge Keith Pursuivant. He’s going to look at our manuscript and say definitely if it is genuine.”

Not until then did Varduk invite me to sit down, waving me to a comfortable chair at one end of his desk. I groped in my pockets for a cigarette, but he pressed upon me a very long and very good cigar.

“I admire tobacco in its naked beauty,” he observed with the wraith of a smile, and himself struck a match for me. Again I admired the whiteness of his hand, its pointed fingers and strong sensitivity of outline. Such hands generally betoken nervousness, but Varduk was serene. Even the fall of his fringed lids over those plumbless eyes seemed a deliberate motion, not an unthought wink.

Yet again a knock at the door, a brief colloquy and an ushering in by Elmo Davidson. This time it was Sigrid.

I got to my feet, as unsteady as a half-grown boy at his first school dance. Desperately I prayed not to look so moved as I felt. As for Sigrid, she paused and met my gaze frankly, with perhaps a shade’s lightening of her gently tanned cheeks. She was a trifle thinner than when I had last seen her five years ago, and wore, as usual, a belted brown coat like an army officer’s. Her hair, the blondest unbleached hair I have ever known, fell to her shoulders and curled at its ends like a full-bottomed wig in the portrait of some old cavalier. There was a green flash in it, as in a field of ripened grain. Framed in its two glistening cascades, her face was as I had known it, tapering from brow to chin over valiant cheekbones and set with eyes as large as Varduk’s and bluer than Davidson’s. She wore no makeup save a touch of rouge upon her short mouth—cleft above and full below, like a red heart. Even with low-heeled shoes, she was only two inches shorter than I.

“Am I late?” she asked Varduk, in that deep, shy voice of hers.

“Not a bit,” he assured her. Then he saw my awkward expectation and added, with monumental tact for which I blessed him fervently, “I think you know Mr. Gilbert Connatt.”

Again she turned to me. “Of course,” she replied. “Of course I know him. How do you do, Gib?”

I took the hand she extended and, greatly daring, bent to kiss it. Her fingers fluttered against mine, but did not draw away. I drew her forward and seated her in my chair, then found a backless settee beside her. She smiled at me once, sidewise, and took from my package the cigarette I had forsaken for Varduk’s cigar.

A hearty clap on my shoulder and a cry of greeting told me for the first time that little Jake Switz had entered with her.

Varduk’s brief but penetrating glance subdued the exuberant Jake. We turned toward the desk and waited.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” began Varduk, seriously but not heavily, “a newfound piece of Lord Byron’s work is bound to be a literary sensation. We hope also to make a theatrical sensation, for our newfound piece is a play.

“A study of Lord Byron evokes varied impressions and appeals. Carlyle thought him a mere dandy, lacking Mr. Brummel’s finesse and good humor, while Goethe insisted that he stood second only to Shakespeare among England’s poets. His mistress, the Countess Guiccioli, held him literally to be an angel; on the other hand, both Lamartine and Southey called him Satan’s incarnation. Even on minor matters—his skill at boxing and swimming, his depth of scholarship, his sincerity in early amours and final espousal of the Greek rebels—the great authorities differ. The only point of agreement is that he had color and individuality.”

He paused and picked up some of the papers from his desk.

“We have here his lost play, Ruthven. Students know that Doctor John Polidori wrote a lurid novel of horror called The Vampire, and that he got his idea, or inspiration, or both, from Byron. Polidori’s tale in turn inspired the plays of Nodier and Dumas in French, and of Planché and Boucicault in English. Gilbert and Sullivan joked with the story in Ruddigore, and Bram Stoker read it carefully before attempting Dracula. This manuscript,” again he lifted it, “is Byron’s original. It is, as I have said, a drama.”

His expressive eyes, bending upon the page in the dimness, seemed to shed a light of their own. “I think that neither Mr. Connatt nor Miss Vining has seen the play. Will you permit me to read?” He took our consent for granted, and began: “Scene, Malvina’s garden. Time, late afternoon—Aubrey, sitting at Malvina’s feet, tells his adventures.”

Since Ruthven is yet unpublished, I take the liberty of outlining it as I then heard it for the first time. Varduk’s voice was expressive, and his sense of drama good. We listened, intrigued and then fascinated, to the opening dialog in which young Aubrey tells his sweetheart of his recent adventures in wildest Greece. The blank verse struck me, at least, as being impressive and not too stiff, though better judges than I have called Byron unsure in that medium. Varduk changed voice and character for each role, with a skill almost ventriloquial, to create for us the illusion of an actual drama. I found quite moving Aubrey’s story of how bandits were beaten off single-handed by his chance acquaintance, Lord Ruthven. At the point where Aubrey expresses the belief that Ruthven could not have survived the battle:

“I fled, but he remained; how could one man,
Even one so godly gallant, face so many?
He followed not. I knew that he was slain—”

At that point, I say, the first surprise comes with the servant’s announcement that Ruthven himself has followed his traveling companion from Greece and waits, whole and sound, for permission to present himself.

No stage directions or other visualization; but immediate dialog defines the title role as courtly and sinister, fascinating and forbidding. Left alone with the maidservant, Bridget, he makes unashamed and highly successful advances. When he lifts the cap from her head and lets her hair fall down, it reminds one that Byron himself had thus ordered it among the maids on his own estate. Byron had made love to them, too; perhaps some of Ruthven’s speeches in this passage, at least, came wholemeal from those youthful conquests.

Yet the seduction is not a gay one, and smacks of bird and snake. When Ruthven says to Bridget,

“You move and live but at my will; dost hear?”

and she answers dully:

“I hear and do submit,”

awareness rises of a darkling and menacing power. Again, as Aubrey mentions the fight with the bandits, Ruthven dismisses the subject with the careless,

“I faced them, and who seeks my face seeks death,”

one feels that he fears and spares an enemy no more than a fly. And, suddenly, he turned his attentions to Malvina:

“Yes, I am evil, and my wickedness
Draws to your glister and your purity.
Now shall you light no darkness but mine own,
An orient pearl swathed in a midnight pall—”

Oscar, husband of the betrayed Bridget, rushes in at this point to denounce Ruthven and draw away his bemused mistress. At a touch from the visitor’s finger, Oscar falls dead. Aubrey, arming himself with a club of whitethorn—a sovereign weapon against demons—strikes Ruthven down. Dying, the enchanter persuades Aubrey and Malvina to drag him into the open and so leave him. As the moon rises upon his body, he moves and stands up:

“Luna, my mother, fountain of my life,
Once more thy rays restore me with their kiss.
Grave, I reject thy shelter! Death, stand back! …

“Curtain,” said Varduk suddenly, and smiled around at us.

“So ends our first act,” he continued in his natural voice. “No date—nor yet are we obliged to date it. For purposes of our dramatic production, however, I intend to lay it early in the past century, in the time of Lord Byron himself. Act Two,” and he picked up another section of the manuscript, “begins a century later. We shall set it in modern times. No blank verse now—Byron cleverly identifies his two epochs by offering his later dialog in natural prose. That was the newest of new tricks in his day.”

Again he read to us. The setting was the same garden, with Mary Aubrey and her cousin Swithin, descendants of the Aubrey and Malvina of the first act, alternating between light words of love and attentions to the aged crone Bridget. This survivor of a century and more croaks out the fearsome tale of Ruthven’s visit and what followed. Her grandson Oscar, Mary’s brother, announces a caller.

The newcomer explains that he has inherited the estate of Ruthven, ancient foe of the Aubreys, and that he wishes to make peace. But Bridget, left alone with him, recognizes in him her old tempter, surviving ageless and pitiless. Oscar, too, hears the secret, and is told that this is his grandfather. Bit by bit, the significance of a dead man restless after a century grows in the play and upon the servants. They swear slavishly to help him. He seeks a double and sinister goal. Swithin, image of his great-grandfather Aubrey, must die for that ancestor’s former triumph over Ruthven. Mary, the later incarnation of Malvina, excites Ruthven’s passion as did her ancestress.

Then the climax. Malvina, trapped by Ruthven, defies him, then offers herself as payment for Swithin’s life. Swithin, refusing the sacrifice, thrusts Ruthven through with a sword, but to no avail. Oscar overpowers him, and the demoniac lord pronounces the beginning of a terrible curse; but Mary steps forward as if to accept her lover’s punishment. Ruthven revokes his words, blesses her. As the Almighty’s name issues from his lips, he falls dead and decaying.

“End of the play,” said Varduk. “I daresay you have surmised what roles I plan for you. Miss Holgar and Mr. Connatt are my choices for Malvina and Aubrey in the first act, and Mary and Swithin in the second. Miss Vining will create the role of Bridget, and Davidson will undertake the two Oscars.”

“And Ruthven?” I prompted, feeling unaccountably presumptuous in speaking uninvited.

Varduk smiled and lowered his fringed lids. “The part is not too difficult,” he murmured. “Ruthven is off stage more than on, an influence rather than a flesh-and-blood character. I shall honor myself with this title role.”

Switz, sitting near me, produced a watch. We had been listening to the play for full two hours and a half.

Again a knock sounded at the door. Davidson started to rise, but Varduk’s slender hand waved him down.

“That will be Judge Pursuivant. I shall admit him myself. Keep your seats all.”

He got up and crossed the floor, walking stiffly as though he wore tight boots. I observed with interest that in profile his nose seemed finer and sharper, and that his ears had no lobes.

“Come in, Judge Pursuivant,” he said cordially at the door. “Come in, sir.”

III

Enter Judge Pursuivant

Keith Hilary Pursuivant, the occultist and antiquary, was as arresting as Varduk himself, though never were two men more different in appearance and manner. Our first impression was of a huge tweed-clad body, a pink face with a heavy tawny mustache, twinkling pale eyes and a shock of golden-brown hair. Under one arm he half crushed a wide black hat, while the other hand trailed a heavy stick of mottled Malacca, banded with silver. There was about him the same atmosphere of mature sturdiness as invests Edward Arnold and Victor McLaglen, and withal a friendly gayety. Without being elegant or dashing, he caught and held the regard. Men like someone like that, and so, I believe, do women who respect something beyond sleek hair and brash repartee.

Varduk introduced him all around. The judge bowed to Sigrid, smiled at Miss Vining, and shook hands with the rest of us. Then he took a seat at the desk beside Varduk.

“Pardon my trembling over a chance to see something that may have been written by Lord Byron to lie perdu for generations,” he said pleasantly. “He and his works have long been enthusiasms of mine. I have just published a modest note on certain aspects of his—”

“Yes, I know,” nodded Varduk, who was the only man I ever knew who could interrupt without seeming rude. “A Defense of the Wickedest Poet—understanding and sympathetic, and well worth the praise and popularity it is earning. May I also congratulate you on your two volumes of demonology, Vampyricon and The Unknown That Terrifies?”

“Thank you,” responded Pursuivant, with a bow of his shaggy head. “And now, the manuscript of the play—”

“Is here.” Varduk pushed it across the desk toward the expert.

Pursuivant bent for a close study. After a moment he drew a floor lamp close to cast a bright light, and donned a pair of pince-nez.

“The words ‘by Lord Byron,’ set down here under the title, are either genuine or a very good forgery,” he said at once. “I call your attention, Mr. Varduk, to the open capital B, the unlooped downstroke of the Y, and the careless scrambling of the O and N.” He fumbled in an inside pocket and produced a handful of folded slips. “These are enlarged photostats of several notes by Lord Byron. With your permission, Mr. Varduk, I shall use them for comparison.”

He did so, holding the cards to the manuscript, moving them here and there as if to match words. Then he held a sheet of the play close to the light. “Again I must say,” he announced at last, “that this is either the true handwriting of Byron or else a very remarkable forgery. Yet—”

Varduk had opened a drawer of the desk and once more he interrupted. “Here is a magnifying glass, Judge Pursuivant. Small, but quite powerful.” He handed it over. “Perhaps, with its help, you can decide with more accuracy.”

“Thank you.” Pursuivant bent for a closer and more painstaking scrutiny. For minutes he turned over page after page, squinting through the glass Varduk had lent him. Finally he looked up again.

“No forgery here. Every stroke of the pen is a clean one. A forger draws pictures, so to speak, of the handwriting he copies, and with a lens like this one can plainly see the jagged, deliberate sketchwork.” He handed back the magnifying glass and doffed his spectacles, then let his thoughtful eyes travel from one of us to the others. “I’ll stake my legal and scholastic reputation that Byron himself wrote these pages.”

“Your stakes are entirely safe, sir,” Varduk assured him with a smile. “Now that you have agreed—and I trust that you will allow us to inform the newspapers of your opinion—that Ruthven is Byron’s work, I am prepared to tell how the play came into my possession. I was bequeathed it—by the author himself.”

We all looked up at that, highly interested. Varduk smiled upon us as if pleased with the sensation he had created.

“The germ of Ruthven came into being one night at the home of the poet Shelley, on the shores of Lake Geneva. The company was being kept indoors by rain and wind, and had occupied itself with reading German ghost stories, and then tried their own skill at Gothic tales. One of those impromptu stories we know—Mary Godwin’s masterpiece, Frankenstein. Lord Byron told the strange adventures of Ruthven, and Polidori appropriated them—that we also know; but later that night, alone in his room, Byron wrote the play we have here.”

“In one sitting?” asked Martha Vining.

“In one sitting,” replied Varduk. “He was a swift and brilliant worker. In his sixteen years of active creative writing, he produced nearly eighty thousand lines of published verse—John Drinkwater reckons an average of fourteen lines, or the equivalent of a complete sonnet, for every day. This prodigious volume of poetry he completed between times of making love, fighting scandal, traveling, quarreling, philosophizing, organizing the Greek revolution. An impressive record of work, both in size and in its proportion of excellence.”

Sigrid leaned forward. “But you said that Lord Byron himself bequeathed the play to you.”

Again Varduk’s tight, brief smile. “It sounds fantastic, but it happened. Byron gave the manuscript to Claire Clairmont, his mistress and the mother of two of his children. He wanted it kept a secret—he had been called fiend incarnate too often. So he charged her that she and the children after her keep the play in trust, to be given the world a hundred years from the date of his death.”

Pursuivant cleared his throat. “I was under the impression that Byron had only one child by Claire Clairmont, Mr. Varduk. Allegra, who died so tragically at the age of six.”

“He had two,” was Varduk’s decisive reply. “A son survived, and had issue.”

“Wasn’t Claire’s son by Shelley?” asked Pursuivant.

Varduk shook his curly head. “No, by Lord Byron.” He paused and drew a gentle breath, as if to give emphasis to what he was going to add. Then: “I am descended from that son, ladies and gentlemen. I am the great-grandson of Lord Byron.”

He sank back into his shadows once more and let his luminous face seem again like a disembodied mask against the dark tapestry. He let us be dazzled by his announcement for some seconds. Then he spoke again.

“However, to return to our play. Summer is at hand, and the opening will take place at the Lake Jozgid Theater, in July, later to come to town with the autumn. All agreed? Ready to discuss contracts?” He looked around the circle, picking up our affirmative nods with his intensely understanding eyes. “Very good. Call again tomorrow. Mr. Davidson, my assistant, will have the documents and all further information.”

Jake Switz was first to leave, hurrying to telephone announcements to all the morning newspapers. Sigrid, rising, smiled at me with real warmth.

“So nice to see you again, Gib. Do not bother to leave with me—my suite is here in this hotel.”

She bade Varduk good night, nodded to the others and left quickly. I watched her departure with what must have been very apparent and foolish ruefulness on my face. It was the voice of Judge Pursuivant that recalled me to my surroundings.

“I’ve seen and admired your motion pictures, Mr. Connatt,” he said graciously. “Shall we go out together? Perhaps I can persuade you to join me in another of my enthusiasms—late food and drink.”

We made our adieux and departed. In the bar of the hotel we found a quiet table, where my companion scanned the liquor list narrowly and ordered samples of three Scotch whiskies. The waiter brought them. The judge sniffed each experimentally, and finally made his choice.

“Two of those, and soda—no ice,” he directed. “Something to eat, Mr. Connatt? No? Waiter, bring me some of the cold tongue with potato salad.” Smiling, he turned back to me. “Good living is my greatest pursuit.”

“Greater than scholarship?”

He nodded readily. “However, I don’t mean that tonight’s visit with Mr. Varduk was not something to rouse any man’s interest. It was full of good meat for any antiquary’s appetite. By the way, were you surprised when he said that he was descended from Lord Byron?”

“Now that you mention it, I wasn’t,” I replied. “He’s the most Byronic individual I have ever met.”

“Right. Of course, the physical resemblances might be accidental, the manner a pose. But in any case, he’s highly picturesque, and from what little I can learn about him, he’s eminently capable as well. You feel lucky in being with him in this venture?”

I felt like confiding in this friendly, tawny man. “Judge Pursuivant,” I said honestly, “any job is a godsend to me just now.”

“Then let me congratulate you, and warn you.”

“Warn me?”

“Here’s your whisky,” he said suddenly, and was silent while he himself mixed the spirit with the soda. Handing me a glass, he lifted the other in a silent toasting gesture. We drank, and then I repeated, “Warn me, you were saying, sir?”

“Yes.” He tightened his wide, intelligent mouth under the feline mustache. “It’s this play, Ruthven.”

“What about it?”

His plate of tongue and salad was set before him at this juncture. He lifted a morsel on his fork and tasted it.

“This is very good, Mr. Connatt. You should have tried some. Where were we? Oh, yes, about Ruthven. I was quite unreserved in my opinion, wasn’t I?”

“So it seemed when you offered to stake your reputation on the manuscript being genuine.”

“So I did,” he agreed, cutting a slice of tongue into mouthfuls. “And I meant just that. What I saw of the play was Byronic in content, albeit creepy enough to touch even an occultist with a shiver. The handwriting, too, was undoubtedly Byron’s. Yet I felt like staking my reputation on something else.”

He paused and we each had a sip of whisky. His recourse to the liquor seemed to give him words for what he wished to say.

“It’s a paradox, Mr. Connatt, and I am by no means so fond of paradoxes as was my friend, the late Gilbert Chesterton; but, while Byron most certainly wrote Ruthven, he wrote it on paper that was watermarked less than ten years ago.”

IV

Into the Country

The judge would not enlarge upon his perplexing statement, but he would and did play the most genial host I had ever known since the extravagant days of Hollywood. We had a number of drinks, and he complimented me on my steadiness of hand and head. When we parted I slept well in my little room that already seemed more cheerful.

Before noon the following day I returned to Varduk’s hotel. Only Davidson was there, and he was far more crisp and to the point than he had been when his chief was present. I accepted the salary figure already set down on my contract form, signed my name, received a copy of the play and left.

After my frugal lunch—I was still living on the money Jake Switz had lent me—I walked to the library and searched out a copy of Contemporary Americans. Varduk’s name I did not find, and wondered at that until the thought occurred that he, a descendant of Byron, was undoubtedly a British subject. Before giving up the volume I turned to the P’s. This time my search bore fruit:

Pursuivant, Keith Hilary; b. 1891, Richmond, Va., only son of Hilary Pursuivant (b. 1840, Pursuivant Landing, Ky.; Col. and Maj.-Gen., Va. Volunteer Infantry, 1861–65; attorney and journalist; d. 1898) and Anne Elizabeth (Keith) Pursuivant (b. 1864, Edinburgh; d. 1891).

Educ. Richmond pub. sch., Lawrenceville and Yale. A.B., male, 1908. Phi Beta Kappa, Skulls and Bones, football, forensics. LL.B., Columbia, 1911. Ph. D., Oxford, 1922. Admitted to Virginia bar, 1912. Elected 1914, Judge district court, Richmond. Resigned, 1917, to enter army. Major, Intelligence Div., U.S.A., 1917–19, D.S.C., Cong. Medal of Honor, Legion d’Honneur (Fr.). Ret. legal practice, 1919.

Author: The Unknown That Terrifies, Cannibalism in America, Vampyricon, An Indictment of Logic, etc.

Clubs: Lambs, Inkhorn, Gastronomics, Saber.

Hobbies: Food, antiquaries, demonology, fencing.

Protestant. Independent, Unmarried.

Address: Low Haven, R.F.D. No. 1, Bucklin, W. Va.

Thus the clean-picked skeleton of a life history; yet it was no hard task to restore some of its tissues, even coax it to life. Son of a Southern aristocrat who was a soldier while young and a lawyer and writer when mature, orphaned of his Scotch mother in the first year of his existence—had she died in giving him life?—Keith Pursuivant was born, it seemed, to distinction. To graduate from Yale in 1908 he must have been one of the youngest men in his class, if not the youngest; yet, at seventeen, he was an honor student, an athlete, member of an exclusive senior society and an orator. After that, law school, practise and election to the bench of his native community at the unheard-of age of twenty-three.

Then the World War, that sunderer of career-chains and remolder of men. The elder Pursuivant had been a colonel at twenty-one, a major-general before twenty-five; Keith, his son, deserting his brilliant legal career, was a major at twenty-six, but in the corps of brain-soldiers that matched wits with an empire. That he came off well in the contest was witnessed by his decorations, earnest of valor and resource.

“Ret. legal practise, 1919.” So he did not remain in his early profession, even though it promised so well. What then? Turn back for the answer. “Ph. D., Oxford, 1922.” His new love was scholarship. He became an author and philosopher. His interests included the trencher—I had seen him eat and drink with hearty pleasure—the study hall, the steel blade.

What else? “Protestant”—religion was his, but not narrowly so, or he would have been specific about a single sect. “Independent”—his political adventures had not bound him to any party. “Unmarried”—he had lived too busily for love? Or had he known it, and lost? I, too, was unmarried, and I was well past thirty. “Address: Low Haven”—a country home, apparently pretentious enough to bear a name like a manor house. Probably comfortable, withdrawn, full of sturdy furniture and good books, with a well-stocked pantry and cellar.

I felt that I had learned something about the man, and I was desirous of learning more.

On the evening mail I received an envelope addressed in Jake Switz’s jagged handwriting. Inside were half a dozen five-dollar bills and a railway ticket, on the back of which was scribbled in pencil: “Take the 9 a.m. train at Grand Central. I’ll meet you at the Dillard Falls Junction with a car. J. Switz.”

I blessed the friendly heart of Sigrid’s little serf, and went home to pack. The room clerk seemed surprised and relieved when I checked out in the morning, paying him in full. I reached the station early and got on the train, securing a good seat in the smoking-car. Many were boarding the car, but none looked at me, not even the big fellow who seated himself into position at my side. Six years before I had been mobbed as I stepped off the Twentieth Century Limited in this very station—a hundred women had rent away my coat and shirt in rags for souvenirs—

“Would you let me have a match, Mr. Connatt?” asked a voice I had heard before. My companion’s pale blue eyes were turned upon me, and he was tucking a trusty-looking pipe beneath his blond mustache.

“Judge Pursuivant!” I cried, with a pleasure I did not try to disguise. “You here—it’s like one of those Grand Hotel plays.”

“Not so much coincidence as that,” he smiled, taking the match I had found. “You see, I am still intrigued by the paradox we discussed the other night; I mean, the riddle of how and when Ruthven was set down. It so happens that an old friend of mine has a cabin near the Lake Jozgid Theater, and I need a vacation.” He drew a cloud of comforting smoke. “Judiciously I accepted his invitation to stay there. You and I shall be neighbors.”

“Good ones, I hope,” was my warm rejoinder, as I lighted a cigarette from the match he still held.

By the time our train clanked out of the subterranean caverns of Grand Central Station, we were deep in pleasant talk. At my earnest plea, the judge discussed Lord Byron.

“A point in favor of the genuineness of the document,” he began, “is that Byron was exactly the sort of man who would conceive and write a play like Ruthven.”

“With the semi-vampire plot?” I asked. “I always thought that England of his time had just about forgotten about vampires.”

“Yes, but Byron fetched them back into the national mind. Remember, he traveled in Greece as a young man, and the belief was strong in that part of the world. In a footnote to The Giaour—you’ll find his footnotes in any standard edition of his works—he discusses vampires.”

“Varduk spoke of those who fancied Byron to be the devil,” I remembered.

“They may have had more than fancy to father the thought. Not that I do not admire Byron, for his talents and his achievements; but something of a diabolic curse hangs over him. Why,” and Pursuivant warmed instantly to the discussion, “his very family history reads like a Gothic novel. His father was ‘Mad Jack’ Byron, the most sinful man of his generation; his grandfather was Admiral ‘Foul-weather Jack’ Byron, about whose ill luck at sea is more than a suggestion of divine displeasure. The title descended to Byron from his great-uncle, the ‘Wicked Lord,’ who was a murderer, a libertine, a believer in evil spirits, and perhaps a practising diabolist. The family seat, Newstead Abbey, had been the retreat of medieval monks, and when those monks were driven from it they may have cursed their dispossessors. In any case, it had ghosts and a ‘Devil’s Wood.’ ”

“Byron was just the man for that heritage,” I observed.

“He certainly was. As a child he carried pistols in his pockets and longed to kill someone. As a youth he chained a bear and a wolf at his door, drank wine from a human skull, and mocked religion by wearing a monk’s habit to orgies. His unearthly beauty, his mocking tongue, fitted in with his wickedness and his limp to make him seem an incarnation of the hoofed Satan. As for his sins—” The judge broke off in contemplation of them.

“Nobody knows them all,” I reminded.

“Perhaps he repented,” mused my companion. “At least he seems to have forgotten his light loves and dark pleasures, turned to good works and the effort to liberate the Greeks from their Turkish oppressors. If he began life like an imp, he finished like a hero. I hope that he was sincere in that change, and not too late.”

I expressed the desire to study Byron’s life and writings, and Pursuivant opened his suitcase on the spot to lend me Drinkwater’s and Maurois’ biographies, a copy of the collected poems, and his own work, A Defense of the Wickedest Poet.

We ate lunch together in the dining-car, Pursuivant pondering his choice from the menu as once he must have pondered his decision in a case at court. When he made his selection, he devoured it with the same gusto I had observed before. “Food may be a necessity,” quoth he between bites, “but the enjoyment of it is a blessing.”

“You have other enjoyments,” I reminded him. “Study, fencing—”

That brought on a discussion of the sword as weapon and symbol. My own swordsmanship is no better or worse than that of most actors, and Pursuivant was frank in condemning most stage fencers.

“I dislike to see a clumsy lout posturing through the duel scenes of Cyrano de Bergerac or Hamlet,” he growled. “No offense, Mr. Connatt. I confess that you, in your motion-picture interpretation of the role of Don Caesar de Bazan, achieved some very convincing cut-and-thrust. From what I saw, you have an understanding of the sport. Perhaps you and I can have a bout or so between your rehearsals.”

I said that I would be honored, and then we had to collect our luggage and change trains. An hour or more passed on the new road before we reached our junction.

Jake Switz was there as he had promised to be, at the wheel of a sturdy repainted car. He greeted us with a triumphant story of his astuteness in helping Elmo Davidson to bargain for the vehicle, broke off to invite Pursuivant to ride with us to his cabin, and then launched into a hymn of praise for Sigrid’s early rehearsals of her role.

“Nobody in America seems to think she ever made anything but movies,” he pointed out. “At home in Sweden, though, she did deep stuff—Ibsen and them guys—and her only a kid then. You wait, Gib, she’ll knock from the theater public their eyes out with her class.”

The road from the junction was deep-set between hills, and darkly hedged with high trees. “This makes the theater hard to get at,” Jake pointed out as he drove. “People will have to make a regular pilgrimage to see Holgar play in Ruthven, and they’ll like it twice as well because of all the trouble they took.”

Pursuivant left us at the head of a little path, with a small structure of logs showing through the trees beyond. We waved goodbye to him, and Jake trod on his starter once more. As we rolled away, he glanced sidewise at me. His crossed eyes behind their thick lenses had grown suddenly serious.

“Only one night Sigrid and I been here, Gib,” he said, somewhat darkly, “and I don’t like it.”

“Don’t tell me you’re haunted,” I rallied him, laughing. “That’s good press-agentry for a horror play, but I’m one of the actors. I won’t be buying tickets.”

He did not laugh in return.

“I won’t say haunted, Gib. That means ordinary ghosts, and whatever is here at the theater is worse than ghosts. Listen what happened.”

V

Jake’s Story

Sigrid, with Jake in attendance as usual, had left New York on the morning after Varduk’s reading of Ruthven. They had driven in the car Jake had helped Davidson to buy, and thus they avoided the usual throngs of Sigrid’s souvenir-demanding public, which would have complicated their departure by train. At Dillard Falls Junction, Varduk himself awaited them, having come up on a night train. Jake took time to mail me a ticket and money, then they drove the long, shadowy way to the theater.

Lake Jozgid, as most rural New Yorkers know, is set rather low among wooded hills and bluffs. The unevenness of the country and the poverty of the soil have discouraged cultivation, so that farms and villages are few. As the party drove, Varduk suggested an advantage in this remoteness, which suggestion Jake later passed on to Judge Pursuivant and me; where a less brilliant or more accessible star might be ignored in such far quarters, Sigrid would find Lake Jozgid to her advantage. The world would beat a path to her box office, and treasure a glimpse of her the more because that glimpse had been difficult of attainment.

The theater building itself had been a great two-story lodge, made of heavy logs and hand-hewn planks. Some sporting-club, now defunct, had owned it, then abandoned it when fish grew scarce in the lake. Varduk had leased it cheaply, knocked out all partitions on the ground floor, and set up a stage, a lobby and pew-like benches. The upper rooms would serve as lodgings for himself and his associate Davidson, while small outbuildings had been fitted up to accommodate the rest of us.

Around this group of structures clung a thick mass of timber. Sigrid, who had spent her girlhood among Sweden’s forests, pointed out that it was mostly virgin and inquired why a lumber company had never cut logs here. Varduk replied that the property had been private for many years, then changed the subject by the welcome suggestion that they have dinner. They had brought a supply of provisions, and Jake, who is something of a cook in addition to his many other professions, prepared a meal. Both Sigrid and Jake ate heartily, but Varduk seemed only to take occasional morsels for politeness’ sake.

In the evening, a full moon began to rise across the lake. Sitting together in Varduk’s upstairs parlor, the three saw the great soaring disk of pale light, and Sigrid cried out joyfully that she wanted to go out and see better.

“Take a lantern if you go out at night,” counseled Varduk over his cigar.

“A lantern?” Sigrid repeated. “But that would spoil the effect of the moonlight.”

Her new director blew a smooth ring of smoke and stared into its center, as though a message lay there. Then he turned his brilliant eyes to her. “If you are wise, you will do as I say,” he made answer.

Men like Varduk are masterful and used to being obeyed. Sometimes they lose sight of the fact that women like Sigrid are not used to being given arbitrary commands without explanation. She fell silent and a little frigid for half an hour—often I had seen her just as Jake was describing her. Then she rose and excused herself, saying that she was tired from the morning’s long drive and would go to bed early. Varduk rose and courteously bowed her to the stairs. Since her sleeping-quarters, a cleverly rebuilt woodshed, were hardly a dozen steps from the rear of the lodge building itself, neither man thought it necessary to accompany her.

Left alone, Varduk and Jake carried on an idle conversation, mostly about publicity plans. Jake, who in the show business had done successfully almost everything but acting, found in his companion a rather penetrating and accurate commentator on this particular aspect of production. Indeed, Varduk debated him into a new attitude—one of restraint and dignity instead of novel and insistent extravagance.

“You’re right,” Jake announced at length. “I’m going to get the releases that go out in tomorrow’s mail. I’ll cut out every ‘stupendous’ and ‘colossal’ I wrote into them. Good night, Mr. Varduk.”

He, too, trotted downstairs and left the main building for his own sleeping-room, which was the loft of an old boathouse. As he turned toward the water, he saw a figure walking slowly and dreamily along its edge—Sigrid, her hands tucked into the pockets of the light belted coat she had donned against possible night chills, her head flung back as though she sought all of the moonlight upon her rapt face.

Although she had wandered out to the brink of the sandy beach and so stood in the open brightness, clumps of bushes and young trees grew out almost to the lake. One tufty belt of scrub willow extended from the denser timber to a point within a dozen feet of Sigrid. It made a screen of gloom between Jake’s viewpoint and the moon’s spray of silver. Yet, he could see, light was apparently soaking through its close-set leaves, a streak of soft radiance that was so filtered as to look murky, greenish, like the glow from rotting salmon.

Even as Jake noticed this flecky glimmer, it seemed to open up like a fan or a parasol. Instead of a streak, it was a blot. This extended further, lazily but noticeably. Jake scowled. And this moved lakeward, without leaving any of itself at the starting-point.

With its greatening came somewhat of a brightening, which revealed that the phenomenon had some sort of shape—or perhaps the shape was defining itself as it moved. The blot’s edges grew unevenly, receding in places to swell in others. Jake saw that these swellings sprouted into pseudopodal extensions (to quote him, they “jellied out”), that stirred as though groping or reaching. And at the top was a squat roundness, like an undeveloped cranium. The lower rays of light became limbs, striking at the ground as though to walk. The thing counterfeited life, motion—and attention. It was moving toward the water, and toward Sigrid.

Jake did not know what it was, and he says that he was suddenly and extremely frightened. Yet he does not seem to have acted like one who is stricken with fear. What he did, and did at once, was to bawl out a warning to Sigrid, then charge at the mystery.

It had stolen into the moonlight, and Jake encountered it there. As he charged, he tried to make out the details; but what little it had had of details in the darkness now went misty, as its glow was conquered in the brighter flood of moonglow. Yet it was there, and moving toward Sigrid. She had turned from looking across the water, and now shrank back with a tremulous cry, stumbling and recovering herself ankle-deep in the shallows.

Jake, meanwhile, had flung himself between her and what was coming out of the thicket. He did not wait or even set himself for conflict, but changed direction to face and spring upon the threatening presence. Though past his first youth, he fancied himself as in fairly tough condition, and more than once he had won such impromptu fistfights as spring up among the too-temperamental folk of the theater. He attacked as he would against a human adversary, sinking his head between his shoulders and flinging his fists in quick succession.

He got home solidly, against something tangible but sickeningly loose beneath its smooth skin or rind. It was like buffeting a sack half full of meal. Though the substance sank in beneath his knuckles, there was no reeling or retreat. A squashy return slap almost enveloped his face, and his spectacles came away as though by suction. At the same time he felt a cable-like embrace, such as he had imagined a python might exert. He smelled putrescence, was close to being sick, and heard, just behind him, the louder screaming of Sigrid.

The fresh knowledge of her danger and terror made him strong again. One arm was free, and he battered gamely with his fist. He found his mark, twice and maybe three times. Then his sickness became faintness when he realized that his knuckles had become slimy wet.

A new force dragged at him behind. Another enemy … then a terrible voice of command, the voice of Varduk:

“Let go at once!”

The grasp and the filthy bulk fell away from Jake. He felt his knees waver like shreds of paper. His eyes, blurred without their thick spectacles, could barely discern, not one, but several lumpy forms drawing back. And near him stood Varduk, his facial phosphorescence out-gleaming the rotten light of the creatures, his form drawn up sternly in a posture of command.

“Get out!” cried Varduk again. “By what power do you come for your victim now?”

The uncouth shapes shrank out of sight. Jake could not be sure whether they found shelter behind bushes and trees or not; perhaps they actually faded into invisibility. Sigrid had come close, stepping gingerly in her wet shoes, and stooped to retrieve Jake’s fallen glasses.

“We owe you our lives,” she said to Varduk. “What were those—”

“Never mind,” he cut her off. “They will threaten you no more tonight. Go to your beds, and be more careful in the future.”

This was the story that Jake told me as we drove the final miles to the Lake Jozgid Theater.

He admitted that it had all been a desperate and indistinct scramble to him, and that explanation he had offered next morning when Varduk laughed and accused him of dreaming.

“But maybe it wasn’t a dream,” Jake said as he finished. “Even if it was, I don’t want any more dreams like it.”

VI

The Theater in the Forest

Jake’s narrative did not give me cheerful expectations of the Lake Jozgid Theater. It was just as well, for my first glimpse of the place convinced me that it was the exact setting for a play of morbid unreality.

The road beyond Pursuivant’s cabin was narrow but not too bad. Jake, driving nimbly over its sanded surface, told me that we might thank the public works program for its good condition. In one or two places, as I think I have said already, the way was cut deeply between knolls or bluffs, and here it was gloomy and almost sunless. Too, the woods thickened to right and left, with taller and taller ranks of trees at the roadside. Springtime’s leafage made the trees seem vigorous, but not exactly cheerful; I fancied that they were endowed with intelligence and the power of motion, and that they awaited only our passing before they moved out to block the open way behind us.

From this sand-surfaced road there branched eventually a second, and even narrower and darker, that dipped down a thickly timbered slope. We took a rather difficult curve at the bottom and came out almost upon the shore of the lake, with the old lodge and its outbuildings in plain view.

These structures were in the best of repair, but appeared intensely dark and weathered, as though the afternoon sky shed a brownish light upon them. The lodge that was now the theater stood clear in the center of the sizable cleared space, although lush-looking clumps and belts of evergreen scrub grew almost against the sheds and the boathouse. I was enough of an observer to be aware that the deep roofs were of stout ax-cut shingles, and that the heavy timbers of the walls were undoubtedly seasoned for an age. The windows were large but deep-set in their sturdy frames. Those who call windows the eyes of a house would have thought that these eyes were large enough, but well able to conceal the secrets and feelings within.

As we emerged from the car, I felt rather than saw an onlooker. Varduk stood in the wide front door of the lodge building. Neither Jake nor I could agree later whether he had opened the door himself and appeared, whether he had stepped into view with the door already open, or whether he had been standing there all the time. His slender, elegant figure was dressed in dark jacket and trousers, with a black silk scarf draped Ascot fashion at his throat, just as he had worn at his hotel in New York. When he saw that we were aware of him, he lifted a white hand in greeting and descended two steps to meet us coming toward him. I offered him my hand, and he gave it a quick, sharp pressure, as though he were investigating the texture of my flesh and bone.

“I am glad to see you here so soon, Mr. Connatt,” he said cordially. “Now we need wait only for Miss Vining, who should arrive before dark. Miss Holgar came yesterday, and Davidson this morning.”

“There will be only the six of us, then?” I asked.

He nodded his chestnut curls. “A caretaker will come here each day, to prepare lunch and dinner and to clean. He lives several miles up the road, and will spend his nights at home. But we of the play itself will be in residence, and we alone—a condition fully in character, I feel, with the attitude of mystery and reserve we have assumed toward our interesting production. For breakfasts, Davidson will be able to look after us.”

“Huh!” grunted Jake. “That Davidson can act, manage, stagehand, cook—he does everything.”

“Almost everything,” said Varduk dryly, and his eyes turned long and expressionlessly upon my friend, who immediately subsided. In the daylight I saw that Varduk’s eyes were hazel; on the night I had met him at his hotel they had seemed thunder-dark.

“You, too, are considered useful at many things around the theater, Switz,” Varduk continued. “I took that into consideration when Miss Holgar, though she left her maid behind, insisted on including you in the company. I daresay, we can depend on you to help Davidson with the staging and so on.”

“Oh, yes, sure,” Jake made reply. “Certainly. Miss Holgar, she wants me to do that.”

“Very good.” Varduk turned on the heel of his well-polished boot. “Suppose,” he added over his shoulder, “that you take Mr. Connatt up to the loft of the boathouse. Mr. Connatt, do you mind putting up with Switz?”

“Not in the least,” I assured him readily, and took up two of my bags. Jake had already lifted the third and heaviest.

We nodded to Varduk and skirted the side of the lodge, walked down to the water, then entered the boathouse. It was a simple affair of well-chinked logs. Two leaky-looking canoes still occupied the lower part of it, but we picked our way past them and ascended a sturdy staircase to a loft under the peaked roof. This had been finished with wallboard and boasted a window at each end. Two cots, a rug, a washstand, a table and several chairs made it an acceptable sleeping-apartment.

“This theater is halfway to the never-never land,” I commented as I began to unpack.

“I should live so—I never saw the like of it,” Jake said earnestly. “How are people going to find their way here? Yesterday I began to talk about signs by the side of the road. Right off at once, Varduk said no. I begged like a poor relation left out of his uncle’s will. Finally he said yes—but the signs must be small and dignified, and put up only a day before the show begins.”

I wanted to ask a question about his adventure of the previous night, but Jake shook his head in refusal to discuss it. “Not here,” he said. “Gib, who knows who may be listening?” He dropped his voice. “Or even what might be listening?”

I lapsed into silence and got out old canvas sneakers, flannel slacks and a Norfolk jacket, and changed into them. Dressed in this easy manner, I left the boathouse and stood beside the lake. At once a voice hailed me. Sigrid was walking along the water’s edge, smiling in apparent delight.

We came face to face; I bent to kiss her hand. As once before, it fluttered under my lips, but when I straightened again I saw nothing of distaste or unsteadiness in her expression.

“Gib, how nice that you’re here!” she cried. “Do you like the place?”

“I haven’t seen very much of it yet,” I told her. “I want to see the inside of the theater.”

She took her hand away from me and thrust it into the pocket of the old white sweater she wore. “I think that I love it here,” she said, with an air of gay confession. “Not all of the hermit stories about me are lies. I could grow truly fat—God save the mark!—on quiet and serenity.”

“Varduk pleases you, too?” I suggested.

“He has more understanding than any other theatrical executive in my experience,” she responded emphatically. “He fills me with the wish to work. I’m like a starry-eyed beginner again. What would you say if I told you that I was sweeping my own room and making my own bed?”

“I would say that you were the most charming housemaid in the world.”

Her laughter was full of delight. “You sound as if you mean it, Gib. It is nice to know you as a friend again.”

It seemed to me that she emphasized the word “friend” a trifle, as though to warn me that our relationship would nevermore become closer than that. Changing the subject, I asked her if she had swum in the lake; she had, and found it cold. How about seeing the theater? Together we walked toward the lodge and entered at a side door.

The auditorium was as Jake had described it to me, and I saw that Varduk liked a dark tone. He had stained the paneling, the benches, and the beams a dark brown. Brown, too, was the heavy curtain that hid the stage.

“We’ll be there tonight,” said Sigrid, nodding stageward. “Varduk has called the first rehearsal for immediately after dinner. We eat together, of course, in a big room upstairs.”

“May I sit next to you when we eat?” I asked, and she laughed yet again. She was being as cheerful as I had ever known her to be.

“You sound like the student-hero in a light opera, Gib. I don’t know about the seating-arrangement. Last night I was at the head of the table, and Varduk at the foot. Jake and Mr. Davidson were at either side of me.”

“I shall certainly arrive before one or the other of them,” I vowed solemnly.

Varduk had drifted in as we talked, and he chuckled at my announcement.

“A gallant note, Mr. Connatt, and one that I hope you can capture as pleasantly for the romantic passages of our Ruthven. By the by, our first rehearsal will take place this evening.”

“So Miss Holgar has told me,” I nodded. “I have studied the play rather prayerfully since Davidson gave me a copy. I hope I’m not a disappointment in it.”

“I am sure that you will not be,” he said kindly. “I did not choose disappointing people for my cast.”

Davidson entered from the front, to say that Martha Vining had arrived. Varduk moved away, stiff in his walk as I had observed before. Sigrid and I went through the side door and back into the open.

That evening I kept my promise to find a place by Sigrid at the table. Davidson, entering just behind me, looked a trifle chagrined but sat at my other side, with Martha Vining opposite. The dinner was good, with roast mutton, salad and apple tart. I thought of Judge Pursuivant’s healthy appetite as I ate.

After the coffee, Varduk nodded to the old man who served as caretaker, cook and waiter, as in dismissal. Then the producer’s hazel eyes turned to Sigrid, who took her cue and rose. We did likewise.

“Shall we go down to the stage?” Varduk said to us. “It’s time for our first effort with Ruthven.”

VII

Rehearsal

We went down a back stairway that brought us to the empty stage. A light was already burning, and I remember well that my first impression was of the stage’s narrowness and considerable depth. Its back was of plaster over the outer timbers, but at either side partitions of paneling had been erected to enclose the cell-like dressing-rooms. One of the doors bore a star of white paint, evidently for Sigrid. Against the back wall leaned several open frames of wood, with rolls of canvas lying ready to be tacked on and painted into scenery.

Varduk had led the way down the stairs, and at the foot he paused to call upward to Davidson, who remained at the rear of the procession. “Fetch some chairs,” he ordered, and the tall subordinate paused to gather them. He carried down six at once, his long strong arms threaded through their open backs. Varduk showed him with silent gestures where to arrange them, and himself led Sigrid to the midmost of them, upstage center.

“Sit down, all,” he said to the rest of us. “Curtain, Davidson.” He waited while the heavy pall rolled ponderously upward against the top of the arch. “Have you got your scripts, ladies and gentlemen?”

We all had, but his hands were empty. I started to offer him my copy, but he waved it away with thanks. “I know the thing by heart,” he informed me, though with no air of boasting. Remaining still upon his feet, he looked around our seated array, capturing every eye and attention.

“The first part of Ruthven is, as we know already, in iambic pentameter—the ‘heroic verse’ that was customary and even expected in dramas of Byron’s day. However, he employs here his usual trick of breaking the earlier lines up into short, situation-building speeches. No long and involved declamations, as in so many creaky tragedies of his fellows. He wrote the same sort of opening scenes for his plays the world has already seen performed—Werner, The Two Foscari, Marino Faliero and The Deformed Transformed.”

Martha Vining cleared her throat. “Doesn’t Manfred begin with a long, measured soliloquy by the central character?”

“It does,” nodded Varduk. “I am gratified, Miss Vining, to observe that you have been studying something of Byron’s work.” He paused, and she bridled in satisfaction. “However,” he continued, somewhat maliciously, “you would be well advised to study farther, and learn that Byron stated definitely that Manfred was not written for the theater. But, returning to Ruthven, with which work we are primarily concerned, the short, lively exchanges at the beginning are Aubrey’s and Malvina’s.” He quoted from memory. “ ‘Scene, Malvina’s garden. Time, late afternoon—Aubrey, sitting at Malvina’s feet, tells his adventures.’ Very good, Mr. Connatt, take your place at Miss Holgar’s feet.”

I did so, and she smiled in comradely fashion while waiting for the others to drag their chairs away. Glancing at our scripts, we began:

“I’m no Othello, darling.”
“Yet I am
Your Desdemona. Tell me of your travels.”
“Of Anthropophagi?”
“ ‘And men whose heads
do grow beneath—’ ”
“I saw no such,
Not in all wildest Greece and Macedon.”
“Saw you no spirits?”
“None, Malvina—none.”
“Not even the vampire, he who quaffs the blood
Of life, that he may live in death?”
“Not I.
How do you know that tale?”
“I’ve read
In old romances—”

“Capital, capital,” interrupted Varduk pleasantly. “I know that the play is written in a specific meter, yet you need not speak as though it were. If anything, make the lines less rhythmic and more matter-of-fact. Remember, you are young lovers, half bantering as you woo. Let your audience relax with you. Let it feel the verse form without actually hearing.”

We continued, to the line where Aubrey tells of his travel-acquaintance Ruthven. Here the speech became definite verse:

“He is a friend who charms, but does not cheer,
One who commands, but comforts not, the world.
I do not doubt but women find him handsome,
Yet hearts must be uneasy at his glance.”

Malvina asks:

“His glance? Is it so piercing when it strikes?”

And Aubrey:

“It does not pierce—indeed, it rather weighs,
Like lead, upon the face where it is fixed.”

Followed the story, which I have outlined elsewhere, of the encounter with bandits and Ruthven’s apparent sacrifice of himself to cover Aubrey’s retreat. Then Martha Vining, as the maid Bridget, spoke to announce Ruthven’s coming, and upon the heels of her speech Varduk moved stiffly toward us.

“Aubrey!” he cried, in a rich, ringing tone such as fills theaters, and not at all like his ordinary gentle voice. I made my due response:

“Have you lived, Ruthven? But the horde
Of outlaw warriors compassed you and struck—”

In the role of Ruthven, Varduk’s interruption was as natural and decisive as when, in ordinary conversation, he neatly cut another’s speech in two with a remark of his own. I have already quoted this reply of Ruthven’s:

“I faced them, and who seeks my face seeks death.”

He was speaking the line, of course, without script, and his eyes held mine. Despite myself, I almost staggered under the weight of his glance. It was like that which Aubrey actually credits to Ruthven—lead-heavy instead of piercing, difficult to support.

The rehearsal went on, with Ruthven’s seduction of Bridget and his court to the nervous but fascinated Malvina. In the end, as I have synopsized earlier, came his secret and miraculous revival from seeming death. Varduk delivered the final rather terrifying speech magnificently, and then abruptly doffed his Ruthven manner to smile congratulations all around.

“It’s more than a month to our opening date in July,” he said, “and yet I would be willing to present this play as a finished play, no later than this day week. Miss Holgar, may I voice my special appreciation? Mr. Connatt, your confessed fear of your own inadequacy is proven groundless. Bravo, Miss Vining—and you, Davidson.” His final tag of praise to his subordinate seemed almost grudging. “Now for the second act of the thing. No verse this time, my friends. Finish the rehearsal as well as you have begun.”

“Wait,” I said. “How about properties? I simulated the club-stroke in the first act, but this time I need a sword. For the sake of feeling the action better—”

“Yes, of course,” granted Varduk. “There’s one in the corner dressing-room.” He pointed. “Go fetch it, Davidson.”

Davidson complied. The sword was a cross-hilt affair, old but keen and bright.

“This isn’t a prop at all,” I half objected. “It’s the real thing. Won’t it be dangerous?”

“Oh, I think we can risk it,” Varduk replied carelessly. “Let’s get on with the rehearsal. A hundred years later, in the same garden. Swithin and Mary, descendants of Aubrey and Malvina, onstage.”

We continued. The opening, again with Sigrid and myself a-wooing, was lively and even brilliant. Martha Vining, in her role of the centenarian Bridget, skilfully cracked her voice and infused a witch-like quality into her telling of the Aubrey-Ruthven tale. Again the entrance of Ruthven, his suavity and apparent friendliness, his manner changing as he is revealed as the resurrected fiend of another age; finally the clash with me, as Swithin.

I spoke my line—“My ancestor killed you once, Ruthven. I can do the same today.” Then I poked at him with the sword.

Varduk smiled and interjected, “Rather a languid thrust, that, Mr. Connatt. Do you think it will seem serious from the viewpoint of our audience?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was afraid I might hurt you.”

“Fear nothing, Mr. Connatt. Take the speech and the swordplay again.”

I did so, but he laughed almost in scorn. “You still put no life into the thrust.” He spread his hands, as if to offer himself as a target. “Once more. Don’t be an old woman.”

Losing a bit of my temper, I made a genuine lunge. My right foot glided forward and my weight shifted to follow my point. But in mid-motion I knew myself for a danger-dealing fool, tried to recover, failed, and slipped.

I almost fell at full length—would have fallen had Varduk not been standing in my way. My sword-point, completely out of control, drove at the center of his breast—I felt it tear through cloth, through flesh—

A moment later his slender hands had caught my floundering body and pushed it back upon its feet. My sword, wedged in something, snatched its hilt from my hand. Sick and horrified, I saw it protruding from the midst of Varduk’s body. Behind me I heard the choked squeal of Martha Vining, and an oath from Jake Switz. I swayed, my vision seemed to swim in smoky liquid, and I suppose I was well on the way to an unmasculine swoon. But a light chuckle, in Varduk’s familiar manner, saved me from collapsing.

“That is exactly the way to do it, Mr. Connatt,” he said in a tone of well-bred applause.

He drew the steel free—I think that he had to wrench rather hard—and then stepped forward to extend the hilt.

“There’s blood on it,” I mumbled sickly.

“Oh, that?” he glanced down at the blade. “Just a deceit for the sake of realism. You arranged the false-blood device splendidly, Davidson.” He pushed the hilt into my slack grasp. “Look, the imitation gore is already evaporating.”

So it was, like dew on a hot stone. Already the blade shone bright and clean.

“Very good,” said Varduk. “Climax now. Miss Holgar, I think it is your line.”

She, too, had been horrified by the seeming catastrophe, but she came gamely up to the bit where Mary pleads for Swithin’s life, offering herself as the price. Half a dozen exchanges between Ruthven and Mary, thus:

“You give yourself up, then?”

“I do.”

“You renounce your former manners, hopes and wishes?”

“I do.”

“You will swear so, upon the book yonder?” (Here Ruthven points to a Bible, open on the garden-seat.)

“I do.” (Mary touches the Bible.)

“You submit to the powers I represent?”

“I know only the power to which I pray. ‘Our Father, which wert in heaven—’ ”

Sigrid, as I say, had done well up to now, but here she broke off. “It isn’t correct there,” she pointed out. “The prayer should read, ‘art in heaven.’ Perhaps the script was copied wrongly.”

“No,” said Martha Vining. “It’s ‘wert in heaven’ on mine.”

“And on mine,” I added.

Varduk had frowned a moment, as if perplexed, but he spoke decisively. “As a matter of fact, it’s in the original. Byron undoubtedly meant it to be so, to show Mary’s agitation.”

Sigrid had been reading ahead. “Farther down in the same prayer, it says almost the same thing—‘Thy will be done on earth as it was in heaven.’ It should be, ‘is in heaven.’ ”

I had found the same deviation in my own copy. “Byron hardly meant Mary’s agitation to extend so far,” I argued.

“Since when, Mr. Connatt,” inquired Varduk silkily, “did you become an authority on what Byron meant, here or elsewhere in his writings? You’re being, not only a critic, but a clairvoyant.”

I felt my cheeks glowing, and I met his heavy, mocking gaze as levelly as I could. “I don’t like sacrilegious mistakes,” I said, “and I don’t like being snubbed, sir.”

Davidson stepped to Varduk’s side. “You can’t talk to him like that, Connatt,” he warned me.

Davidson was a good four inches taller than I, and more muscular, but at the moment I welcomed the idea of fighting him. I moved a step forward.

“Mr. Davidson,” I said to him, “I don’t welcome dictation from you, not on anything I choose to do or say.”

Sigrid cried out in protest, and Varduk lifted up a hand. He smiled, too, in a dazzling manner.

“I think,” he said in sudden good humor, “that we are all tired and shaken. Perhaps it’s due to the unintentional realism of that incident with the sword—I saw several faces grow pale. Suppose we say that the rehearsals won’t include so dangerous-looking an attack hereafter; we’ll save the trick for the public performance itself. And we’ll stop work now; in any case, it’s supposed to be unlucky to speak the last line of a play in rehearsal. Shall we all go and get some rest?”

He turned to Sigrid and offered his arm. She took it, and they walked side by side out of the stage door and away. Martha Vining followed at their heels, while Davidson lingered to turn out the lights. Jake and I left together for our own boathouse loft. The moon was up, and I jumped when leaves shimmered in its light—I remembered Jake’s story about the amorphous lurkers in the thickets.

But nothing challenged us, and we went silently to bed, though I, at least, lay wakeful for hours.

VIII

Pursuivant Again

When finally I slept, it was to dream in strange, unrelated flashes. The clearest impression of all was that Sigrid and Judge Pursuivant came to lead me deep into the dark woods beyond the lodge. They seemed to know their way through pathless thickets, and finally beckoned me to follow into a deep, shadowed cleft between banks of earth. We descended for miles, I judged in my dream, until we came to a bare, hard floor at the bottom. Here was a wide, round hatchway of metal, like a very large sewer lid. Bidding me watch, Sigrid and the judge bent and tugged the lid up and away. Gazing down the exposed shaft, it was as if I saw the heavens beneath my feet—the fathomlessness of the night sky, like velvet all sprinkled with crumbs of star-fire. I did not know whether to be joyful or to fear; then I had awakened, and it was bright morning.

The air was warmer than it had been the day before, and I donned bathing-trunks and went downstairs, treading softly to let Jake snore blissfully on. Almost at the door of the boathouse I came face to face with Davidson, who smiled disarmingly and held out his hand. He urged me to forget the brief hostility that had come over us at rehearsal; he was quite unforced and cheerful about it, yet I surmised that Varduk had bade him make peace with me. However, I agreed that we had both been tired and upset, and we shook hands cordially.

Then I turned toward the water, and saw Sigrid lazily crawling out into the deep stretches with long, smooth strokes. I called her name, ran in waist-deep, and swam as swiftly as I could, soon catching up. She smiled in welcome and turned on her side to say good morning. In her brief bathing-suit she did not look so gaunt and fragile. Her body was no more than healthily slim, and quite firm and strong-looking.

As we swam easily, I was impelled to speak of my dream, and she smiled again.

“I think that was rather beautiful, I mean about the heavens below your feet,” she said. “Symbolism might have something to say about it. In a way the vision was prophetic—Judge Pursuivant has sent word that he will call on us.”

“Perhaps the rest was prophetic, too,” I ventured boldly. “You and I together, Sigrid—and heaven at our feet—”

“I’ve been in long enough,” she announced suddenly, “and breakfast must be ready. Come on, Gib, race me back to shore.”

She was off like a trout, and I churned after her. We finished neck and neck, separated and went away to dress. At breakfast, which Davidson prepared simply but well of porridge, toast and eggs, I did not get to sit next to Sigrid; Davidson and Jake had found places at her left and right hands. I paid what attentions I could devise to Martha Vining, but if Sigrid was piqued by my courtliness in another direction, she gave no sign.

The meal over, I returned to my room, secured my copy of Ruthven and carried it outdoors to study. I chose a sun-drenched spot near the lodge, set my back to a tree, and leafed through the play, underlining difficult passages here and there. I remembered Varduk’s announcement that we would never speak the play’s last line in rehearsal, lest bad luck fall. He was superstitious, for all his apparent wisdom and culture; yet, according to the books Judge Pursuivant had lent me, so was Lord Byron, from whom Varduk claimed descent. What was the ill-omened last line, by the way?

I turned to the last page of the script.

The final line, as typewritten by Davidson, contained only a few words. My eyes found it:

Ruthven (placing his hand on Mary’s head):

And no more than that. There was place for a speech after the stage direction, apparently the monster’s involuntary cry for blessing upon the brave girl, but Davidson had not set down such a speech.

Amazed and in some unaccountable way uneasy, I walked around the corner of the lodge to where Martha Vining, seated on the doorstep, also studied her lines. Before I had finished my first question, she nodded violently.

“It’s the same way on my script,” she informed me. “You mean, the last speech missing. I noticed last night, and mentioned it before breakfast to Miss Holgar. She has no last line, either.”

A soft chuckle drifted down upon us. Varduk had come to the open door.

“Davidson must have made a careless omission,” he said. “Of course, there is only one typescript of the play, with carbon copies. Well, if the last line is missing, isn’t it a definite sign that we should not speak it in rehearsal?”

He rested his heavy gaze upon me, then upon Martha Vining, smiled to conclude the discussion, and drew back into the hallway and beyond our sight.

Perhaps I may be excused for not feeling completely at rest on the subject.

Judge Pursuivant arrived for lunch, dressed comfortably in flannels and a tweed jacket, and his performance at table was in healthy contrast to Varduk, who, as usual, ate hardly anything. In the early afternoon I induced the judge to come for a stroll up the slope and along the main road. As soon as we were well away from the lodge, I told him of Jake’s adventure, the outcome of the sword-accident at rehearsal, and the air of mystery that deepened around the omitted final speech of the play.

“Perhaps I’m being nervous and illusion-ridden,” I began to apologize in conclusion, but he shook his great head.

“You’re being nothing of the sort, Connatt. Apparently my semi-psychic intuition was good as gold. I did perfectly right in following this drama and its company out here into the wilderness.”

“You came deliberately?” I asked, and he nodded.

“My friend’s cabin in the neighborhood was a stroke of good luck, and I more than half courted the invitation to occupy it. I’ll be frank, Connatt, and say that from the outset I have felt a definite and occult challenge from Varduk and his activities.”

He chopped at a weed with his big malacca stick, pondered a moment, then continued.

“Your Mr. Varduk is a mysterious fellow. I need not enlarge on that, though I might remind you of the excellent reason for his strange character and behavior.”

“Byron’s blood?”

“Exactly. And Byron’s curse.”

I stopped in mid-stride and turned to face the judge. He smiled somewhat apologetically.

“I know, Connatt,” he said, “that modern men and women think such things impossible. They think it equally impossible that anyone of good education and normal mind should take occultism seriously. But I disprove the latter impossibility, at least—I hold degrees from three world-famous universities, and my behavior, at least, shows that I am neither morbid nor shallow.”

“Certainly not,” I assented, thinking of his hearty appetite, his record of achievement in many fields, his manifest kindness and sincerity.

“Then consent to hear my evidence out.” He resumed his walk, and I fell into step with him. “It’s only circumstantial evidence, I fear, and as such must not be entirely conclusive. Yet here it is:

“Byron was the ideal target for a curse, not only personally but racially. His forebears occupied themselves with revolution, dueling, sacrilege and lesser sins—they were the sort who attract and merit disaster. As for his immediate parents, it would be difficult to choose a more depraved father than Captain ‘Mad Jack’ Byron, or a more unnatural mother than Catherine Gordon of Gight. Brimstone was bred into the child’s very soul by those two. Follow his career, and what is there? Pride, violence, orgy, disgrace. Over his married life hangs a shocking cloud, an unmentionable accusation—rightly or not we cannot say. As for his associates, they withered at his touch. His children, lawful and natural, died untimely and unhappy. His friends found ruin or death. Even Doctor Polidori, plagiarist of the Ruthven story, committed suicide. Byron himself, when barely past his first youth, perished alone and far from home and friends. Today his bright fame is blurred and tarnished by a wealth of legend that can be called nothing less than diabolic.”

“Yet he wasn’t all unlucky,” I sought to remind my companion. “His beauty and brilliance, his success as a poet—”

“All part of the curse. When could he be thankful for a face that drew the love of Lady Caroline Lamb and precipitated one of London’s most fearful scandals? As for his poetry, did it not mark him for envy, spite and, eventually, a concerted attack? I daresay Byron would have been happier as a plain-faced mechanic or grocer.”

I felt inclined to agree, and said as much. “If a curse exists,” I added, “would it affect Varduk as a descendant of Byron?”

“I think that it would, and that his recent actions prove at once the existence of a curse and the truth of his claim to descent. A shadow lies on that man, Connatt.”

“The rest of the similarity holds,” I responded. “The charm and the genius. I have wondered why Miss Holgar agrees to this play. It is archaic, in some degree melodramatic, and her part is by no means dominant. Yet she seems delighted with the role and the production in general.”

“I have considered the same apparent lapse of her judgment,” said Pursuivant, “and came to the conclusion that you are about to suggest—that Varduk has gained some sort of influence over Miss Holgar.”

“Perhaps, then, you feel that such an influence would be dangerous to her and to others?”

“Exactly.”

“What to do, then?”

“Do nothing, gentlemen,” said someone directly behind us.

We both whirled in sudden surprise. It was Elmo Davidson.

IX

Davidson Gives a Warning

I scowled at Davidson in surprised protest at his intrusion. Judge Pursuivant did not scowl, but I saw him lift his walking-stick with his left hand, place his right upon the curved handle, and gave it a little twist and jerk, as though preparing to draw a cork from a bottle. Davidson grinned placatingly.

“Please, gentlemen! I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, or to do anything else sneaking. It was only that I went for a walk, too, saw the pair of you ahead, and hurried to catch up. I couldn’t help but hear the final words you were saying, and I couldn’t help but warn you.”

We relaxed, but Judge Pursuivant repeated “Warn?” in a tone deeply frigid.

“May I amplify? First of all, Varduk certainly does not intend to harm either of you. Second, he isn’t the sort of man to be crossed in anything.”

“I suppose not,” I rejoined, trying to be casual. “You must be pretty sure, Davidson, of his capabilities and character.”

He nodded. “We’ve been together since college.”

Pursuivant leaned on his stick and produced his well-seasoned briar pipe. “It’s comforting to hear you say that. I mean, that Mr. Varduk was once a college boy. I was beginning to wonder if he wasn’t thousands of years old.”

Davidson shook his head slowly. “See here, why don’t we sit down on the bank and talk? Maybe I’ll tell you a story.”

“Very good,” agreed Pursuivant, and sat down. I did likewise, and we both gazed expectantly at Davidson. He remained standing, with hands in pockets, until Pursuivant had kindled his pipe and I my cigarette. Then:

“I’m not trying to frighten you, and I won’t give away any real secrets about my employer. It’s just that you may understand better after you learn how I met him.

“It was more than ten years ago. Varduk came to Revere College as a freshman when I was a junior. He was much the same then as he is now—slender, quiet, self-contained, enigmatic. I got to know him better than anyone in school, and I can’t say truly that I know him, not even now.

“Revere, in case you never heard of the place, is a small school with a big reputation for grounding its students hock-deep in the classics.”

Pursuivant nodded and emitted a cloud of smoke. “I knew your Professor Dahlberg of Revere,” he interjected. “He’s one of the great minds of the age on Greek literature and history.”

Davidson continued: “The buildings at Revere are old and, you might say, swaddled in the ivy planted by a hundred graduating classes. The traditions are consistently mellow, and none of the faculty members come in for much respect until they are past seventy. Yet the students are very much like any others, when class is over. In my day, at least, we gave more of a hoot for one touchdown than for seven thousand odes of Horace.”

He smiled a little, as though in mild relish of memories he had evoked within himself.

“The football team wasn’t very good, but it wasn’t very bad, either. It meant something to be on the first team, and I turned out to be a fairish tackle. At the start of my junior year, the year I’m talking about, a man by the name of Schaefer was captain—a good fullback though not brilliant, and the recognized leader of the campus.

“Varduk didn’t go in for athletics, or for anything else except a good stiff course of study, mostly in the humanities. He took a room at the end of the hall on the third floor of the men’s dormitory, and kept to himself. You know how a college dorm loves that, you men. Six days after the term started, the Yellow Dogs had him on their list.”

“Who were the Yellow Dogs?” I asked.

“Oh, there’s a bunch like it in every school. Spiritual descendants of the Mohocks that flourished in Queen Anne’s reign; rough and rowdy undergraduates, out for Halloween pranks every night. And any student, particularly any frosh, that stood on his dignity—” He paused and let our imagination finish the potentialities of such a situation.

“So, one noon after lunch at the training-table, Schaefer winked at me and a couple of other choice spirits. We went to our rooms and got out our favorite paddles, carved from barrel-staves and lettered over with fraternity emblems and wisecracks. Then we tramped up to the third floor and knocked loudly at Varduk’s door.

“He didn’t answer. We tried the knob. The lock was on, so Schaefer dug his big shoulder into the panel and smashed his way in.”

Davidson stopped and drew a long breath, as if with it he could win a better ability to describe the things he was telling.

“Varduk lifted those big, deep eyes of his as we appeared among the ruins of his door. No fear, not even surprise. Just a long look, traveling from one of us to another. When he brought his gaze to me, I felt as if somebody was pointing two guns at me, two guns loaded to their muzzles.”

I, listening, felt like saying I knew how he had felt, but I did not interrupt.

“He was sitting comfortably in an armchair,” went on Davidson, rocking on his feet as though nervous with the memory, “and in his slender hands he held a big dark book. His forefinger marked a place between the leaves.

“ ‘Get up, frosh,’ Schaefer said, ‘and salute your superiors.’

“Varduk did not move or speak. He looked, and Schaefer bellowed louder, against a sudden and considerable uneasiness.

“ ‘What are you reading there?’ he demanded of Varduk in his toughest voice.

“ ‘A very interesting work,’ Varduk replied gently. ‘It teaches how to rule people.’

“ ‘Uh-huh?’ Schaefer sneered at him. ‘Let’s have a look at it.’

“ ‘I doubt if you would like it,’ Varduk said, but Schaefer made a grab. The book came open in his hands. He bent, as if to study it.

“Then he took a blind, lumbering step backward. He smacked into the rest of us all bunched behind him, and without us I think he might have fallen down. I couldn’t see his face, but the back of his big bull-neck had turned as white as plaster. He made two efforts to speak before he managed it. Then all he could splutter out was ‘Wh-what—’ ”

Davidson achieved rather well the manner of a strong, simple man gone suddenly shaky with fright.

“ ‘I told you that you probably wouldn’t like it,’ Varduk said, like an adult reminding a child. Then he got up out of his armchair and took the book from Schaefer’s hands. He began to talk again. ‘Schaefer, I want to see you here in this room after you finish your football practise this afternoon.’

“Schaefer didn’t make any answer. All of us edged backward and got out of there.”

Davidson paused, so long that Pursuivant asked, “Is that all?”

“No, it isn’t. In a way, it’s just the beginning. Schaefer made an awful fool of himself five or six times on the field that day. He dropped every one of his passes from center when we ran signals, and five or six times he muffed the ball at dropkick practise. The coach told him in front of everybody that he acted like a high school yokel. When we finished and took our showers, he hung back until I came out, so as to walk to the dormitory with me. He tagged along like a frightened kid brother, and when we got to the front door he started upstairs like an old man. He wanted to turn toward his own room on the second floor; but Varduk’s voice spoke his name, and we both looked up, startled. On the stairs to the third flight stood Varduk, holding that black book open against his chest.

“He spoke to Schaefer. ‘I told you that I wanted to see you.’

“Schaefer tried to swear at him. After all, here was a frail, pale little frosh, who didn’t seem to have an ounce of muscle on his bones, giving orders to a big football husky who weighed more than two hundred pounds. But the swear words sort of strangled in his throat. Varduk laughed. Neither of you have ever heard a sound so soft or merciless.

“ ‘Perhaps you’d like me to come to your room after you,’ Varduk suggested.

“Schaefer turned and came slowly to the stairs and up them. When he got level with Varduk, I didn’t feel much like watching the rest. As I moved away toward my room, I saw Varduk slip his slender arm through Schaefer’s big, thick one and fall into step with him, just as if they were going to have the nicest schoolboy chat you can imagine.”

Davidson shuddered violently, and so, despite the warm June air, did I. Pursuivant seemed a shade less pink.

“Here, I’ve talked too much,” Davidson said, with an air of embarrassment. “Probably it’s because I’ve wanted to tell this story—over a space of years. No point in holding back the end, but I’d greatly appreciate your promise—both your promises—that you’ll not pass the tale on.”

We both gave our words, and urged him to continue. He did so.

“I had barely got to my own digs when there was a frightful row outside, shouts and scamperings and screamings; yes, screamings, of young men scared out of their wits. I jumped up and hurried downstairs and out. There lay Schaefer on the pavement in front of the dormitory. He was dead, with the brightest red blood all over him. About twenty witnesses, more or less, had seen him as he jumped out of Varduk’s window.

“The faculty and the police came, and Varduk spent hours with them, being questioned. But he told them something satisfactory, for he was let go and never charged with any responsibility.

“Late that night, as I sat alone at my desk trying to drive from my mind’s eye the bright, bright red of Schaefer’s blood, a gentle knock sounded at my door. I got up and opened. There stood Varduk, and he held in his hands that black volume. I saw the dark red edging on its pages, the color of blood three hours old.

“ ‘I wondered,’ he said in his soft voice, ‘if you’d like to see the thing in my book that made your friend Schaefer so anxious to leave my room.’

“I assured him that I did not. He smiled and came in, all uninvited.

“Then he spoke, briefly but very clearly, about certain things he hoped to do, and about how he needed a helper. He said that I might be that helper. I made no reply, but he knew that I would not refuse.

“He ordered me to kneel, and I did. Then he showed me how to put my hands together and set them between his palms. The oath I took was the medieval oath of vassalage. And I have kept my oath from that day to this.”

Davidson abruptly strode back along the way to the lodge. He stopped at half a dozen paces’ distance.

“Maybe I’d better get along,” he suggested. “You two may want to think and talk about what I have said, and my advice not to get in Varduk’s way.”

With that he resumed his departure, and went out of sight without once looking back again.

X

That Evening

Judge Pursuivant and I remained sitting on the roadside bank until Davidson had completely vanished around a tree-clustered bend of the way. Then my companion lifted a heavy walking-boot and tapped the dottle from his pipe against the thick sole.

“How did that cheerful little story impress you?” he inquired.

I shook my head dubiously. My mustache prickled on my upper lip, like the mane of a nervous dog. “If it was true,” I said slowly, “how did Davidson dare tell it?”

“Probably because he was ordered to.”

I must have stared foolishly. “You think that—”

Pursuivant nodded. “My knowledge of underworld argot is rather limited, but I believe that the correct phrase is ‘lay off.’ We’re being told to do that, and in a highly interesting manner. As to whether or not the story is true, I’m greatly inclined to believe that it is.”

I drew another cigarette from my package, and my hand trembled despite itself. “Then the man is dangerous—Varduk, I mean. What is he trying to do to Sigrid?”

“That is what perplexes me. Once, according to your little friend Jake Switz, he defended her from some mysterious but dangerous beings. His behavior argues that he isn’t the only power to consider.”

The judge held a match for my cigarette. His hand was steady, and its steadiness comforted me.

“Now then,” I said, “to prevent—whatever is being done.”

“That’s what we’d better talk about.” Pursuivant took his stick and rose to his feet. “Let’s get on with our walk, and make sure this time that nobody overhears us.”

We began to saunter, while he continued, slowly and soberly:

“You feel that it is Miss Holgar who is threatened. That’s no more than guesswork on your part, supplemented by the natural anxiety of a devoted admirer—if you’ll pardon my mentioning that—but you are probably right. Varduk seems to have exerted all his ingenuity and charm to induce her to take a part in this play, and at this place. The rest of you he had gathered more carelessly. It is reasonably safe to say that whatever happens will happen to Miss Holgar.”

“But what will happen?” I urged, feeling very depressed.

“That we do not know as yet,” I began to speak again, but he lifted a hand. “Please let me finish. Perhaps you think that we should do what we can to call off the play, get Miss Holgar out of here. But I reply, having given the matter deep thought, that such a thing is not desirable.”

“Not desirable?” I echoed, my voice rising in startled surprise. “You mean, she must stay here? In heaven’s name, why?”

“Because evil is bound to occur. To spirit her away will be only a retreat. The situation must be allowed to develop—then we can achieve victory. Why, Connatt,” he went on warmly, “can you not see that the whole atmosphere is charged with active and supernormal perils? Don’t you know that such a chance, for meeting and defeating the power of wickedness, seldom arises? What can you think of when you want to run away?”

“I’m not thinking of myself, sir,” I told him. “It’s Sigrid. Miss Holgar.”

“Handsomely put. All right, then; when you go back to the lodge, tell her what we’ve said and suggest that she leave.”

I shook my head, more hopelessly than before. “You know that she wouldn’t take me seriously.”

“Just so. Nobody will take seriously the things we are beginning to understand, you and I. We have to fight alone—but we’ll win.” He began to speak more brightly. “When is the play supposed to have its first performance?”

“Sometime after the middle of July. I’ve heard Varduk say as much several times, though he did not give the exact date.”

Pursuivant grew actually cheerful. “That means that we have three weeks or so. Something will happen around that time—presumably on opening night. If time was not an element, he would not have defended her on her first night here.”

I felt somewhat reassured, and we returned from our stroll in fairly good spirits.

Varduk again spoke cordially to Pursuivant, and invited him to stay to dinner. “I must ask that you leave shortly afterward,” he concluded the invitation. “Our rehearsals have something of secrecy about them. You won’t be offended if—”

“Of course not,” Pursuivant assured him readily, but later the judge found a moment to speak with me. “Keep your eyes open,” he said earnestly. “He feels that I, in some degree familiar with occult matters, might suspect or even discover something wrong about the play. We’ll talk later about the things you see.”

The evening meal was the more pleasant for Judge Pursuivant’s high-humored presence. He was gallant to the ladies, deferential to Varduk, and witty to all of us. Even the pale, haunted face of our producer relaxed in a smile once or twice, and when the meal was over and Pursuivant was ready to go, Varduk accompanied him to the door, speaking graciously the while.

“You will pardon me if I see you safely to the road. It is no more than evening, yet I have a feeling—”

“And I have the same feeling,” said Pursuivant, not at all heavily. “I appreciate your offer of protection.”

Varduk evidently suspected a note of mockery. He paused. “There are things, Judge Pursuivant,” he said, “against which ordinary protection would not suffice. You have borne arms, I believe, yet you know that they will not always avail.”

They had come to the head of the front stairs, leading down to the lobby of the theater. The others at table were chattering over a second cup of coffee, but I was straining my ears to hear what the judge and Varduk were saying.

“Arms? Yes, I’ve borne them,” Pursuivant admitted. “Oddly enough, I’m armed now. Should you care to see?”

He lifted his malacca walking-stick in both hands, grasping its shank and the handle. A twist and a jerk, and it came apart, revealing a few inches of metal. Pursuivant drew forth, as from a sheath, a thin, gleaming blade.

“Sword-cane!” exclaimed Varduk admiringly. He bent for a closer look.

“And a singularly interesting one,” elaborated Pursuivant. “Quite old, as you can see for yourself.”

“Ah, so it is,” agreed Varduk. “I fancy you had it put into the cane?”

“I did. Look at the inscription.”

Varduk peered. “Yes, I can make it out, though it seems worn.” He pursed his lips, then read aloud, very slowly: “Sic pereant omnes inimici tui, Domine. It sounds like Scripture.”

“That’s what it is, Mr. Varduk,” Pursuivant was saying blandly. “The King James Version has it: ‘So let all thine enemies perish, O Lord.’ It’s from Deborah’s song—fifth chapter of Judges.”

Varduk was plainly intrigued. “A warlike text, I must say. What knight of the church chose it for his battle cry?”

“Many have chosen it,” responded the judge. “Shall we go on?”

They walked down the stairs side by side, and so out of my sight and hearing.

When Varduk returned he called us at once to rehearsal. He was as alert as he had been the night before, but much harder to please. Indeed, he criticized speeches and bits of stage business that had won his high praise at the earlier rehearsal, and several times he called for repetitions and new interpretations. He also announced that at the third rehearsal, due the next day, he would take away our scripts.

“You are all accomplished actors,” he amplified. “You need nothing to refresh good memories.”

“I’d like to keep my book,” begged Martha Vining, but Varduk smiled and shook his head.

“You’ll be better without,” he said definitely.

When we approached the climactic scene, with Swithin’s attempt to kill Ruthven and Mary’s attempted sacrifice, Varduk did not insist on stage business; in fact, he asked us flatly to speak our lines without so much as moving from our places. If this was to calm us after the frightening events of the night before, it did not succeed. Everyone there remembered the accidental sword-thrust, and Varduk’s seeming invulnerability; it was as though their thoughts were doleful spoken words.

Rehearsal over—again without the final line by Ruthven—Varduk bade us a courteous good night and, as before, walked out first with Sigrid and Martha Vining. I followed with Jake, but at the threshold I touched his arm.

“Come with me,” I muttered, and turned toward the front of the lodge.

Varduk and the two women had gone out of sight around the rear of the building. Nobody challenged us as we walked silently in the direction of the road, but I had a sensation as of horrors all around me, inadequately bound back with strands that might snap at any moment.

“What’s it about, Gib?” asked Jake once, but at that moment I saw what I had somehow expected and feared to see.

A silent figure lay at the foot of the upward-sloping driveway to the road. We both ran forward, coming up on either side of that figure.

The moon showed through broken clouds. By its light we recognized Judge Pursuivant, limp and apparently lifeless. Beside him lay the empty shank of his walking-stick. His right fist still clenched around the handle, and the slender blade set therein was driven deeply into the loam.

I did not know what to do, but Jake did. He knelt, scooped the judge’s head up and set it against his knee, then slapped the flaccid cheeks with his open palm. Pursuivant’s eyelids and mustache fluttered.

Jake snorted approvingly and lifted his own crossed eyes to mine. “I guess he’s all right, Gib. Just passed out is all. Maybe better you go to Varduk and ask for some brand—”

He broke off suddenly. He was staring at something behind me.

I turned, my heart quivering inside my chest.

Shapes—monstrous, pallid, unclean shapes—were closing in upon us.

XI

Battle and Retreat

I doubt if any writer, however accomplished, has ever done full justice to the emotion of terror.

To mention the icy chill at the backbone, the sudden sinewless trembling of the knees, the withering dryness of throat and tongue, is to be commonplace; and terror is not commonplace. Perhaps to remember terror is to know again the helplessness and faintness it brings.

Therefore it must suffice to say that, as I turned and saw the closing in of those pale-glowing blots of menace, I wanted to scream, and could not; to run, and could not; to take my gaze away, and could not.

If I do not describe the oncoming creatures—if creatures indeed they were—it is because they defied clear vision then and defy clear recollection now. Something quasi-human must have hung about them, something suggestive of man’s outline and manner, as in a rough image molded by children of snow; but they were not solid like snow. They shifted and swirled, like wreaths of thick mist, without dispersing in air. They gave a dim, rotten light of their own, and they moved absolutely without sound.

“It’s them,” gulped Jake Switz beside me. He, too, was frightened, but not as frightened as I. He could speak, and move, too—he had dropped Pursuivant’s head and was rising to his feet. I could hear him suck in a lungful of air, as though to brace himself for action.

His remembered presence, perhaps the mere fact of his companionship before the unreasoned awfulness of the glow-shadowy pack that advanced to hem us in, gave me back my own power of thought and motion. It gave me, too, the impulse to arm myself. I stooped to earth, groped swiftly, found and drew forth from its bed the sword-cane of Judge Pursuivant.

The non-shapes—that paradoxical idea is the best I can give of them—drifted around me, free and weightless in the night air like luminous sea-things in still, dark water. I made a thrust at the biggest and nearest of them.

I missed. Or did I? The target was, on a sudden, there no longer. Perhaps I had pierced it, and it had burst like a flimsy bladder. Thus I argued within my desperate inner mind, even as I faced about and made a stab at another. In the same instant it had gone, too—but the throng did not seem diminished. I made a sweeping slash with my point from side to side, and the things shrank back before it, as though they dared not pass the line I drew.

“Give ’em the works, Gib!” Jake was gritting out. “They can be hurt, all right!”

I laughed, like an impudent child. I felt inadequate and disappointed, as when in dreams a terrible adversary wilts before a blow I am ashamed of.

“Come on,” I challenged the undefinable enemy, in a feeble attempt at swagger. “Let me have a real poke at—”

“Hold hard,” said a new voice. Judge Pursuivant, apparently wakened by this commotion all around him, was struggling erect. “Here, Connatt, give me my sword.” He fairly wrung it from my hand, and drove back the misty horde with great fanwise sweeps. “Drop back, now. Not toward the lodge—up the driveway to the road.”

We made the retreat somehow, and were not followed. My clothing was drenched with sweat, as though I had swum in some filthy pool. Jake, whom I remember as helping me up the slope when I might have fallen, talked incessantly without finishing a single sentence. The nearest he came to rationality was, “What did … what if … can they—”

Pursuivant, however, seemed well recovered. He kicked together some bits of kindling at the roadside. Then he asked me for a match—perhaps to make me rally my sagging senses as I explored my pockets—and a moment later he had kindled a comforting fire.

“Now,” he said, “we’re probably safe from any more attention of that bunch. And our fire can’t be seen from the lodge. Sit down and talk it over.”

Jake was mopping a face as white as tallow. His spectacles mirrored the firelight in nervous shimmers.

“I guess I didn’t dream the other night, after all,” he jabbered. “Wait till I tell Mister Varduk about this.”

“Please tell him nothing,” counseled Judge Pursuivant at once.

“Eh?” I mumbled, astonished. “When the non-shapes—”

“Varduk probably knows all about these things—more than we shall ever know,” replied the judge. “I rather think he cut short his walk across the front yards so that they would attack me. At any rate, they seemed to ooze out of the timber the moment he and I separated.”

He told us, briefly, of how the non-shapes (he liked and adopted my paradox) were upon him before he knew. Like Jake two nights before, he felt an overwhelming disgust and faintness when they touched him, began to faint. His last voluntary act was to draw the blade in his cane and drive it into the ground, as an anchor against being dragged away.

“They would never touch that point,” he said confidently. “You found that out, Connatt.”

“And I’m still amazed, more about that fact than anything else. How would such things fear, even the finest steel?”

“It isn’t steel.” Squatting close to the fire, Pursuivant again cleared the bright, sharp bodkin. “Look at it, gentlemen—silver.”

It was two feet long, or more, round instead of flat, rather like a large needle. Though the metal was bright and worn with much polishing, the inscription over which Pursuivant and Varduk had pored was plainly decipherable by the firelight. Sic pereant omnes inimici tui, Domine. … I murmured it aloud, as though it were a protective charm.

“As you may know,” elaborated Judge Pursuivant, “silver is a specific against all evil creatures.”

“That’s so,” interjected Jake. “I heard my grandfather tell a yarn about the old country, how somebody killed a witch with a silver bullet.”

“And this is an extraordinary object, even among silver swords,” Pursuivant went on. “A priest gave it to me, with his blessing, when I did a certain thing to help him and his parish against an enemy not recognized by the common law of today. He assured me that the blade was fashioned by Saint Dunstan himself.”

“A saint make a silver weapon!” I ejaculated incredulously.

Pursuivant smiled, exactly as though we had not lately feared and fought for our lives and souls. His manner was that of a kindly teacher with a dull but willing pupil.

“Saint Dunstan is not as legendary or as feeble as his name sounds. As a matter of fact, he flourished heartily in the Tenth Century—not long before the very real Norman Conquest. He was the stout son of a Saxon noble, studied magic and metalworking, and was a political power in England as well as a spiritual one.”

“Didn’t he tweak Satan’s nose?” I inquired.

“So the old poem tells, and so the famous painting illustrates,” agreed Pursuivant, his smile growing broader. “Dunstan was, in short, exactly the kind of holy man who would make a sword to serve against demons. Do you blame me for being confident in his work?”

“Look here, Judge,” said Jake, “what were those things that jumped us up?”

“That takes answering.” Pursuivant had fished a handkerchief from a side pocket and was carefully wiping the silver skewer. “In the first place, they are extraterrestrial—supernatural—and in the second, they are noisomely evil. We need no more evidence on those points. As for the rest, I have a theory of a sort, based on wide studies.”

“What is it, sir?” I seconded Jake. Once again the solid assurance of the judge was comforting me tremendously.

He pursed his lips. “I’ve given the subject plenty of thought ever since you, Connatt, told me the experience of your friend here. There are several accounts and considerations of similar phenomena. Among ancient occultists was talk of elementary spirits—things supernormal and sometimes invisible, of subhuman intelligence and personality and not to be confused with spirits of the dead. A more modern word is ‘elemental,’ used by several cults. The things are supposed to exert influences of various kinds, upon various localities and people.

“Again, we have the poltergeist, a phenomenon that is coming in for lively investigation by various psychical scholars of today. I can refer you to the definitions of Carrington, Podmore and Lewis Spence—their books are in nearly every large library—but you’ll find that the definitions and possible explanations vary. The most familiar manifestation of this strange but undeniable power is in the seeming mischief that it performs in various houses—the knocking over of furniture, the smashing of mirrors, the setting of mysterious fires—”

“I know about that thing,” said Jake excitedly. “There was a house over in Brooklyn that had mysterious fires and stuff.”

“And I’ve read Charles Fort’s books—Wild Talents and the rest,” I supplemented. “He tells about such happenings. But see here, isn’t the thing generally traced to some child who was playing tricks?”

Pursuivant, still furbishing his silver blade, shook his head. “Mr. Hereward Carrington, the head of the American Psychical Institute, has made a list of more than three hundred notable cases. Only twenty or so were proven fraudulent, and another twenty doubtful. That leaves approximately seven-eighths unexplained—unless you consider supernormal agency an explanation. It is true that children are often in the vicinity of the phenomena, and some investigators explain this by saying that the poltergeist is attracted or set in motion by some spiritual current from the growing personality of the child.”

“Where’s the child around here?” demanded Jake. “He must be a mighty bad boy. Better someone should take a stick to him.”

“There is no child,” answered the judge. “The summoning power is neither immature nor unconscious, but old, wicked and deliberate. Have you ever heard of witches’ familiars?”

“I have,” I said. “Black cats and toads, with demon spirits.”

“Yes. Also grotesque or amorphous shapes—similar, perhaps, to what we encountered tonight—or disembodied voices and hands. Now we are getting down to our own case. The non-shapes—thanks again, Connatt, for the expression—are here as part of a great evil. Perhaps they came of themselves, spiritual vultures or jackals, waiting to share in the prey. Or they may be recognized servants of a vast and dreadful activity for wrong. In any case they are here, definite and dangerous.”

Again I felt my nerve deserting me. “Judge Pursuivant,” I pleaded, “we must get Miss Holgar out of here.”

“No. You and I talked that out this afternoon. The problem cannot be solved except at its climax.”

He rose to his feet. The fire was dying.

“I suggest that you go to your quarters. Apparently you’re safe indoors, and just now the moon’s out from behind the clouds. Keep your eyes open, and stay in the clear. The things won’t venture into the moonlight unless they feel sure of you. Anyway, I think they’re waiting for something else.”

“How about you?” I asked.

“Oh, I’ll do splendidly.” He held up the sword of Saint Dunstan. “I’ll carry this naked in my hand as I go.”

We said good night all around, rather casually, like late sitters leaving their club. Pursuivant turned and walked along the road. Jake and I descended gingerly to the yard of the lodge, hurried across it, and gained our boathouse safely.

XII

Return Engagement

One of the most extraordinary features of the entire happening was that it had so little immediate consequence.

Judge Pursuivant reached his cabin safely, and came to visit us again and again, but never remained after dark. If Varduk knew of the attack by the non-shapes, and if he felt surprise or chagrin that Pursuivant had escaped, he did not betray it. By silent and common consent, Jake and I forbore to discuss the matter between ourselves, even when we knew that we were alone.

Meanwhile, the moon waned and waxed again while we rehearsed our play and between rehearsals swam, tramped and bathed in the sun. Not one of us but seemed to profit by the exercise and fresh air. Sigrid’s step grew freer, her face browner and her green-gold hair paler by contrast. I acquired some weight, but in the proper places, and felt as strong and healthy as I had been when first I went from the Broadway stage to Hollywood, eight years before. Even Jake Switz, whose natural habitat lay among theatrical offices and stage doors, became something of a hill-climber, canoeist and fisherman. Only Varduk did not tan, though he spent much time out of doors, strolling with Davidson or by himself. Despite his apparent fragility and his stiffness of gait, he was a tireless walker.

One thing Jake and I did for our protection; that was to buy, on one of our infrequent trips to the junction, an electric flashlight apiece as well as one for Sigrid. These we carried, lighted, when walking about at night, and not once in the month that followed our first encounter with the non-shapes did we have any misadventure.

The middle of July brought the full moon again, and with it the approach of our opening night.

The theatrical sections of the papers—Varduk had them delivered daily—gave us whole square yards of publicity. Jake had fabricated most of this, on his typewriter in our boathouse loft, though his most glamorous inventions included nothing of the grisly wonders we had actually experienced. Several publishers added to the general interest in the matter by sending to Varduk attractive offers for the manuscript of Ruthven, and receiving blunt refusals. One feature writer, something of a scholar of early Nineteenth Century English literature, cast a doubt upon the authenticity of the piece. In reply to this, Judge Pursuivant sent an elaboration of his earlier statement that Ruthven was undoubtedly genuine. The newspaper kindly gave this rejoinder considerable notice, illustrating it with photographs of the judge, Varduk and Sigrid.

On July 20, two days before opening, Jake went out to nail signs along the main road to guide motor parties to our theater. He was cheerfully busy most of the morning, and Sigrid deigned to let me walk with her. We did not seek the road, but turned our steps along the brink of the water. An ancient but discernible trail, made perhaps by deer, ran there.

“Happy, Sigrid?” I asked her.

“I couldn’t be otherwise,” she cried at once. “Our play is to startle the world—first here, then on Broadway—”

“Sigrid,” I said, “what is there about this play that has such a charm for you? I know that it’s a notable literary discovery, and that it’s pretty powerful stuff in spots, but in the final analysis it’s only melodrama with a clever supernatural twist. You’re not the melodramatic type.”

“Indeed?” she flung back. “Am I a type, then?”

I saw that I had been impolitic and made haste to offer apology, but she waved it aside.

“What you said might well be asked by many people. The pictures have put me into a certain narrow field, with poor Jake Switz wearing out the thesaurus to find synonyms for ‘glamorous.’ Yet, as a beginner in Sweden, I did Hedda Gabler and The Wild Duck—yes, and Bernard Shaw, too; I was the slum girl in Pygmalion. After that, a German picture, Cyrano de Bergerac, with me as Roxane. It was luck, perhaps, and a momentary wish by producers for a new young foreign face, that got me into American movies. But, have I done so poorly?”

“Sigrid, nobody ever did so nobly.”

“And at the first, did I do always the same thing? What was my first chance? The French war bride in that farce comedy. Then what? Something by Somerset Maugham, where I wore a black wig and played a savage girl of the tropics. Then what? A starring role, or rather a co-starring role—opposite you.” She gave me a smile, as though the memory were pleasant.

“Opposite me,” I repeated, and a thrill crept through me. “Lavengro, the costume piece. Our costumes, incidentally, were rather like what we will wear in the first part of Ruthven.”

“I was thinking the same thing. And speaking of melodrama, what about Lavengro? You, with romantic curly sideburns, stripped to the waist and fighting like mad with Noah Beery. Firelight gleaming on your wet skin, and me mopping your face with a sponge and telling you to use your right hand instead of your left—”

“By heaven, there have been lots of worse shows!” I cried, and we both laughed. My spirits had risen as we had strolled away from the lodge grounds, and I had quite forgotten my half-formed resolve to speak a warning.

We came to a stretch of sand, with a great half-rotted pink trunk lying across it. Here we sat, side by side, smoking and scrawling in the fine sand with twigs.

“There’s another reason why I have been happy during this month of rehearsal,” said Sigrid shyly.

“Yes?” I prompted her, and my heart began suddenly to beat swiftly.

“It’s been so nice to be near you and with you.”

I felt at once strong and shivery, rather like the adolescent hero of an old-fashioned novel. What I said, somewhat ruefully, was, “If you think so, why have you been so hard to see? This is the first time we have walked or been alone together.”

She smiled, and in her own individual way that made her cheeks crease and her eyes turn aslant. “We saw a lot of each other once, Gib. I finished up by being sorry. I don’t want to be sorry again. That’s why I’ve gone slowly.”

“See here, Sigrid,” I blurted suddenly. “I’m not going to beat around the bush, or try to lead up diplomatically or dramatically, but—oh, hang it!” Savagely I broke a twig in my hands. “I loved you once, and in spite of the fact that we quarreled and separated, I’ve never stopped. I love you right this instant—”

She caught me in strong, fierce arms, and kissed me so soundly that our teeth rang together between lips crushed open. Thus for a second of white-hot surprise; then she let go with equal suddenness. Her face had gone pale under its tan—no acting there—and her eyes were full of panicky wonder.

“I didn’t do that,” she protested slowly. She, too, was plainly stunned. “I didn’t. But—well, I did, didn’t I?”

“You certainly did. I don’t know why, and if you say so I won’t ask; but you did, and it’ll be hard to retire from the position again.”

After that, we had a lot more to say to each other. I admitted, very humbly, that I had been responsible for our estrangement five years before, and that the reason was the very unmanly one that I, losing popularity, was jealous of her rise. For her part, she confessed that not once had she forgotten me, nor given up the hope of reconciliation.

“I’m not worth it,” I assured her. “I’m a sorry failure, and we both know it.”

“Whenever I see you,” she replied irrelevantly, “bells begin to ring in my ears—loud alarm bells, as if fires had broken out all around me.”

“We’re triple idiots to think of love,” I went on. “You’re the top, and I’m the muck under the bottom.”

“You’ll be the sensation of your life when Ruthven comes to Broadway,” rejoined Sigrid confidently. “And the movie magnets will fight duels over the chance to ask for your name on a contract.”

“To hell with the show business! Let’s run away tonight and live on a farm,” I suggested.

In her genuine delight at the thought she clutched my shoulders, digging in her long, muscular fingers. “Let’s!” she almost whooped, like a little girl promised a treat. “We’ll have a garden and keep pigs—no, there’s a show.”

“And the show,” I summed up, “must go on.”

On that doleful commonplace we rose from the tree-trunk and walked back. Climbing to the road, we sought out Jake, who with a hammer and a mouthful of nails was fastening his last sign to a tree. We swore him to secrecy with terrible oaths, then told him that we intended to marry as soon as we returned to New York. He half swallowed a nail, choked dangerously, and had to be thumped on the back by both of us.

“I should live so—I knew this would happen,” he managed to gurgle at last. “Among all the men you know, Sigrid Holgar, you got to pick this schlemiel!”

We both threatened to pummel him, and he apologized profusely, mourning the while that his vow kept him from announcing our decision in all the New York papers.

“With that romance breaking now, we would have every able-bodied man, woman and child east of the Mississippi trying to get into our show,” he said earnestly. “With a club we’d have to beat them away from the ticket window. Standing-room would sell for a dollar an inch.”

“It’s a success as it is,” I comforted him. “Ruthven, I mean. The house is a sellout, Davidson says.”

That night at dinner, Sigrid sat, not at the head of the table, but on one side next to me. Once or twice we squeezed hands and Jake, noticing this, was shocked and burned his mouth with hot coffee. Varduk, too, gazed at us as though he knew our secret, and finally was impelled to quote something from Byron—a satiric couplet on love and its shortness of life. But we were too happy to take offense or even to recognize that the quotation was leveled at us.

XIII

The Black Book

Our final rehearsal, on the night of the twenty-first of July, was fairly accurate as regards the speeches and attention to cues, but it lacked fire and assurance. Varduk, however, was not disappointed.

“It has often been said, and often proven as well, that a bad last rehearsal means a splendid first performance,” he reminded us. “To bed all of you, and try to get at least nine hours of sleep.” Then he seemed to remember something. “Miss Holgar.”

“Yes?” said Sigrid.

“Come here, with me.” He led her to the exact center of the stage. “At this spot, you know, you are to stand when the final incident of the play, and our dialog together, unfolds.”

“I know,” she agreed.

“Yet—are you sure? Had we not better be sure?” Varduk turned toward the auditorium, as though to gage their position from the point of view of the audience. “Perhaps I am being too exact, yet—”

He snapped his fingers in the direction of Davidson, who seemed to have expected some sort of request signal. The big assistant reached into the pocket of his jacket and brought out a piece of white chalk.

“Thank you, Davidson.” Varduk accepted the proffered fragment. “Stand a little closer center, Miss Holgar. Yes, like that.” Kneeling, he drew with a quick sweep of his arm a small white circle around her feet.

“That,” he informed her, standing up again, “is the spot where I want you to stand, at the moment when you and I have our final conflict of words, the swearing on the Bible, and my involuntary blessing upon your head.”

Sigrid took a step backward, out of the circle. I, standing behind her, could see that she had drawn herself up in outraged protest. Varduk saw, too, and half smiled as if to disarm her. “Forgive me if I seem foolish,” he pleaded gently.

“I must say,” she pronounced in a slow, measured manner, as though she had difficulty in controlling her voice, “that I do not feel that this little diagram will help me in the least.”

Varduk let his smile grow warmer, softer. “Oh, probably it will not, Miss Holgar; but I am sure it will help me. Won’t you do as I ask?”

She could not refuse, and by the time she had returned across the stage to me she had relaxed into cheerfulness again. I escorted her to the door of her cabin, and her good night smile warmed me all the way to my own quarters.

Judge Pursuivant appeared at noon the next day, and Varduk, hailing him cordially, invited him to lunch.

“I wonder,” ventured Varduk as we all sat down together, “if you, Judge Pursuivant, would not speak a few words in our favor before the curtain tonight.”

“I?” The judge stared, then laughed. “But I’m not part of the management.”

“The management—which means myself—will be busy getting into costume for the first act. You are a scholar, a man whose recent book on Byron has attracted notice. It is fitting that you do what you can to help our opening.”

“Oh,” said Pursuivant, “if you put it like that—but what shall I tell the audience?”

“Make it as short as you like, but impressive. You might announce that all present are subpenaed as witnesses to a classic moment.”

Pursuivant smiled. “That’s rather good, Mr. Varduk, and quite true as well. Very good, count on me.”

But after lunch he drew me almost forcibly away from the others, talking affably about the merits of various wines until we were well out of earshot. Then his tone changed abruptly.

“I think we know now that the thing—whatever it is—will happen at the play, and we also know why.”

“Why, then?” I asked at once.

“I am to tell the audience that they are ‘subpenaed as witnesses.’ In other words, their attention is directed, they must be part of a certain ceremony. I, too, am needed. Varduk is making me the clerk, so to speak, of his court—or his cult. That shows that he will preside.”

“It begins to mean something,” I admitted. “Yet I am still at a loss.”

Pursuivant’s own pale lips were full of perplexity. “I wish that we could know more before the actual beginning. Yet I, who once prepared and judged legal cases, may be able to sum up in part:

“Something is to happen to Miss Holgar. The entire fabric of theatrical activity—this play, the successful effort to interest her in it, the remote theater, her particular role, everything—is to perform upon her a certain effect. That effect, we may be sure, is devastating. We may believe that a part, at least, of the success depends on the last line of the play, a mystery as yet to all of us.”

“Except to Varduk,” I reminded.

“Except to Varduk.”

But a new thought struck me, and for a moment I found it comforting.

“Wait. The ceremony, as you call it, can’t be all evil,” I said. “After all, he asks her to swear on a Bible.”

“So he does,” Pursuivant nodded. “What kind of a Bible?”

I tried to remember. “To tell the truth, I don’t know. We haven’t used props of any kind in rehearsals—not even the sword, after that first time.”

“No? Look here, that’s apt to be significant. We’ll have to look at the properties.”

We explored the auditorium and the stage with a fine show of casual interest. Davidson and Switz were putting final touches on the scenery—a dark blue backdrop for evening sky, a wall painted to resemble vine-hung granite, benches and an arbor—but no properties lay on the table backstage.

“You know this is a Friday, Gib?” demanded Jake, looking up from where he was mending the cable of a floodlight. “Bad luck, opening our play on a Friday.”

“Not a bit,” laughed Pursuivant. “What’s begun on a Friday never comes to an end. Therefore—”

“Oi!” crowed Jake. “That means we’ll have a record-breaking run, huh?” He jumped up and shook my hand violently. “You’ll be working in this show till you step on your beard.”

We wandered out again, and Sigrid joined us. She was in high spirits.

“I feel,” she said excitedly, “just as I felt on the eve of my first professional appearance. As though the world would end tonight!”

“God forbid,” I said at once, and “God forbid,” echoed Judge Pursuivant. Sigrid laughed merrily at our sudden expressions of concern.

“Oh, it won’t end that way,” she made haste to add, in the tone one reserves for children who need comfort. “I mean, the world will begin tonight, with success and happiness.”

She put out a hand, and I squeezed it tenderly. After a moment she departed to inspect her costume.

“I haven’t a maid or a dresser,” she called over her shoulder. “Everything has to be in perfect order, and I myself must see to it.”

We watched her as she hurried away, both of us sober.

“I think I know why you fret so about her safety,” Pursuivant said to me. “You felt, too, that the thing she said might be a bad omen.”

“Then may her second word be a good omen,” I returned.

“Amen to that,” he said heartily.

Dinnertime came, and Pursuivant and I made a quick meal of it. We excused ourselves before the others—Sigrid looked up in mild astonishment that I should want to leave her side—and went quickly downstairs to the stage.

On the property table lay the cudgel I was to use in the first act, the sword I was to strike with in the second, the feather duster to be wielded by Martha Vining as Bridget, a tray with a wine service to be borne by Davidson as Oscar. There was also a great book, bound in red cloth, with red edging.

“That is the Bible,” said Pursuivant at once. “I must have a look at it.”

“I still can’t see,” I muttered, half to myself, “how this sword—a good piece of steel and as sharp as a razor—failed to kill Varduk when I—”

“Never mind that sword,” interrupted Judge Pursuivant. “Look at this book, this ‘Bible’ which they’ve refused to produce up to now. I’m not surprised to find out that—well, have a look for yourself.”

On the ancient black cloth I saw rather spidery capitals, filled with red coloring matter: Grand Albert.

“I wouldn’t look inside if I were you,” warned the judge. “This is in all probability the book that Varduk owned when Davidson met him at Revere College. Remember what happened to one normal young man, ungrounded in occultism, who peeped into it.”

“What can it be?” I asked.

“A notorious gospel for witches,” Pursuivant informed me. “I’ve heard of it—Descrepe, the French occultist, edited it in 1885. Most editions are modified and harmless, but this, at first glance, appears to be the complete and infamous Eighteenth Century version.” He opened it.

The first phase of his description had stuck in my mind. “A gospel for witches; and that is the book on which Sigrid must swear an oath of renunciation at the end of the play!”

Pursuivant was scowling at the flyleaf. He groped for his pince-nez, put them on. “Look here, Connatt,” he said.

I crowded close to his elbow, and together we read what had been written long ago, in ink now faded to a dirty brown:

Geo Gordon (Biron) his book

At 1 hr. befor midnt, on 22 July, 1788 givn him. He was brot to coeven by Todlin he the saide Geo. G. to be bond to us for 150 yers. and serve for our glory he to gain his title & hav all he desirs. at end of 150 yrs. to give acctg. & not be releasd save by delivring anothr as worthie our coeven.

(Signed)

For coeven
Terragon

For Geo. Gordon (Biron)
Todlin

“And look at this, too,” commanded Judge Pursuivant. He laid his great forefinger at the bottom of the page. There, written in fresh blue ink, and in a hand somehow familiar:

This 22nd of July, 1938, I tender this book and quit this service unto Sigrid Holgar.

George Gordon, Lord Byron.

XIV

Zero Hour

Pursuivant closed the book with a loud snap, laid it down on the table, and caught me by the arm.

“Come away from here,” he said in a tense voice. “Outside, where nobody will hear.” He almost dragged me out through the stage door. “Come along—down by the water—it’s fairly open, we’ll be alone.”

When we reached the edge of the lake we faced each other. The sun was almost set. Back of us, in front of the lodge, we could hear the noise of early arrivals for the theater—perhaps the men who would have charge of automobile parking, the ushers, the cashier.

“How much of what you read was intelligible to you?” asked Pursuivant.

“I had a sense that it was rotten,” I said. “Beyond that, I’m completely at sea.”

“I’m not.” His teeth came strongly together behind the words. “There, on the flyleaf of a book sacred to witches and utterly abhorrent to honest folk, was written an instrument pledging the body and soul of a baby to a ‘coeven’—that is, a congregation of evil sorcerers—for one hundred and fifty years. George Gordon, the Lord Byron that was to be, had just completed his sixth month of life.”

“How could a baby be pledged like that?” I asked.

“By some sponsor—the one signing the name ‘Todlin.’ That was undoubtedly a coven name, such as we know all witches took. Terragon was another such cognomen. All we can say of ‘Todlin’ is that the signature is apparently a woman’s. Perhaps that of the child’s eccentric nurse, Mistress Gray—”

“This is beastly,” I interposed, my voice beginning to tremble. “Can’t we do something besides talk?”

Pursuivant clapped me strongly on the back. “Steady,” he said. “Let’s talk it out while that writing is fresh in our minds. We know, then, that the infant was pledged to an unnaturally long life of evil. Promises made were kept—he became the heir to the estates and title of his granduncle, ‘Wicked Byron,’ after his cousins died strangely. And surely he had devil-given talents and attractions.”

“Wait,” I cut in suddenly. “I’ve been thinking about that final line or so of writing, signed with Byron’s name. Surely I’ve seen the hand before.”

“You have. The same hand wrote Ruthven, and you’ve seen the manuscript.” Pursuivant drew a long breath. “Now we know how Ruthven could be written on paper only ten years old. Byron lives and signs his name today.”

I felt almost sick, and heartily helpless inside. “But Byron died in Greece,” I said, as though reciting a lesson. “His body was brought to England and buried at Hucknall Torkard, close to his ancestral home.”

“Exactly. It all fits in.” Pursuivant’s manifest apprehension was becoming modified by something of grim triumph. “Must he not have repented, tried to expiate his curse and his sins by an unselfish sacrifice for Grecian liberty? You and I have been over this ground before; we know how he suffered and labored, almost like a saint. Death would seem welcome—his bondage would end in thirty-six years instead of a hundred and fifty. What about his wish to be burned?”

“Burning would destroy his body,” I said. “No chance for it to come alive again.”

“But the body was not burned, and it has come alive again. Connatt, do you know who the living-dead Byron is?”

“Of course I do. And I also know that he intends to pass something into the hands of Sigrid.”

“He does. She is the new prospect for bondage, the ‘other as worthie.’ She is not a free agent in the matter, but neither was Byron at the age of six months.”

The sun’s lower rim had touched the lake. Pursuivant’s pink face was growing dusky, and he leaned on the walking-stick that housed a silver blade.

“Byron’s hundred and fifty years will end at eleven o’clock tonight,” he said, gazing shrewdly around for possible eavesdroppers. “Now, let me draw some parallels.”

“Varduk—we know who Varduk truly is—will, in the character of Ruthven, ask Miss Holgar, who plays Mary, a number of questions. Those questions, and her answers as set down for her to repeat, make up a pattern. Think of them, not as lines in a play, but an actual interchange between an adept of evil and a neophyte.”

“It’s true,” I agreed. “He asks her if she will ‘give herself up,’ ‘renounce former manners,’ and to swear so upon—the book we saw. She does so.”

“Then the prayer, which perplexes you by its form. The ‘wert in heaven’ bit becomes obvious now, eh? How about the angel that fell from grace and attempted to build up his own power to oppose?”

“Satan!” I almost shouted. “A prayer to the force of evil!”

“Not so loud, Connatt. And then, while Miss Holgar stands inside a circle—that, also, is part of the witch ceremony—he touches her head, and speaks words we do not know. But we can guess.”

He struck his stick hard against the sandy earth.

“What then?” I urged him on.

“It’s in an old Scottish trial of witches,” said Pursuivant. “Modern works—J. W. Wickwar’s book, and I think Margaret Alice Murray’s—quote it. The master of the coven touched the head of the neophyte and said that all beneath his hand now belonged to the powers of darkness.”

“No! No!” I cried, in a voice that wanted to break.

“No hysterics, please!” snapped Pursuivant. “Connatt, let me give you one stark thought—it will cool you, strengthen you for what you must help me achieve. Think what will follow if we let Miss Holgar take this oath, accept this initiation, however unwittingly. At once she will assume the curse that Varduk—Byron—lays down. Life after death, perhaps; the faculty of wreaking devastation at a word or touch; gifts beyond human will or comprehension, all of them a burden to her; and who can know the end?”

“There shall not be a beginning,” I vowed huskily. “I will kill Varduk—”

“Softly, softly. You know that weapons—ordinary weapons—do not even scratch him.”

The twilight was deepening into dusk, Pursuivant turned back toward the lodge, where windows had begun to glow warmly, and muffled motor-noises bespoke the parking of automobiles. There were other flecks of light, too. For myself, I felt beaten and weary, as though I had fought to the verge of losing against a stronger, wiser enemy.

“Look around you, Connatt. At the clumps of bush, the thickets. What do they hide?”

I knew what he meant. I felt, though I saw only dimly, the presence of an evil host in ambuscade all around us.

“They’re waiting to claim her, Connatt. There’s only one thing to do.”

“Then let’s do it, at once.”

“Not yet. The moment must be his moment, one hour before midnight. Escape, as I once said, will not be enough. We must conquer.”

I waited for him to instruct me.

“As you know, Connatt, I will make a speech before the curtain. After that, I’ll come backstage and stay in your dressing-room. What you must do is get the sword that you use in the second act. Bring it there and keep it there.”

“I’ve told you and told you that the sword meant nothing against him.”

“Bring it anyway,” he insisted.

I heard Sigrid’s clear voice, calling me to the stage door. Pursuivant and I shook hands quickly and warmly, like teammates just before a hard game, and we went together to the lodge.

Entering, I made my way at once to the property table. The sword still lay there, and I put out my hand for it.

“What do you want?” asked Elmo Davidson behind me.

“I thought I’d take the sword into my dressing-room.”

“It’s a prop, Connatt. Leave it right where it is.”

I turned and looked at him. “I’d rather have it with me,” I said doggedly.

“You’re being foolish,” he told me sharply, and there is hardly any doubt but that I sounded so to him. “What if I told Varduk about this?”

“Go and tell him, if you like. Tell him also that I won’t go on tonight if you’re going to order me around.” I said this as if I meant it, and he relaxed his commanding pose.

“Oh, go ahead. And for heaven’s sake calm your nerves.”

I took the weapon and bore it away. In my room I found my costume for the first act already laid out on two chairs—either Davidson or Jake had done that for me. Quickly I rubbed color into my cheeks, lined my brows and eyelids, affixed fluffy side-whiskers to my jaws. The mirror showed me a set, pale face, and I put on rather more makeup than I generally use. My hands trembled as I donned gleaming slippers of patent leather, fawn-colored trousers that strapped under the insteps, a frilled shirt and flowing necktie, a flowered waistcoat and a bottle-green frock coat with velvet facings and silver buttons. My hair was long enough to be combed into a wavy sweep back from my brow.

“Places, everybody,” the voice of Davidson was calling outside.

I emerged. Jake Switz was at my door, and he grinned his good wishes. I went quickly onstage, where Sigrid already waited. She looked ravishing in her simple yet striking gown of soft, light blue, with billows of skirt, little puffs of sleeves, a tight, low bodice. Her gleaming hair was caught back into a Grecian-looking coiffure, with a ribbon and a white flower at the side. The normal tan of her skin lay hidden beneath the pallor of her makeup.

At sight of me she smiled and put out a hand. I kissed it lightly, taking care that the red paint on my lips did not smear. She took her seat on the bench against the artificial bushes, and I, as gracefully as possible, dropped at her feet.

Applause sounded beyond the curtain, then died away. The voice of Judge Pursuivant became audible:

“Ladies and gentlemen, I have been asked by the management to speak briefly. You are seeing, for the first time before any audience, the lost play of Lord Byron, Ruthven. My presence here is not as a figure of the theater, but as a modest scholar of some persistence, whose privilege it has been to examine the manuscript and perceive its genuineness.

“Consider yourselves all subpenaed as witnesses to a classic moment.” His voice rang as he pronounced the phrase required by Varduk. “I wonder if this night will not make spectacular history for the genius who did not die in Greece a century and more ago. I say, he did not die—for when does genius die? We are here to assist at, and to share in, a performance that will bring him his proper desserts.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I feel, and perhaps you feel as well, the presence of the great poet with us in this remote hall. I wish you joy of what you shall observe. And now, have I your leave to withdraw and let the play begin?”

Another burst of applause, in the midst of which sounded three raps. Then up went the curtain, and all fell silent. I, as Aubrey, spoke the first line of the play:

“I’m no Othello, darling. …”

XV

“Whither? I Dread to Think—”

Sigrid and I struck on the instant the proper note of affectionate gayety, and I could feel in the air that peculiar audience-rhythm by which an actor knows that his effort to capture a mood is successful. For the moment it was the best of all possible worlds, to be exchanging thus the happy and brilliant lines with the woman I adored, while an intelligent and sympathetic houseful of spectators shared our happy mood.

But, if I had forgotten Varduk, he was the more imposing when he entered. His luminous pallor needed no heightening to seize the attention; his face was set off, like some gleaming white gem, by the dark coat, stock, cape, books, pantaloons. He spoke his entrance line as a king might speak in accepting the crown and homage of a nation. On the other side of the footlights the audience grew tense with heightened interest.

He overpowered us both, as I might have known he would, with his personality and his address. We might have been awkward amateurs, wilting into nothingness when a master took the stage. I was eclipsed completely, exactly as Aubrey should be at the entrance of Ruthven, and I greatly doubt if a single pair of eyes followed me at my first exit; for at the center of the stage, Varduk had begun to make love to Sigrid.

I returned to my dressing-room. Pursuivant sat astride a chair, his sturdy forearms crossed upon its back.

“How does it go?” he asked.

“Like a producer’s dream,” I replied, seizing a powder puff with which to freshen my makeup. “Except for the things we know about, I would pray for no better show.”

“I gave you a message in my speech before the curtain. Did you hear what I said? I meant, honestly, to praise Byron and at the same time to defy him. You and I, with God’s help, will give Ruthven an ending he does not expect.”

It was nearly time for me to make a new entrance, and I left the dressing-room, mystified but comforted by Pursuivant’s manner. The play went on, gathering speed and impressiveness. We were all acting inspiredly, maugre the bizarre nature of the rehearsals and other preparations, the dark atmosphere that had surrounded the piece from its first introduction to us.

The end of the act approached, and with it my exit. Sigrid and I dragged the limp Varduk to the center of the stage and retired, leaving him alone to perform the sinister resurrection scene with which the first act closes. I loitered in the wings to watch, but Jake Switz tugged at my sleeve.

“Come,” he whispered. “I want to show you something.”

We went to the stage door. Jake opened it an inch.

The space behind the lodge was full of uncertain, half-formed lights that moved and lived. For a moment we peered. Then the soft, larval radiances flowed toward us. Jake slammed the door.

“They’re waiting,” he said.

From the direction of the stage came Varduk’s final line:

“Grave, I reject thy shelter! Death, stand back!”

Then Davidson dragged down the curtain, while the house shook with applause. I turned again. Varduk, backstage, was speaking softly but clearly, urging us to hurry with our costume changes. Into my dressing-room I hastened, my feet numb and my eyes blurred.

“I’ll help you dress,” came Pursuivant’s calm voice. “Did Jake show you what waits outside?”

I nodded and licked my parched, painted lips.

“Don’t fear. Their eagerness is premature.”

He pulled off my coat and shirt. Grown calm again before his assurance, I got into my clothes for Act Two—a modern dinner suit. With alcohol I removed the clinging side-whiskers, repaired my makeup and brushed my hair into modern fashion once more. Within seconds, it seemed, Davidson was calling us to our places.

The curtain rose on Sigrid and me, as Mary and Swithin, hearing the ancestral tale of horror from Old Bridget. As before, the audience listened raptly, and as before it rose to the dramatic entrance of Varduk. He wore his first-act costume, and his manner was even more compelling. Again I felt myself thrust into the background of the drama; as for Sigrid, great actress though she is, she prospered only at his sufferance.

Off stage, on again, off once more—the play was Varduk’s, and Sigrid’s personality was being eclipsed. Yet she betrayed no anger or dislike of the situation. It was as though Varduk mastered her, even while his character of Ruthven overpowered her character of Mary. I felt utterly helpless.

In the wings I saw the climax approach. Varduk, flanked by Davidson as the obedient Oscar, was declaring Ruthven’s intention to gain revenge and love.

“Get your sword,” muttered Jake, who had taken Davidson’s place at the curtain ropes. “You’re on again in a moment.”

I ran to my dressing-room. Pursuivant opened the door, thrust something into my hand.

“It’s the silver sword,” he told me quickly. “The one from my cane. Trust in it, Connatt. Almost eleven o’clock—go, and God stiffen your arm.”

It seemed a mile from the door to the wings. I reached it just in time for my entrance cue—Sigrid’s cry of “Swithin will not allow this.”

“Let him try to prevent it,” grumbled Davidson, fierce and grizzled as the devil-converted Oscar.

“I’m here for that purpose,” I said clearly, and strode into view. The sword from Pursuivant’s cane I carried low, hoping that Varduk would not notice at once. He stood with folded arms, a mocking smile just touching his white face.

“So brave?” he chuckled. “So foolish?”

“My ancestor killed you once, Ruthven,” I said, with more meaning than I had ever employed before. “I can do so again.”

I leaped forward, past Sigrid and at him.

The smile vanished. His mouth fell open.

“Wait! That sword—”

He hurled himself, as though to snatch it from my hand. But I lifted the point and lunged, extending myself almost to the boards of the stage. As once before, I felt the flesh tear before my blade. The slender spike of metal went in, in, until the hilt thudded against his breastbone.

No sound from audience or actors, no motion. We made a tableau, myself stretched out at lunge, Varduk transfixed, the other two gazing in sudden aghast wonder.

For one long breath’s space my victim stood like a figure of black stone, with only his white face betraying anything of life and feeling. His deep eyes, gone dark as a winter night, dug themselves into mine. I felt once again the intolerable weight of his stare—yet it was not threatening, not angry even. The surprise ebbed from it, and the eyes and the sad mouth softened into a smile. Was he forgiving me? Thanking me? …

Sigrid found her voice again, and screamed tremulously. I released the cane-hilt and stepped backward, automatically. Varduk fell limply upon his face. The silver blade, standing out between his shoulders, gleamed red with blood. Next moment the red had turned dull black, as though the gore was a millennium old. Varduk’s body sagged. It shrank within its rich, gloomy garments. It crumbled.

The curtain had fallen. I had not heard its rumble of descent, nor had Sigrid, nor the stupefied Davidson. From beyond the folds came only choking silence. Then Pursuivant’s ready voice.

“Ladies and gentlemen, a sad accident has ended the play unexpectedly—tragically. Through the fault of nobody, one of the players has been fatally—”

I heard no more. Holding Sigrid in my arms I told her, briefly and brokenly, the true story of Ruthven and its author. She, weeping, gazed fearfully at the motionless black heap.

“The poor soul!” she sobbed. “The poor, poor soul!”

Jake, leaving his post by the curtain-ropes, had walked on and was leading away the stunned, stumbling Davidson.

I still held Sigrid close. To my lips, as if at the bidding of another mind and memory, came the final lines of Manfred:

“He’s gone—his soul hath ta’en its earthless flight—
Whither? I dread to think—but he is gone.”

Fearful Rock

I

The Sacrifice

Enid Mandifer tried to stand up under what she had just heard. She managed it, but her ears rang, her eyes misted. She felt as if she were drowning.

The voice of Persil Mandifer came through the fog, level and slow, with the hint of that foreign accent which nobody could identify:

“Now that you know that you are not really my daughter, perhaps you are curious as to why I adopted you.”

Curious … was that the word to use? But this man who was not her father after all, he delighted in understatements. Enid’s eyes had grown clearer now. She was able to move, to obey Persil Mandifer’s invitation to seat herself. She saw him, half sprawling in his rocking-chair against the plastered wall of the parlor, under the painting of his ancient friend Aaron Burr. Was the rumor true, she mused, that Burr had not really died, that he still lived and planned ambitiously to make himself a throne in America? But Aaron Burr would have to be an old, old man—a hundred years old, or more than a hundred.

Persil Mandifer’s own age might have been anything, but probably he was nearer seventy than fifty. Physically he was the narrowest of men, in shoulders, hips, temples and legs alike, so that he appeared distorted and compressed. White hair, like combed thistledown, fitted itself in ordered streaks to his high skull. His eyes, dull and dark as musket-balls, peered expressionlessly above the nose like a stiletto, the chin like the pointed toe of a fancy boot. The fleshlessness of his legs was accentuated by tight trousers, strapped under the insteps. At his throat sprouted a frill of lace, after a fashion twenty-five years old.

At his left, on a stool, crouched his enormous son Larue. Larue’s body was a collection of soft-looking globes and bladders—a tremendous belly, round-kneed short legs, puffy hands, a gross bald head between fat shoulders. His white linen suit was only a shade paler than his skin, and his loose, faded-pink lips moved incessantly. Once Enid had heard him talking to himself, had been close enough to distinguish the words. Over and over he had said: “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you.”

These two men had reared her from babyhood, here in this low, spacious manor of brick and timber in the Ozark country. Sixteen or eighteen years ago there had been Indians hereabouts, but they were gone, and the few settlers were on remote farms. The Mandifers dwelt alone with their slaves, who were unusually solemn and taciturn for Negroes.

Persil Mandifer was continuing: “I have brought you up as a gentleman would bring up his real daughter—for the sole and simple end of making her a good wife. That explains, my dear, the governess, the finishing-school at St. Louis, the books, the journeys we have undertaken to New Orleans and elsewhere. I regret that this distressing war between the states,” and he paused to draw from his pocket his enameled snuffbox, “should have made recent junkets impracticable. However, the time has come, and you are not to be despised. Your marriage is now to befall you.”

“Marriage,” mumbled Larue, in a voice that Enid was barely able to hear. His fingers interlaced, like fat white worms in a jumble. His eyes were for Enid, his ears for his father.

Enid saw that she must respond. She did so: “You have—chosen a husband for me?”

Persil Mandifer’s lips crawled into a smile, very wide on his narrow blade of a face, and he took a pinch of snuff. “Your husband, my dear, was chosen before ever you came into this world,” he replied. The smile grew broader, but Enid did not think it cheerful. “Does your mirror do you justice?” he teased her. “Enid, my foster-daughter, does it tell you truly that you are a beauty, with a face all lustrous and oval, eyes full of tender fire, a cascade of golden-brown curls to frame the whole?” His gaze wandered upon her body, and his eyelids drooped. “Does it convince you, Enid, that your figure combines rarely those traits of fragility and rondure that are never so desirable as when they occur together? Ah, Enid, had I myself met you, or one like you, thirty years ago—”

“Father!” growled Larue, as though at sacrilege. Persil Mandifer chuckled. His left hand, white and slender with a dark cameo upon the forefinger, extended and patted Larue’s repellent bald pate, in superior affection.

“Never fear, son,” crooned Persil Mandifer. “Enid shall go a pure bride to him who waits her.” His other hand crept into the breast of his coat and drew forth something on a chain. It looked like a crucifix.

“Tell me,” pleaded the girl, “tell me, fa—” She broke off, for she could not call him father. “What is the name of the one I am to marry?”

“His name?” said Larue, as though aghast at her ignorance.

“His name?” repeated the lean man in the rocking-chair. The crucifix-like object in his hands began to swing idly and rhythmically, while he paid out chain to make its pendulum motion wider and slower. “He has no name.”

Enid felt her lips grow cold and dry. “He has no—”

“He is the Nameless One,” said Persil Mandifer, and she could discern the capital letters in the last two words he spoke.

“Look,” said Larue, out of the corner of his weak mouth that was nearest his father. “She thinks that she is getting ready to run.”

“She will not run,” assured Persil Mandifer. “She will sit and listen, and watch what I have here in my hand.” The object on the chain seemed to be growing in size and clarity of outline. Enid felt that it might not be a crucifix, after all.

“The Nameless One is also ageless,” continued Persil Mandifer. “My dear, I dislike telling you all about him, and it is not really necessary. All you need know is that we—my fathers and I—have served him here, and in Europe, since the days when France was Gaul. Yes, and before that.”

The swinging object really was increasing in her sight. And the basic cross was no cross, but a three-armed thing like a capital T. Nor was the body-like figure spiked to it; it seemed to twine and clamber upon that T-shape, like a monkey on a bracket. Like a monkey, it was grotesque, disproportionate, a mockery. That climbing creature was made of gold, or of something gilded over. The T-shaped support was as black and bright as jet.

Enid thought that the golden creature was dull, as if tarnished, and that it appeared to move; an effect created, perhaps, by the rhythmic swinging on the chain.

“Our profits from the association have been great,” Persil Mandifer droned. “Yet we have given greatly. Four times in each hundred years must a bride be offered.”

Mist was gathering once more, in Enid’s eyes and brain, a thicker mist than the one that had come from the shock of hearing that she was an adopted orphan. Yet through it all she saw the swinging device, the monkey-like climber upon the T. And through it all she heard Mandifer’s voice:

“When my real daughter, the last female of my race, went to the Nameless One, I wondered where our next bride would come from. And so, twenty years ago, I took you from a foundling asylum at Nashville.”

It was becoming plausible to her now. There was a power to be worshipped, to be feared, to be fed with young women. She must go—no, this sort of belief was wrong. It had no element of decency in it, it was only beaten into her by the spell of the pendulum-swinging charm. Yet she had heard certain directions, orders as to what to do.

“You will act in the manner I have described, and say the things I have repeated, tonight at sundown,” Mandifer informed her, as though from a great distance. “You will surrender yourself to the Nameless One, as it was ordained when first you came into my possession.”

“No,” she tried to say, but her lips would not even stir. Something had crept into her, a will not her own, which was forcing her to accept defeat. She knew she must go—where?

“To Fearful Rock,” said the voice of Mandifer, as though he had heard and answered the question she had not spoken. “Go there, to that house where once my father lived and worshipped, that house which, upon the occasion of his rather mysterious death, I left. It is now our place of devotion and sacrifice. Go there, Enid, tonight at sundown, in the manner I have prescribed. …”

II

The Cavalry Patrol

Lieutenant Kane Lanark was one of those strange and vicious heritage-anomalies of one of the most paradoxical of wars—a war where a great Virginian was high in Northern command, and a great Pennsylvanian stubbornly defended one of the South’s principal strongholds; where the two presidents were both born in Kentucky, indeed within scant miles of each other; where father strove against son, and brother against brother, even more frequently and tragically than in all the jangly verses and fustian dramas of the day.

Lanark’s birthplace was a Maryland farm, moderately prosperous. His education had been completed at the Virginia Military Institute, where he was one of a very few who were inspired by a quiet, bearded professor of mathematics who later became the Stonewall of the Confederacy, perhaps the continent’s greatest tactician. The older Lanark was strongly for state’s rights and mildly for slavery, though he possessed no Negro chattels. Kane, the younger of two sons, had carried those same attitudes with him as much as seven miles past the Kansas border, whither he had gone in 1861 to look for employment and adventure.

At that lonely point he met with Southern guerrillas, certain loose-shirted, weapon-laden gentry whose leader, a gaunt young man with large, worried eyes, bore the craggy name of Quantrill and was to be called by a later historian the bloodiest man in American history. Young Kane Lanark, surrounded by sudden leveled guns, protested his sympathy with the South by birth, education and personal preference. Quantrill replied, rather sententiously, that while this might be true, Lanark’s horse and money-belt had a Yankee look to them, and would be taken as prisoners of war.

After the guerrillas had galloped away, with a derisive laugh hanging in the air behind them, Lanark trudged back to the border and a little settlement, where he begged a ride by freight wagon to St. Joseph, Missouri. There he enlisted with a Union cavalry regiment just then in the forming, and his starkness of manner, with evidences about him of military education and good sense, caused his fellow recruits to elect him a sergeant.

Late that year, Lanark rode with a patrol through southern Missouri, where fortune brought him and his comrades face to face with Quantrill’s guerrillas, the same that had plundered Lanark. The lieutenant in charge of the Federal cavalry set a most hysterical example for flight, and died of six Southern bullets placed accurately between his shoulder blades; but Lanark, as ranking noncommissioned officer, rallied the others, succeeded in withdrawing them in order before the superior force. As he rode last of the retreat, he had the fierce pleasure of engaging and sabering an overzealous guerrilla, who had caught up with him. The patrol rejoined its regiment with only two lost, the colonel was pleased to voice congratulations and Sergeant Lanark became Lieutenant Lanark, vice the slain officer.

In April of 1862, General Curtis, recently the victor in the desperately fought battle of Pea Ridge, showed trust and understanding when he gave Lieutenant Lanark a scouting party of twenty picked riders, with orders to seek yet another encounter with the marauding Quantrill. Few Union officers wanted anything to do with Quantrill, but Lanark, remembering his harsh treatment at those avaricious hands, yearned to kill the guerrilla chieftain with his own proper sword. On the afternoon of April fifth, beneath a sun bright but none too warm, the scouting patrol rode down a trail at the bottom of a great, trough-like valley just south of the Missouri-Arkansas border. Two pairs of men, those with the surest-footed mounts, acted as flanking parties high on the opposite slopes, and a watchful corporal by the name of Googan walked his horse well in advance of the main body. The others rode two and two, with Lanark at the head and Sergeant Jager, heavyset and morosely keen of eye, at the rear.

A photograph survives of Lieutenant Kane Lanark as he appeared that very spring—his breadth of shoulder and slimness of waist accentuated by the snug blue cavalry jacket that terminated at his sword-belt, his ruddy, beak-nosed face shaded by a wide black hat with a gold cord. He wore a mustache, trim but not gay, and his long chin alone of all his command went smooth-shaven. To these details be it added that he rode his bay gelding easily, with a light, sure hand on the reins, and that he had the air of one who knew his present business.

The valley opened at length upon a wide level platter of land among high, pine-tufted hills. The flat expanse was no more than half timbered, though clever enemies might advance unseen across it if they exercised caution and foresight enough to slip from one belt or clump of trees to the next. Almost at the center of the level, a good five miles from where Lanark now halted his command stood a single great chimney or finger of rock, its lean tip more than twice the height of the tallest tree within view.

To this geologic curiosity the eyes of Lieutenant Lanark snapped at once.

“Sergeant!” he called, and Jager sidled his horse close.

“We’ll head for that rock, and stop there,” Lanark announced. “It’s a natural watchtower, and from the top of it we can see everything, even better than we could if we rode clear across flat ground to those hills. And if Quantrill is west of us, which I’m sure he is, I’d like to see him coming a long way off, so as to know whether to fight or run.”

“I agree with you, sir,” said Jager. He peered through narrow, puffy lids at the pinnacle, and gnawed his shaggy lower lip. “I shall lift up mine eyes unto the rocks, from whence cometh my help,” he misquoted reverently. The sergeant was full of garbled Scripture, and the men called him “Bible” Jager behind that wide back of his. This did not mean that he was soft, dreamy or easily fooled; Curtis had chosen him as sagely as he had chosen Lanark.

Staying in the open as much as possible, the party advanced upon the rock. They found it standing above a soft, grassy hollow, which in turn ran eastward from the base of the rock to a considerable ravine, dark and full of timber. As they spread out to the approach, they found something else; a house stood in the hollow, shadowed by the great pinnacle.

“It looks deserted, sir,” volunteered Jager, at Lanark’s bridle-elbow. “No sign of life.”

“Perhaps,” said Lanark. “Deploy the men, and we’ll close in from all sides. Then you, with one man, enter the back door. I’ll take another and enter the front.”

“Good, sir.” The sergeant kneed his horse into a faster walk, passing from one to another of the three corporals with muttered orders. Within sixty seconds the patrol closed upon the house like a twenty-fingered hand. Lanark saw that the building had once been pretentious—two stories, stoutly made of good lumber that must have been carted from a distance, with shuttered windows and a high peaked roof. Now it was a paint-starved gray, with deep veins and traceries of dirty black upon its clapboards. He dismounted before the piazza with its four pillar-like posts, and threw his reins to a trooper.

“Suggs!” he called, and obediently his own personal orderly, a plump blond youth, dropped out of the saddle. Together they walked up on the resounding planks of the piazza. Lanark, his ungloved right hand swinging free beside his holster, knocked at the heavy front door with his left fist. There was no answer. He tried the knob, and after a moment of shoving, the hinges creaked and the door went open.

They walked into a dark front hall, then into a parlor with dust upon the rug and the fine furniture, and rectangles of pallor upon the walls where pictures had once hung for years. They could hear echoes of their every movement, as anyone will hear in a house to which he is not accustomed. Beyond the parlor, they came to an ornate chandelier with crystal pendants, and at the rear stood a sideboard of dark, hard wood. Its drawers all hung half open, as if the silver and linen had been hastily removed. Above it hung plate-racks, also empty.

Feet sounded in a room to the rear, and then Jager’s voice, asking if his lieutenant were inside. Lanark met him in the kitchen, conferred; then together they mounted the stairs in the front hall.

Several musty bedrooms, darkened by closed shutters, occupied the second floor. The beds had dirty mattresses, but no sheets or blankets.

“All clear in the house,” pronounced Lanark. “Jager, go and detail a squad to reconnoiter in that little ravine east of here—we want no rebel sharpshooters sneaking up on us from that point. Then leave a picket there, put a man on top of the rock, and guards at the front and rear of this house. And have some of the others police up the house itself. We may stay here for two days, even longer.”

The sergeant saluted, then went to bellow his orders, and troopers dashed hither and thither to obey. In a moment the sound of sweeping arose from the parlor. Lanark, to whom it suggested spring cleaning, sneezed at thought of the dust, then gave Suggs directions about the care of his bay. Unbuckling his saber, he hung it upon the saddle, but his revolver he retained. “You’re in charge, Jager,” he called, and sauntered away toward the wooded cleft.

His legs needed the exercise; he could feel them straightening by degrees after their long clamping to his saddle-flaps. He was uncomfortably dusty, too, and there must be water at the bottom of the ravine. Walking into the shade of the trees, he heard, or fancied he heard, a trickling sound. The slope was steep here, and he walked fast to maintain an easy balance upon it, for a minute and then two. There was water ahead, all right, for it gleamed through the leafage. And something else gleamed, something pink.

That pinkness was certainly flesh. His right hand dropped quickly to his revolver-butt, and he moved forward carefully. Stooping, he took advantage of the bushy cover, at the same time avoiding a touch that might snap or rustle the foliage. He could hear a voice now, soft and rhythmic. Lanark frowned. A woman’s voice? His right hand still at his weapon, his left caught and carefully drew down a spray of willow. He gazed into an open space beyond.

It was a woman, all right, within twenty yards of him. She stood ankle-deep in a swift, narrow rush of brook-water, and her fine body was nude, every graceful curve of it, with a cascade of golden-brown hair falling and floating about her shoulders. She seemed to be praying, but her eyes were not lifted. They stared at a hand-mirror, that she held up to catch the last flash of the setting sun.

III

The Image in the Cellar

Lanark, a young, serious-minded bachelor in an era when women swaddled themselves inches deep in fabric, had never seen such a sight before; and to his credit be it said that his first and strongest emotion was proper embarrassment for the girl in the stream. He had a momentary impulse to slip back and away. Then he remembered that he had ordered a patrol to explore this place; it would be here within moments.

Therefore he stepped into the open, wondering at the time, as well as later, if he did well.

“Miss,” he said gently. “Miss, you’d better put on your things. My men—”

She stared, squeaked in fear, dropped the mirror and stood motionless. Then she seemed to gather herself for flight. Lanark realized that the trees beyond her were thick and might hide enemies, that she was probably a resident of this rebel-inclined region and might be a decoy for such as himself. He whipped out his revolver, holding it at the ready but not pointing it.

“Don’t run,” he warned her sharply. “Are those your clothes beside you? Put them on at once.”

She caught up a dress of flowered calico and fairly flung it on over her head. His embarrassment subsided a little, and he came another pace or two into the open. She was pushing her feet—very small feet they were—into heelless shoes. Her hands quickly gathered up some underthings and wadded them into a bundle. She gazed at him apprehensively, questioningly. Her hastily-donned dress remained unfastened at the throat, and he could see the panicky stir of her heart in her half-bared bosom.

“I’m sorry,” he went on, “but I think you’d better come up to the house with me.”

“House?” she repeated fearfully, and her dark, wide eyes turned to look beyond him. Plainly she knew which house he meant. “You—live there?”

“I’m staying there at this time.”

“You—came for me?” Apparently she had expected someone to come.

But instead of answering, he put a question of his own. “To whom were you talking just now? I could hear you.”

“I—I said the words. The words my faith—” She broke off, wretchedly, and Lanark was forced to think how pretty she was in her confusion. “The words that Persil Mandifer told me to say.” Her eyes on his, she continued softly: “I came to meet the Nameless One. Are you the—Nameless One?”

“I am certainly not nameless,” he replied. “I am Lieutenant Lanark, of the Federal Army of the Frontier, at your service.” He bowed slightly, which made it more formal. “Now, come along with me.”

He took her by the wrist, which shook in his big left hand. Together they went back eastward through the ravine, in the direction of the house.

Before they reached it, she told him her name, and that the big natural pillar was called Fearful Rock. She also assured him that she knew nothing of Quantrill and his guerrillas; and a fourth item of news shook Lanark to his spurred heels, the first nonmilitary matter that had impressed him in more than a year.

An hour later, Lanark and Jager finished an interview with her in the parlor. They called Suggs, who conducted the young woman up to one of the bedrooms. Then lieutenant and sergeant faced each other. The light was dim, but each saw bafflement and uneasiness in the face of the other.

“Well?” challenged Lanark.

Jager produced a clasp-knife, opened it, and pared thoughtfully at a thumbnail. “I’ll take my oath,” he ventured, “that this Miss Enid Mandifer is telling the gospel truth.”

“Truth!” exploded Lanark scornfully. “Mountain-folk ignorance, I call it. Nobody believes in those devil-things these days.”

“Oh, yes, somebody does,” said Jager, mildly but definitely. “I do.” He put away his knife and fumbled within his blue army shirt. “Look here, Lieutenant.”

It was a small book he held out, little more than a pamphlet in size and thickness. On its cover of gray paper appeared the smudged woodcut of an owl against a full moon, and the title:

John George Hohman’s
Powwows
or
Long Lost Friend

“I got it when I was a young lad in Pennsylvania,” explained Jager, almost reverently. “Lots of Pennsylvania people carry this book, as I do.” He opened the little volume, and read from the back of the title page:

“ ‘Whosoever carries this book with him is safe from all his enemies, visible or invisible; and whoever has this book with him cannot die without the holy corpse of Jesus Christ, nor drown in any water nor burn up in any fire, nor can any unjust sentence be passed upon him.’ ”

Lanark put out his hand for the book, and Jager surrendered it, somewhat hesitantly. “I’ve heard of supposed witches in Pennsylvania,” said the officer. “Hexes, I believe they’re called. Is this a witch book?”

“No, sir. Nothing about black magic. See the cross on that page? It’s a protection against witches.”

“I thought that only Catholics used the cross,” said Lanark.

“No. Not only Catholics.”

“Hmm.” Lanark passed the thing back. “Superstition, I call it. Nevertheless, you speak this much truth: that girl is in earnest, she believes what she told us. Her father, or stepfather, or whoever he is, sent her up here on some ridiculous errand—perhaps a dangerous one.” He paused. “Or I may be misjudging her. It may be a clever scheme, Jager—a scheme to get a spy in among us.”

The sergeant’s big bearded head wagged negation. “No, sir. If she was telling a lie, it’d be a more believable one, wouldn’t it?” He opened his talisman book again. “If the lieutenant please, there’s a charm in here, against being shot or stabbed. It might be a good thing, seeing there’s a war going on—perhaps the lieutenant would like me to copy it out?”

“No, thanks.” Lanark drew forth his own charm against evil and nervousness, a leather case that contained cheroots. Jager, who had convictions against the use of tobacco, turned away disapprovingly as his superior bit off the end of a fragrant brown cylinder and kindled a match.

“Let me look at that what-do-you-call-it book again,” he requested, and for a second time Jager passed the little volume over, then saluted and retired.

Darkness was gathering early, what with the position of the house in the grassy hollow, and the pinnacle of Fearful Rock standing between it and the sinking sun to westward. Lanark called for Suggs to bring a candle, and, when the orderly obeyed, directed him to take some kind of supper upstairs to Enid Mandifer. Left alone, the young officer seated himself in a newly dusted armchair of massive dark wood, emitted a cloud of blue tobacco smoke, and opened the Long Lost Friend.

It had no publication date, but John George Hohman, the author, dated his preface from Berks County, Pennsylvania, on July 31, 1819. In the secondary preface filled with testimonials as to the success of Hohman’s miraculous cures, was included the pious ejaculation: “The Lord bless the beginning and the end of this little work, and be with us, that we may not misuse it, and thus commit a heavy sin!”

“Amen to that!” said Lanark to himself, quite soberly. Despite his assured remarks to Jager, he was somewhat repelled and nervous because of the things Enid Mandifer had told him.

Was there, then, potentiality for such supernatural evil in this enlightened Nineteenth Century, even in the pages of the book he held? He read further, and came upon a charm to be recited against violence and danger, perhaps the very one Jager had offered to copy for him. It began rather sonorously: “The peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with me. Oh shot, stand still! In the name of the mighty prophets Agtion and Elias, and do not kill me. …”

Lanark remembered the name of Elias from his boyhood Sunday schooling, but Agtion’s identity, as a prophet or otherwise, escaped him. He resolved to ask Jager; and, as though the thought had acted as a summons, Jager came almost running into the room.

“Lieutenant, sir! Lieutenant!” he said hoarsely.

“Yes, Sergeant Jager?” Lanark rose, stared questioningly, and held out the book. Jager took it automatically, and as automatically stowed it inside his shirt.

“I can prove, sir, that there’s a real devil here,” he mouthed unsteadily.

“What?” demanded Lanark. “Do you realize what you’re saying, man? Explain yourself.”

“Come, sir,” Jager almost pleaded, and led the way into the kitchen. “It’s down in the cellar.”

From a little heap on a table he picked up a candle, and then opened a door full of darkness.

The stairs to the cellar were shaky to Lanark’s feet, and beneath him was solid black shadow, smelling strongly of damp earth. Jager, stamping heavily ahead, looked back and upward. That broad, bearded face, that had not lost its full-blooded flush in the hottest fighting at Pea Ridge, had grown so pallid as almost to give off sickly light. Lanark began to wonder if all this theatrical approach would not make the promised devil seem ridiculous, anticlimactic—the flutter of an owl, the scamper of a rat, or something of that sort.

“You have the candle, sergeant,” he reminded, and the echo of his voice momentarily startled him. “Strike a match, will you?”

“Yes, sir.” Jager had raised a knee to tighten his stripe-sided trousers. A snapping scrape, a burst of flame, and the candle glow illuminated them both. It revealed, too, the cellar, walled with stones but floored with clay. As they finished the descent, Lanark could feel the soft grittiness of that clay under his boot-soles. All around them lay rubbish—boxes, casks, stacks of broken pots and dishes, bundles of kindling.

“Here,” Jager was saying, “here is what I found.”

He walked around the foot of the stairs. Beneath the slope of the flight lay a long, narrow case, made of plain, heavy boards. It was unpainted and appeared ancient. As Jager lowered the light in his hand, Lanark saw that the joinings were secured with huge nails, apparently forged by hand. Such nails had been used in building the older sheds on his father’s Maryland estate. Now there was a creak of wooden protest as Jager pried up the loosened lid of the coffin-like box.

Inside lay something long and ruddy. Lanark saw a head and shoulders, and started violently. Jager spoke again:

“An image, sir. A heathen image.” The light made grotesque the sergeant’s face, one heavy half fully illumined, the other secret and lost in the black shadow. “Look at it.”

Lanark, too, stooped for a closer examination. The form was of human length, or rather more; but it was not finished, was neither divided into legs below nor extended into arms at the roughly shaped shoulders. The head, too, had been molded without features, though from either side, where the ears should have been it sprouted upcurved horns like a bison’s. Lanark felt a chill creep upon him, whence he knew not.

“It’s Satan’s own image,” Jager was mouthing deeply. “ ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image—’ ”

With one foot he turned the coffin-box upon its side. Lanark took a quick stride backward, just in time to prevent the ruddy form from dropping out upon his toes. A moment later, Jager had spurned the thing. It broke, with a crashing sound like crockery, and two more trampling kicks of the sergeant’s heavy boots smashed it to bits.

“Stop!” cried Lanark, too late. “Why did you break it? I wanted to have a good look at the thing.”

“But it is not good for men to look upon the devil’s works,” responded Jager, almost pontifically.

“Don’t advise me, sergeant,” said Lanark bleakly. “Remember that I am your officer, and that I don’t need instruction as to what I may look at.” He looked down at the fragments. “Hmm, the thing was hollow, and quite brittle. It seems to have been stuffed with straw—no, excelsior. Wood shavings, anyway.” He investigated the fluffy inner mass with a toe. “Hullo, there’s something inside of the stuff.”

“I wouldn’t touch it, sir,” warned Jager, but this time it was he who spoke too late. Lanark’s boot-toe had nudged the object into plain sight, and Lanark had put down his gauntleted left hand and picked it up.

“What is this?” he asked himself aloud. “Looks rather like some sort of strongbox—foreign, I’d say, and quite cold. Come on, Jager, we’ll go upstairs.”

In the kitchen, with a strong light from several candles, they examined the find quite closely. It was a dark oblong, like a small dispatch-case or, as Lanark had commented, a strongbox. Though as hard as iron, it was not iron, nor any metal either of them had ever known.

“How does it open?” was Lanark’s next question, turning the case over in his hands. “It doesn’t seem to have hinges on it. Is this the lid—or this?”

“I couldn’t say.” Jager peered, his eyes growing narrow with perplexity. “No hinges, as the lieutenant just said.”

“None visible, nor yet a lock.” Lanark thumped the box experimentally, and proved it hollow. Then he lifted it close to his ear and shook it. There was a faint rustle, as of papers loosely rolled or folded. “Perhaps,” the officer went on, “this separate slice isn’t a lid at all. There may be a spring to press, or something that slides back and lets another plate come loose.”

But Suggs was entering from the front of the house. “Lieutenant, sir! Something’s happened to Newton—he was watching on the rock. Will the lieutenant come? And Sergeant Jager, too.”

The suggestion of duty brought back the color and self-control that Jager had lost. “What’s happened to Newton?” he demanded at once, and hurried away with Suggs.

Lanark waited in the kitchen for only a moment. He wanted to leave the box, but did not want his troopers meddling with it. He spied, beside the heavy iron stove, a fireplace, and in its side the metal door to an old brick oven. He pulled that door open, thrust the box in, closed the door again, and followed Suggs and Jager.

They had gone out upon the front porch. There, with Corporal Gray and a blank-faced trooper on guard, lay the silent form of Newton, its face covered with a newspaper.

Almost every man of the gathered patrol knew a corpse when he saw one, and it took no second glance to know that Newton was quite dead.

IV

The Mandifers

Jager, bending, lifted the newspaper and then dropped it back. He said something that, for all his religiosity, might have been an oath.

“What’s the matter, sergeant?” demanded Lanark.

Jager’s brows were clamped in a tense frown, and his beard was actually trembling. “His face, sir. It’s terrible.”

“A wound?” asked Lanark, and lifted the paper in turn. He, too, let it fall back, and his exclamation of horror and amazement was unquestionably profane.

“There ain’t no wound on him, Lieutenant Lanark,” offered Suggs, pushing his wan, plump face to the forefront of the troopers. “We heard Newton yell—heard him from the top of the rock yonder.”

All eyes turned gingerly toward the promontory.

“That’s right, sir,” added Corporal Gray. “I’d just sent Newton up, to relieve Josserand.”

“You heard him yell,” prompted Lanark. “Go on, what happened?”

“I hailed him back,” said the corporal, “but he said nothing. So I climbed up—that north side’s the easiest to climb. Newton was standing at the top, standing straight up with his carbine at the ready. He must have been dead right then.”

“You mean, he was struck somehow as you watched?”

Gray shook his head. “No, sir. I think he was dead as he stood up. He didn’t move or speak, and when I touched him he sort of coiled down—like an empty coat falling off a clothesline.” Gray’s hand made a downward-floating gesture in illustration. “When I turned him over I saw his face, all twisted and scared-looking, like—like what the lieutenant has seen. And I sung out for Suggs and McSween to come up and help me bring him down.”

Lanark gazed at Newton’s body. “He was looking which way?”

“Over yonder, eastward.” Gray pointed unsteadily. “Like it might have been beyond the draw and them trees in it.”

Lanark and Jager peered into the waning light, that was now dusk. Jager mumbled what Lanark had already been thinking—that Newton had died without wounds, at or near the moment when the horned image had been shattered upon the cellar floor.

Lanark nodded, and dismissed several vague but disturbing inspirations. “You say he died standing up, Gray. Was he leaning on his gun?”

“No, sir. He stood on his two feet, and held his carbine at the ready. Sounds impossible, a dead man standing up like that, but that’s how it was.”

“Bring his blanket and cover him up,” said Lanark. “Put a guard over him, and we’ll bury him tomorrow. Don’t let any of the men look at his face. We’ve got to give him some kind of funeral.” He turned to Jager. “Have you a prayerbook, sergeant?”

Jager had fished out the Long Lost Friend volume. He was reading something aloud, as though it were a prayer: “… and be and remain with us on the water and upon the land,” he pattered out. “May the Eternal Godhead also—”

“Stop that heathen nonsense,” Lanark almost roared. “You’re supposed to be an example to the men, sergeant. Put that book away.”

Jager obeyed, his big face reproachful. “It was a spell against evil spirits,” he explained, and for a moment Lanark wished that he had waited for the end. He shrugged and issued further orders.

“I want all the lamps lighted in the house, and perhaps a fire out here in the yard,” he told the men. “We’ll keep guard both here and in that gulley to the east. If there is a mystery, we’ll solve it.”

“Pardon me, sir,” volunteered a well-bred voice, in which one felt rather than heard the tiny touch of foreign accent. “I can solve the mystery for you, though you may not thank me.”

Two men had come into view, were drawing up beside the little knot of troopers. How had they approached? Through the patroled brush of the ravine? Around the corner of the house? Nobody had seen them coming, and Lanark, at least, started violently. He glowered at this new enigma.

The man who had spoken paused at the foot of the porch steps, so that lamplight shone upon him through the open front door. He was skeleton-gaunt, in face and body, and even his bones were small. His eyes burned forth from deep pits in his narrow, high skull, and his clothing was that of a dandy of the forties. In his twig-like fingers he clasped bunches of herbs.

His companion stood to one side in the shadow, and could be seen only as a huge coarse lump of a man.

“I am Persil Mandifer,” the thin creature introduced himself. “I came here to gather from the gardens,” and he held out his handfuls of leaves and stalks. “You, sir, you are in command of these soldiers, are you not? Then know that you are trespassing.”

“The expediencies of war,” replied Lanark easily, for he had seen Suggs and Corporal Gray bring their carbines forward in their hands. “You’ll have to forgive our intrusion.”

A scornful mouth opened in the emaciated face, and a soft, superior chuckle made itself heard. “Oh, but this is not my estate. I am allowed here, yes—but it is not mine. The real Master—” The gaunt figure shrugged, and the voice paused for a moment. The bright eyes sought Newton’s body. “From what I see and what I heard as I came up to you, there has been trouble. You have transgressed somehow, and have begun to suffer.”

“To you Southerners, all Union soldiers are trespassers and transgressors,” suggested Lanark, but the other laughed and shook his fleshless white head.

“You misunderstand, I fear. I care nothing about this war, except that I am amused to see so many people killed. I bear no part in it. Of course, when I came to pluck herbs, and saw your sentry at the top of Fearful Rock—” Persil Mandifer eyed again the corpse of Newton. “There he lies, eh? It was my privilege and power to project a vision up to him in his loneliness that, I think, put an end to his part of this puerile strife.”

Lanark’s own face grew hard. “Mr. Mandifer,” he said bleakly, “you seem to be enjoying a quiet laugh at our expense. But I should point out that we greatly outnumber you, and are armed. I’m greatly tempted to place you under arrest.”

“Then resist that temptation,” advised Mandifer urbanely. “It might be disastrous to you if we became enemies.”

“Then be kind enough to explain what you’re talking about,” commanded Lanark. Something swam into the forefront of his consciousness. “You say that your name is Mandifer. We found a girl named Enid Mandifer in the gulley yonder. She told us a very strange story. Are you her stepfather? The one who mesmerized her and—”

“She talked to you?” Mandifer’s soft voice suddenly shifted to a windy roar that broke Lanark’s questioning abruptly in two. “She came, and did not make the sacrifice of herself? She shall expiate, sir, and you with her!”

Lanark had had enough of this high-handed civilian’s airs. He made a motion with his left hand to Corporal Gray, whose carbine-barrel glinted in the light from the house as it leveled itself at Mandifer’s skull-head.

“You’re under arrest,” Lanark informed the two men.

The bigger one growled, the first sound he had made. He threw his enormous body forward in a sudden leaping stride, his gross hands extended as though to clutch Lanark. Jager, at the lieutenant’s side, quickly drew his revolver and fired from the hip. The enormous body fell, rolled over and subsided.

“You have killed my son!” shrieked Mandifer.

“Take hold of him, you two,” ordered Lanark, and Suggs and Josserand obeyed.

The gaunt form of Mandifer achieved one explosive struggle, then fell tautly motionless with the big hands of the troopers upon his elbows.

“Thanks, Jager,” continued Lanark. “That was done quickly and well. Some of you drag this body up on the porch and cover it. Gray, tumble upstairs and bring down that girl we found.”

While waiting for the corporal to return, Lanark ordered further that a bonfire be built to banish a patch of the deepening darkness. It was beginning to shoot up its bright tongues as the corporal ushered Enid Mandifer out upon the porch.

She had arranged her disordered clothing, had even contrived to put up her hair somehow, loosely but attractively. The firelight brought out a certain strength of line and angle in her face, and made her eyes shine darkly. She was manifestly frightened at the sight of her stepfather and the blanket-covered corpses to one side; but she faced determinedly a flood of half-understandable invectives from the emaciated man. She answered him, too; Lanark did not know what she meant by most of the things she said, but gathered correctly that she was refusing, finally and completely, to do something.

“Then I shall say no more,” gritted out the spidery Mandifer, and his bared teeth were of the flat, chalky white of long-dead bone. “I place this matter in the hands of the Nameless One. He will not forgive, will not forget.”

Enid moved a step toward Lanark, who put out a hand and touched her arm reassuringly. The mounting flame of the bonfire lighted up all who watched and listened—the withered, glaring mummy that was Persil Mandifer, the frightened but defiant shapeliness of Enid in her flower-patterned gown, Lanark in his sudden attitude of protection, the ring of troopers in their dusty blue blouses. With the half-lighted front of the weathered old house like a stage set behind them, and alternate red lights and sooty shadows playing over all, they might have been a tableau in some highly melodramatic opera.

“Silence,” Lanark was grating. “For the last time, Mr. Mandifer, let me remind you that I have placed you under arrest. If you don’t calm down immediately and speak only when you’re spoken to, I’ll have my men tie you flat to four stakes and put a gag in your mouth.”

Mandifer subsided at once, just as he was on the point of hurling another harsh threat at Enid.

“That’s much better,” said Lanark. “Sergeant Jager, it strikes me that we’d better get our pickets out to guard this position.”

Mandifer cleared his throat with actual diffidence. “Lieutenant Lanark—that is your name, I gather,” he said in the soft voice which he had employed when he had first appeared. “Permit me, sir, to say but two words.” He peered as though to be sure of consent. “I have it in my mind that it is too late, useless, to place any kind of guard against surprise.”

“What do you mean?” asked Lanark.

“It is all of a piece with your offending of him who owns this house and the land which encompasses it,” continued Mandifer. “I believe that a body of your enemies, mounted men of the Southern forces, are upon you. That man who died upon the brow of Fearful Rock might have seen them coming, but he was brought down sightless and voiceless, and nobody was assigned in his place.”

He spoke truth. Gray, in his agitation, had not posted a fresh sentry. Lanark drew his lips tight beneath his mustache.

“Once more you feel that it is a time to joke with us, Mr. Mandifer,” he growled. “I have already suggested gagging you and staking you out.”

“But listen,” Mandifer urged him.

Suddenly hoofs thundered, men yelled a double-noted defiance, high and savage—“Yee-hee!”

It was the rebel yell.

Quantrill’s guerrillas rode out of the dark and upon them.

V

Blood in the Night

Neither Lanark nor the others remembered that they began to fight for their lives; they only knew all at once that they were doing it. There was a prolonged harsh rattle of gunshots like a blast of hail upon hard wood; Lanark, by chance or unconscious choice, snatched at and drew his sword instead of his revolver.

A horse’s flying shoulder struck him, throwing him backward but not down. As he reeled to save his footing, he saved also his own life; for the rider, a form all cascading black beard and slouch hat, thrust a pistol almost into the lieutenant’s face and fired. The flash was blinding, the ball ripped Lanark’s cheek like a whiplash, and then the saber in his hand swung, like a scythe reaping wheat. By luck rather than design, the edge bit the guerrilla’s gun-wrist. Lanark saw the hand fly away as though on wings, its fingers still clutching the pistol, all agleam in the firelight. Blood gushed from the stump of the rider’s right arm, like water from a fountain, and Lanark felt upon himself a spatter as of hot rain. He threw himself in, clutched the man’s legs with his free arm and, as the body sagged heavily from above upon his head and shoulder, he heaved it clear out of the saddle.

The horse was plunging and whinnying, but Lanark clutched its reins and got his foot into the stirrup. The bonfire seemed to be growing strangely brighter, and the mounted guerrillas were plainly discernible, raging and trampling among his disorganized men. Corporal Gray went down, dying almost under Lanark’s feet. Amid the deafening drum-roll of shots, Sergeant Jager’s bull-like voice could be heard: “Stop, thieves and horsemen, in the name of God!” It sounded like an exorcism, as though the Confederate raiders were devils.

Lanark had managed to climb into the saddle of his captured mount. He dropped the bridle upon his pommel, reached across his belly with his left hand, and dragged free his revolver. At a little distance, beyond the tossing heads of several horses, he thought he saw the visage of Quantrill, clean-shaven and fierce. He fired at it, but he had no faith in his own left-handed snap-shooting. He felt the horse frantic and unguided, shoving and striving against another horse. Quarters were too close for a saber-stroke, and he fired again with his revolver. The guerrilla spun out of the saddle. Lanark had a glimpse he would never forget, of great bulging eyes and a sharp-pointed mustache.

Again the rebel yell, flying from mouth to bearded mouth, and then an answering shout, deeper and more sustained; some troopers had run out of the house and, standing on the porch, were firing with their carbines. It was growing lighter, with a blue light. Lanark did not understand that.

Quantrill did not understand it, either. He and Lanark had come almost within striking distance of each other, but the guerrilla chief was gazing past his enemy, in the direction of the house. His mouth was open, with strain-lines around it. His eyes glowed. He feared what he saw.

“Remember me, you thieving swine!” yelled Lanark, and tried to thrust with his saber. But Quantrill had reined back and away, not from the sword but from the light that was growing stronger and bluer. He thundered an order, something that Lanark could not catch but which the guerrillas understood and obeyed. Then Quantrill was fleeing. Some guerrillas dashed between him and Lanark. They, too, were in flight. All the guerrillas were in flight. Somebody roared in triumph and fired with a carbine—it sounded like Sergeant Jager. The battle was over, within moments of its beginning.

Lanark managed to catch his reins, in the tips of the fingers that held his revolver, and brought the horse to a standstill before it followed Quantrill’s men into the dark. One of his own party caught and held the bits, and Lanark dismounted. At last he had time to look at the house.

It was afire, every wall and sill and timber of it, burning all at once, and completely. And it burnt deep blue, as though seen through the glass of an old-fashioned bitters-bottle. It was falling to pieces with the consuming heat, and they had to draw back from it. Lanark stared around to reckon his losses.

Nearest the piazza lay three bodies, trampled and broken-looking. Some men ran in and dragged them out of danger; they were Persil Mandifer, badly battered by horses’ feet, and the two who had held him, Josserand and Lanark’s orderly, Suggs. Both the troopers had been shot through the head, probably at the first volley from the guerrillas.

Corporal Gray was stone-dead, with five or six bullets in him, and three more troopers had been killed, while four were wounded, but not critically. Jager, examining them, pronounced that they could all ride if the lieutenant wished it.

“I wish it, all right,” said Lanark ruefully. “We leave first thing in the morning. Hmm, six dead and four hurt, not counting poor Newton, who’s there in the fire. Half my command—and, the way I forgot the first principles of military vigilance, I don’t deserve as much luck as that. I think the burning house is what frightened the guerrillas. What began it?”

Nobody knew. They had all been fighting too desperately to have any idea. The three men who had been picketing the gulley, and who had dashed back to assault the guerrillas on the flank, had seen the blue flames burst out, as it were from a hundred places; that was the best view anybody had.

“All the killing wasn’t done by Quantrill,” Jager comforted his lieutenant. “Five dead guerrillas, sir—no, six. One was picked up a little way off, where he’d been dragged by his foot in the stirrup. Others got wounded, I’ll be bound. Pretty even thing, all in all.”

“And we still have one prisoner,” supplemented Corporal Googan.

He jerked his head toward Enid Mandifer, who stood unhurt, unruffled almost, gazing raptly at the great geyser of blue flame that had been the house and temple of her stepfather’s nameless deity.

It was a gray morning, and from the first streaks of it Sergeant Jager had kept the unwounded troopers busy, making a trench-like grave halfway between the spot where the house had stood and the gulley to the east. When the bodies were counted again, there were only twelve; Persil Mandifer’s was missing, and the only explanation was that it had been caught somehow in the flames. The ruins of the house, that still smoked with a choking vapor as of sulfur gas, gave up a few crisped bones that apparently had been Newton, the sentry who had died from unknown causes; but no giant skeleton was found to remind one of the passing of Persil Mandifer’s son.

“No matter,” said Lanark to Jager. “We know that they were both dead, and past our worrying about. Put the other bodies in—our men at this end, the guerrillas at the other.”

The order was carried out. Once again Lanark asked about a prayerbook. A lad by the name of Duckin said that he had owned one, but that it had been burned with the rest of his kit in the blue flame that destroyed the house.

“Then I’ll have to do it from memory,” decided Lanark.

He drew up the surviving ten men at the side of the trench. Jager took a position beside him, and, just behind the sergeant, Enid Mandifer stood.

Lanark self-consciously turned over his clutter of thoughts, searching for odds and ends of his youthful religious teachings. “ ‘Man that is born of woman hath but short time to live, and is full of misery,’ ” he managed to repeat. “ ‘He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower.’ ” As he said the words “cut down,” he remembered his saber-stroke of the night before, and how he had shorn away a man’s hand. That man, with his heavy black beard, lay in this trench before them, with the severed hand under him. Lanark was barely able to beat down a shudder. “ ‘In the midst of life,’ ” he went on, “ ‘we are in death.’ ”

There he was obliged to pause. Sergeant Jager, on inspiration, took one pace forward and threw into the trench a handful of gritty earth.

“ ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ ” remembered Lanark. “ ‘Unto Almighty God we commit these bodies’ ”—he was sure that that was a misquotation worthy of Jager himself, and made shift to finish with one more tag from his memory: “ ‘… in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life.’ ”

He faced toward the file of men. Four of them had been told to fall in under arms, and at his order they raised their carbines and fired a volley into the air. After that, the trench was filled in.

Jager then cleared his throat and began to give orders concerning horses, saddles and what possessions had been spared by the fire. Lanark walked aside, and found Enid Mandifer keeping pace with him.

“You are going back to your army?” she asked.

“Yes, at once. I was sent here to see if I could find and damage Quantrill’s band. I found him, and gave at least as good as I got.”

“Thank you,” she said, “for everything you’ve done for me.”

He smiled deprecatingly, and it hurt his bullet-burnt cheek.

“I did nothing,” he protested, and both of them realized that it was the truth. “All that has happened—it just happened.”

He drew his eyes into narrow gashes, as if brooding over the past twelve hours.

“I’m halfway inclined to believe what your stepfather said about a supernatural influence here. But what about you, Miss Mandifer?”

She tried to smile in turn, not very successfully.

“I can go back to my home. I’ll be alone there.”

“Alone?”

“I have a few servants.”

“You’ll be safe?”

“As safe as anywhere.”

He clasped his hands behind him. “I don’t know how to say it, but I have begun to feel responsible for you. I want to know that all will be well.”

“Thank you,” she said a second time. “You owe me nothing.”

“Perhaps not. We do not know each other. We have spoken together only three or four times. Yet you will be in my mind. I want to make a promise.”

“Yes?”

They had paused in their little stroll, almost beside the newly filled grave trench. Lanark was frowning, Enid Mandifer nervous and expectant.

“This war,” he said weightily, “is going to last much longer than people thought at first. We—the Union—have done pretty well in the West here, but Lee is making fools of our generals back East. We may have to fight for years, and even then we may not win.”

“I hope, Mr.—I mean, Lieutenant Lanark,” stammered the girl, “I hope that you will live safely through it.”

“I hope so, too. And if I am spared, if I am alive and well when peace comes, I swear that I shall return to this place. I shall make sure that you, too, are alive and well.”

He finished, very certain that he could not have used stiffer, more stupid words; but Enid Mandifer smiled now, radiantly and gratefully.

“I shall pray for you, Lieutenant Lanark. Now, your men are ready to leave. Go, and I shall watch.”

“No,” he demurred. “Go yourself, get away from this dreadful place.”

She bowed her head in assent, and walked quickly away. At some distance she paused, turned, and waved her hand above her head.

Lanark took off his broad, black hat and waved in answer. Then he faced about, strode smartly back into the yard beside the charred ruins. Mounting his bay gelding, he gave the order to depart.

VI

Return

It was spring again, the warm, bright spring of the year 1866, when Kane Lanark rode again into the Fearful Rock country.

His horse was a roan gray this time; the bay gelding had been shot under him, along with two other horses, during the hard-fought three days at Westport, the “Gettysburg of the West,” when a few regulars and the Kansas militia turned back General Sterling Price’s raid through Missouri. Lanark had been a captain then, and a major thereafter, leading a cavalry expedition into Kentucky. He narrowly missed being in at the finish of Quantrill, whose death by the hand of another he bitterly resented. Early in 1865 he was badly wounded in a skirmish with Confederate horsemen under General Basil Duke. Thereafter he could ride as well as ever, but when he walked he limped.

Lanark’s uniform had been replaced by a soft hat and black frock coat, his face was browner and his mustache thicker, and his cheek bore the jaggedly healed scar of the guerrilla pistol-bullet. He was richer, too; the death of his older brother, Captain Douglas Lanark of the Confederate artillery, at Chancellorsville, had left him his father’s only heir. Yet he was recognizable as the young lieutenant who had ridden into this district four years gone.

Approaching from the east instead of the north, he came upon the plain with its grass-levels, its clumps of bushes and trees, from another and lower point. Far away on the northward horizon rose a sharp little finger; that would be Fearful Rock, on top of which Trooper Newton had once died, horrified and unwounded. Now, then, which way would lie the house he sought for? He idled his roan along the trail, and encountered at last an aged, ragged Negro on a mule.

“Hello, uncle,” Lanark greeted him, and they both reined up. “Which way is the Mandifer place?”

“Mandifuh?” repeated the slow, high voice of the old man. “Mandifuh, suh, cap’n? Ah doan know no Mandifuh.”

“Nonsense, uncle,” said Lanark, but without sharpness, for he liked Negroes. “The Mandifer family has lived around here for years. Didn’t you ever know Mr. Persil Mandifer and his stepdaughter, Miss Enid?”

“Puhsil Mandifuh?” It was plain that the old fellow had heard and spoken the name before, else he would have stumbled over its unfamiliarities. “No, suh, cap’n. Ah doan nevah heah tella such gemman.”

Lanark gazed past the mule and its tattered rider. “Isn’t that a little house among those willows?”

The kinky head turned and peered. “Yes, suh, cap’n. Dat place b’long to Pahson Jaguh.”

“Who?” demanded Lanark, almost standing up in his stirrups in his sudden interest. “Did you say Jager? What kind of man is he?”

“He jes a pahson—Yankee pahson,” replied the Negro, a trifle nervous at this display of excitement. “Big man, suh, got red face. He Yankee. You ain’ no Yankee, cap’n, suh. Whaffo you want Pahson Jaguh?”

“Never mind,” said Lanark, and thrust a silver quarter into the withered brown palm. He also handed over one of his long, fragrant cheroots. “Thanks, uncle,” he added briskly, then spurred his horse and rode on past.

Reaching the patch of willows, he found that the trees formed an open curve that faced the road, and that within this curve stood a rough but snug-looking cabin, built of sawn, unpainted planks and home-split shingles. Among the brush to the rear stood a smaller shed, apparently a stable, and a pen for chickens or a pig. Lanark reined up in front, swung out of his saddle, and tethered his horse to a thorny shrub at the trailside. As he drew tight the knot of the halter-rope, the door of heavy boards opened with a creak. His old sergeant stepped into view.

Jager was a few pounds heavier, if anything, than when Lanark had last seen him. His hair was longer, and his beard had grown to the center of his broad chest. He wore blue jeans tucked into worn old cavalry boots, a collarless checked shirt fastened with big brass studs, and leather suspenders. He stared somewhat blankly as Lanark called him by name and walked up to the doorstep, favoring his injured leg.

“It’s Captain Lanark, isn’t it?” Jager hazarded. “My eyes—” He paused, fished in a hip pocket and produced steel-rimmed spectacles. When he donned them, they appeared to aid his vision. “Indeed it is Captain Lanark! Or Major Lanark—yes, you were promoted—”

“I’m Mr. Lanark now,” smiled back the visitor. “The war’s over, Jager. Only this minute did I hear of you in the country. How does it happen that you settled in this place?”

“Come in, sir.” Jager pushed the door wide open, and ushered Lanark into an unfinished front room, well lighted by windows on three sides. “It’s not a strange story,” he went on as he brought forward a well-mended wooden chair for the guest, and himself sat on a small keg. “You will remember, sir, that the land hereabouts is under a most unhallowed influence. When the war came to an end, I felt strong upon me the call to another conflict—a crusade against evil.” He turned up his eyes, as though to subpoena the powers of heaven as witnesses to his devotion. “I preach here, the gospels and the true godly life.”

“What is your denomination?” asked Lanark.

Jager coughed, as though abashed. “To my sorrow, I am ordained of no church; yet might this not be part of heaven’s plan? I may be here to lead a strong new movement against hell’s legions.”

Lanark nodded as though to agree with this surmise, and studied Jager anew. There was nothing left in manner or speech to suggest that here had been a fierce fighter and model soldier, but the old rude power was not gone. Lanark then asked about the community, and learned that there were but seven white families within a twenty-mile radius. To these Jager habitually preached of a Sunday morning, at one farm home or another, and in the afternoon he was wont to exhort the more numerous Negroes.

Lanark had by now the opening for his important question. “What about the Mandifer place? Remember the girl we met, and her stepfather?”

“Enid Mandifer!” breathed Jager huskily, and his right hand fluttered up. Lanark remembered that Jager had once assured him that not only Catholics warded off evil with the sign of the cross.

“Yes, Enid Mandifer.” Lanark leaned forward. “Long ago, Jager, I made a promise that I would come and make sure that she prospered. Just now I met an old Negro who swore that he had never heard the name.”

Jager began to talk, steadily but with a sort of breathless awe, about what went on in the Fearful Rock country. It was not merely that men died—the death of men was not sufficient to horrify folk around whom a war had raged. But corpses, when found, held grimaces that nobody cared to look upon, and no blood remained in their bodies. Cattle, too, had been slain, mangled dreadfully—perhaps by the strange, unidentifiable creatures that prowled by moonlight and chattered in voices that sounded human. One farmer of the vicinity, who had ridden with Quantrill, had twice met strollers after dusk, and had recognized them for comrades whom he knew to be dead.

“And the center of this devil’s business,” concluded Jager, “is the farm that belonged to Persil Mandifer.” He drew a deep, tired-sounding breath. “As the desert is the habitation of dragons, so is it with that farm. No trees live, and no grass. From a distance, one can see a woman. It is Enid Mandifer.”

“Where is the place?” asked Lanark directly.

Jager looked at him for long moments without answering. When he did speak, it was an effort to change the subject. “You will eat here with me at noon,” he said. “I have a Negro servant, and he is a good cook.”

“I ate a very late breakfast at a farmhouse east of here,” Lanark put him off. Then he repeated, “Where is the Mandifer place?”

“Let me speak this once,” Jager temporized. “As you have said, we are no longer at war—no longer officer and man. We are equals, and I am able to refuse to guide you.”

Lanark got up from his chair. “That is true, but you will not be acting the part of a friend.”

“I will tell you the way, on one condition.” Jager’s eyes and voice pleaded. “Say that you will return to this house for supper and a bed, and that you will be within my door by sundown.”

“All right,” said Lanark. “I agree. Now, which way does that farm lie?”

Jager led him to the door. He pointed. “This trail joins a road beyond, an old road that is seldom used. Turn north upon it, and you will come to a part which is grown up in weeds. Nobody passes that way. Follow on until you find an old house, built low, with the earth dry and bare around it. That is the dwelling-place of Enid Mandifer.”

Lanark found himself biting his lip. He started to step across the threshold, but Jager put a detaining hand on his arm. “Carry this as you go.”

He was holding out a little book with a gray paper cover. It had seen usage and trouble since last Lanark had noticed it in Jager’s hands; its back was mended with a pasted strip of dark cloth, and its edges were frayed and gnawed-looking, as though rats had been at it. But the front cover still said plainly:

John George Hohman’s
Powwows
Or
Long Lost Friend

“Carry this,” said Jager again, and then quoted glibly: “ ‘Whoever carries this book with him is safe from all his enemies, visible or invisible; and whoever has this book with him cannot die without the holy corpse of Jesus Christ, nor drown in any water, nor burn up in any fire, nor can any unjust sentence be passed upon him.’ ”

Lanark grinned in spite of himself and his new concern. “Is this the kind of a protection that a minister of God should offer me?” he inquired, half jokingly.

“I have told you long ago that the Long Lost Friend is a good book, and a blessed one.” Jager thrust it into Lanark’s right-hand coat pocket. His guest let it remain, and held out his own hand in friendly termination of the visit.

“Goodbye,” said Lanark. “I’ll come back before sundown, if that will please you.”

He limped out to his horse, untied it and mounted. Then, following Jager’s instructions, he rode forward until he reached the old road, turned north and proceeded past the point where weeds had covered the unused surface. Before the sun had fallen far in the sky, he was come to his destination.

It was a squat, spacious house, the bricks of its trimming weathered and the dark brown paint of its timbers beginning to crack. Behind it stood unrepaired stables, seemingly empty. In the yard stood what had been wide-branched trees, now leafless and lean as skeleton paws held up to a relentless heaven. And there was no grass. The earth was utterly sterile and hard, as though rain had not fallen since the beginning of time.

Enid Mandifer had been watching him from the open door. When she saw that his eyes had found her, she called him by name.

VII

The Rock Again

Then there was silence. Lanark sat his tired roan and gazed at Enid, rather hungrily, but only a segment of his attention was for her. The silence crowded in upon him. His unconscious awareness grew conscious—conscious of that blunt, pure absence of sound. There was no twitter of birds, no hum of insects. Not a breath of wind stirred in the leafless branches of the trees. Not even echoes came from afar. The air was dead, as water is dead in a still, stale pond.

He dismounted then, and the creak of his saddle and the scrape of his boot-sole upon the bald earth came sharp and shocking to his quiet-filled ears. A hitching-rail stood there, old-seeming to be in so new a country as this. Lanark tethered his horse, pausing to touch its nose reassuringly—it, too, felt uneasy in the thick silence. Then he limped up a gravel-faced path and stepped upon a porch that rang to his feet like a great drum.

Enid Mandifer came through the door and closed it behind her. Plainly she did not want him to come inside. She was dressed in brown alpaca, high-necked, long-sleeved, tight above the waist and voluminous below. Otherwise she looked exactly as she had looked when she bade him goodbye beside the ravine, even to the strained, sleepless look that made sorrowful her fine oval face.

“Here I am,” said Lanark. “I promised that I’d come, you remember.”

She was gazing into his eyes, as though she hoped to discover something there. “You came,” she replied, “because you could not rest in another part of the country.”

“That’s right,” he nodded, and smiled, but she did not smile back.

“We are doomed, all of us,” she went on, in a low voice. “Mr. Jager—the big man who was one of your soldiers—”

“I know. He lives not far from here.”

“Yes. He, too, had to return. And I live—here.” She lifted her hands a trifle, in hopeless inclusion of the dreary scene. “I wonder why I do not run away, or why, remaining, I do not go mad. But I do neither.”

“Tell me,” he urged, and touched her elbow. She let him take her arm and lead her from the porch into the yard that was like a surface of tile. The spring sun comforted them, and he knew that it had been cold, so near to the closed front door of Persil Mandifer’s old house.

She moved with him to a little rustic bench under one of the dead trees. Still holding her by the arm, he could feel at the tips of his fingers the shock of her footfalls, as though she trod stiffly. She, in turn, quite evidently was aware of his limp, and felt distress; but, tactfully, she did not inquire about it. When they sat down together, she spoke.

“When I came home that day,” she began, “I made a hunt through all of my stepfather’s desks and cupboards. I found many papers, but nothing that told me of the things that so shocked us both. I did find money, a small chest filled with French and American gold coins. In the evening I called the slaves together and told them that their master and his son were dead.

“Next morning, when I wakened, I found that every slave had run off, except one old woman. She, nearly a hundred years old and very feeble, told me that fear had come to them in the night, and that they had run like rabbits. With them had gone the horses, and all but one cow.”

“They deserted you!” cried Lanark hotly.

“If they truly felt the fear that came here to make its dwelling-place!” Enid Mandifer smiled sadly, as if in forgiveness of the fugitives. “But to resume; the old aunty and I made out here somehow. The war went on, but it seemed far away; and indeed it was far away. We watched the grass die before June, the leaves fall, the beauty of this place vanish.”

“I am wondering about that death of grass and leaves,” put in Lanark. “You connect it, somehow, with the unholiness at Fearful Rock; yet things grow there.”

“Nobody is being punished there,” she reminded succinctly. “Well, we had the chickens and the cow, but no crops would grow. If they had, we needed hands to farm them. Last winter aunty died, too. I buried her myself, in the back yard.”

“With nobody to help you?”

“I found out that nobody cared or dared to help.” Enid said that very slowly, and did not elaborate upon it. “One Negro, who lives down the road a mile, has had some mercy. When I need anything, I carry one of my gold pieces to him. He buys for me, and in a day or so I seek him out and get whatever it is. He keeps the change for his trouble.”

Lanark, who had thought it cold upon the porch of the house, now mopped his brow as though it were a day in August. “You must leave here,” he said.

“I have no place to go,” she replied, “and if I had I would not dare.”

“You would not dare?” he echoed uncomprehendingly.

“I must tell you something else. It is that my stepfather and Larue—his son—are still here.”

“What do you mean? They were killed,” Lanark protested. “I saw them fall. I myself examined their bodies.”

“They were killed, yes. But they are here, perhaps within earshot.”

It was his turn to gaze searchingly into her eyes. He looked for madness, but he found none. She was apparently sane and truthful.

“I do not see them,” she was saying, “or, at most, I see only their sliding shadows in the evening. But I know of them, just around a corner or behind a chair. Have you never known and recognized someone just behind you, before you looked? Sometimes they sneer or smile. Have you,” she asked, “ever felt someone smiling at you, even though you could not see him?”

Lanark knew what she meant. “But stop and think,” he urged, trying to hearten her, “that nothing has happened to you—nothing too dreadful—although so much was promised when you failed to go through with that ceremony.”

She smiled, very thinly. “You think that nothing has happened to me? You do not know the curse of living here, alone and haunted. You do not understand the sense I have of something tightening and thickening about me; tightening and thickening inside of me, too.” Her hand touched her breast, and trembled. “I have said that I have not gone mad. That does not mean that I shall never go mad.”

“Do not be resigned to any such idea,” said Lanark, almost roughly, so earnest was he in trying to win her from the thought.

“Madness may come—in the good time of those who may wish it. My mind will die. And things will feed upon it, as buzzards would feed upon my dead body.”

Her thin smile faded away. Lanark felt his throat growing as dry as lime, and cleared it noisily. Silence was still dense around them. He asked her, quite formally, what she found to do.

“My stepfather had many books, most of them old,” was her answer. “At night I light one lamp—I must husband my oil—and sit well within its circle of light. Nothing ever comes into that circle. And I read books. Every night I read also a chapter from a Bible that belonged to my old aunty. When I sleep, I hold that Bible against my heart.”

He rose nervously, and she rose with him. “Must you go so soon?” she asked, like a courteous hostess.

Lanark bit his mustache. “Enid Mandifer, come out of here with me.”

“I can’t.”

“You can. You shall. My horse will carry both of us.”

She shook her head, and the smile was back, sad and tender this time. “Perhaps you cannot understand, and I know that I cannot tell you. But if I stay here, the evil stays here with me. If I go, it will follow and infect the world. Go away alone.”

She meant it, and he did not know what to say or do.

“I shall go,” he agreed finally, with an air of bafflement, “but I shall be back.”

Suddenly he kissed her. Then he turned and limped rapidly away, raging at the feeling of defeat that had him by the back of the neck. Then, as he reached his horse he found himself glad to be leaving the spot, even though Enid Mandifer remained behind, alone. He cursed with a vehemence that made the roan flinch, untied the halter and mounted. Away he rode, to the magnified clatter of hoofs. He looked back, not once but several times. Each time he saw Enid Mandifer, smaller and smaller, standing beside the bench under the naked tree. She was gazing, not along the road after him, but at the spot where he had mounted his horse. It was as though he had vanished from her sight at that point.

Lanark damned himself as one who retreated before an enemy, but he felt that it was not as simple as that. Helplessness, not fear, had routed him. He was leaving Enid Mandifer, but again he promised in his heart to return.

Somewhere along the weed-teemed road, the silence fell from him like a heavy garment slipping away, and the world hummed and sighed again.

After some time he drew rein and fumbled in his saddlebag. He had lied to Jager about his late breakfast, and now he was grown hungry. His fingers touched and drew out two hardtacks—they were plentiful and cheap, so recently was the war finished and the army demobilized—and a bit of raw bacon. He sandwiched the streaky smoked flesh between the big square crackers and ate without dismounting. Often, he considered, he had been content with worse fare. Then his thoughts went to the place he had quitted, the girl he had left there. Finally he skimmed the horizon with his eye.

To north and east he saw the spire of Fearful Rock, like a dark threatening finger lifted against him. The challenge of it was too much to ignore.

He turned his horse off the road and headed in that direction. It was a longer journey than he had thought, perhaps because he had to ride slowly through some dark swamp-ground with a smell of rotten grass about it. When he came near enough, he slanted his course to the east, and so came to the point from which he first approached the rock and the house that had then stood in its shadow.

A crow flapped overhead, cawing lonesomely. Lanark’s horse seemed to falter in its stride, as though it had seen a snake on the path, and he had to spur it along toward its destination. He could make out the inequalities of the rock, as clearly as though they had been sketched in with a pen, and the new spring greenery of the brush and trees in the gulley beyond to the westward; but the tumbledown ruins of the house were somehow blurred, as though a gray mist or cloud hung there.

Lanark wished that his old command rode with him, at least that he had coaxed Jager along; but he was close to the spot now, and would go in, however uneasily, for a closer look.

The roan stopped suddenly, and Lanark’s spur made it sidle without advancing. He scolded it in an undertone, slid out of the saddle and threaded his left arm through the reins. Pulling the beast along, he limped toward the spot where the house had once stood.

The sun seemed to be going down.

VIII

The Grapple by the Grave

Lanark stumped for a furlong or more, to the yard of the old house, and the horse followed unwillingly—so unwillingly that had there been a tree or a stump at hand, Lanark would have tethered and left it. When he paused at last, under the lee of the great natural obelisk that was Fearful Rock, the twilight was upon him. Yet he could see pretty plainly the collapsed, blackened ruins of the dwelling that four years gone had burned before his eyes in devil-blue flame.

He came close to the brink of the foundation-hollow, and gazed narrowly into it. Part of the chimney still stood, broken off at about a level with the surface of the ground, the rubbish that had been its upper part lying in jagged heaps about its base. Chill seemed to rise from that littered depression, something like the chill he had guessed at rather than felt when he had faced Enid Mandifer upon her porch. The chill came slowly, almost stealthily, about his legs and thighs, creeping snakelike under his clothing to tingle the skin upon his belly. He shuddered despite himself, and the roan nuzzled his shoulder in sympathy. Lanark lifted a hand and stroked the beast’s cheek, then moved back from where the house had stood.

He gazed westward, in the direction of the gulley. There, midway between the foundation-hollow and the natural one, was a much smaller opening in the earth, a pit filled with shadow. He remembered ordering a grave dug there, a grave for twelve men. Well, it seemed to be open now, or partially open.

He plodded toward it, reached it and gazed down in the fading light. He judged that the dead of his own command still lay where their comrades had put them, in a close row of six toward the east. It was the westward end of the trench that had been dug up, the place where the guerrillas had been laid. Perhaps the burial had been spied upon, and the Southerners had returned to recover their fallen friends.

Yet there was something below there, something pallid and flabby-looking. Lanark had come to make sure of things, and he stooped, then climbed down, favoring his old wound. It was darker in the ditch than above; yet he judged by the looseness of earth under his feet that in one spot, at least, there had been fresh digging—or, perhaps, some other person walking and examining. And the pallid patch was in reality two pallid patches, like discarded cloaks or jackets. Still holding the end of his horse’s bridle, he put down his free hand to investigate.

Human hair tickled his fingers, and he snatched them back with an exclamation. Then he dug in his pocket, brought out a match, and snapped it aglow on the edge of his thumbnail.

He gazed downward for a full second before he dropped the light. It went out before it touched the bottom of the hole. But Lanark had seen enough.

Two human skins lay there—white, empty human skins. The legs of them sprawled like discarded court stockings, the hands of them like forgotten gauntlets. And tousled hair covered the collapsed heads of them. …

He felt lightheaded and sick. Frantically he struggled up out of that grave, and barely had he come to his knees on the ground above, when his horse snorted and jerked its bridle free from his grasp. Lanark sprang up, tingling all over. Across the trench, black and broad, stood a human—or semi-human—figure.

Lanark felt a certain draining cold at cheek and brow. Yet his voice was steady as he spoke, challengingly:

“What do you want?”

The creature opposite stooped, then bent its thick legs. It was going to jump across the ditch. Lanark took a quick backward step toward his horse—an old Colt’s revolver was tucked into his right saddlebag.

But the sudden move on his part was too much for the jangled nerves of the beast. It whickered, squealed, and jerked around. A moment later it bolted away toward the east.

At the same time, the form on the other side of the open grave lunged forward, cleared the space, and came at Lanark.

But it was attacking one who had been in close fights before, and emerged the victor. Lanark, though partially a cripple, had lost nothing of a cavalryman’s toughness and resolution. He sprang backward, let his assailant’s charge slow before it reached him, then lashed out with his left fist. His gloved knuckles touched soft flesh at what seemed to be the side of the face, flesh that gave under them. Lanark brought over his right, missed with it, and fell violently against the body of the other. For a moment he smelled corruption, and then found his feet and retreated again.

The black shape drew itself stoopingly down, as though to muster and concentrate its volume of vigor. It launched itself at Lanark’s legs, with two arms extended. The veteran tried to dodge again, this time sidewise, but his lameness made him slow. Hands reached and fastened upon him, one clutching his thigh, the other clawing at the left-hand pocket of his coat.

But in the moment of capture, the foul-smelling thing seemed to shudder and snatch itself away, as though the touch of Lanark had burned it. A moan came from somewhere in its direction. The crouched body straightened, the arms lifted in cringing protection of the face. Lanark, mystified but desperately glad, himself advanced to the attack. As he came close he threw his weight. It bowled the other backward and over, and he fell hard upon it. His own hands, sinewy and sure, groped quickly upon dank, sticky-seeming garments, found a rumpled collar and then a throat.

That throat appeared to be muddy, or at any rate slippery and foul. With an effort Lanark sank his fingertips into it, throttling grimly and with honest intention to kill. There was no resistance, only a quivering of the body under his knee. The arms that screened the face fell quivering away to either side. At that moment a bright moon shimmered from behind a passing veil of cloud. Lanark gazed down into the face of his enemy.

A puffy, livid, filth-clotted face—but he knew it. Those spiked mustaches, those bulging eyes, the shape, contour and complexion. …

“You’re one of Quantrill’s—” accused Lanark between clenched teeth. Then his voice blocked itself, and his hands jerked away from their strangle hold. His mouth gaped open.

“I killed you once!” he cried.

Between him and the body he had pinned down there drifted a wild whirl of vision. He saw again the fight in the blue fireglow, the assailant who spurred against him, the flash of his own revolver, the limp collapse of the other. He saw, too, the burial next morning—blue-coated troopers shoveling loam down upon a silent row of figures; and, ere clods hid it, a face peeping through a disarranged blanket, a face with staring eyes and mustaches like twin knife-points.

Then his eyes were clear again, and he was on his feet and running. His stiff leg gave him pain, but he slackened speed no whit. Once he looked back. A strange blueness, like a dim reflection of the fire long ago, hung around the base of Fearful Rock. In the midst of it, he saw not one but several figures. They were not moving—not walking, anyway—but he could swear that they gazed after him.

Something tripped him, a root or a fallen branch. He rose, neither quickly nor confidently, aching in all his limbs. The moon had come up, he took time to realize. Then he suddenly turned dizzy and faint all over, as never in any battle he had seen, not even Pea Ridge and Westport; for something bulky and dark was moving toward and against him.

Then it whinnied softly, and his heart stole down from his throat—it was his runaway horse.

Lanark was fain to stand for long seconds, with his arm across the saddle, before he mounted. Then he turned the animal’s head southward and shook the bridle to make it walk. At last he was able to examine himself for injuries.

Though winded, he was not bruised or hurt, but he was covered with earth and mold, and his side pocket had been almost ripped from his coat. That had happened when the—the creature yonder had tried to grapple him. He wondered how it had been forced to retreat so suddenly. He put his hand in the pocket.

He touched a little book there, and drew it forth.

It was Jager’s Long Lost Friend.

A good hour later, Lanark rode into the yard of his ex-sergeant. The moon was high, and Jager was sitting upon the front stoop.

Silently the owner of the little house rose, took Lanark’s bridle rein and held the horse while Lanark dismounted. Then he led the beast around to the rear yard, where the little shed stood. In front of this he helped Lanark unbridle and unsaddle the roan.

A Negro boy appeared, diffident in his mute offer of help, and Jager directed him to rub the beast down with a wisp of hay before giving it water or grain. Then he led Lanark to the front of the house.

Jager spoke at the threshold: “I thank God you are come back safely.”

IX

Debate and Decision

Jager’s Negro servant was quite as good a cook as promised. Lanark, eating chicken stew and biscuits, reflected that only twice before had he been so ravenous—upon receiving the news of Lee’s surrender at Appomatox, and after the funeral of his mother. When he had finished, he drew forth a cheroot. His hand shook as he lighted it. Jager gave him one of the old looks of respectful disapproval, but did not comment. Instead he led Lanark to the most comfortable chair in the parlor and seated himself upon the keg. Then he said: “Tell me.”

Lanark told him, rather less coherently than here set down, the adventures of the evening. Again and again he groped in his mind for explanations, but not once found any to offer.

“It is fit for the devil,” pronounced Jager when his old commander had finished. “Did I not say that you should have stayed away from that woman? You’re well out of the business.”

“I’m well into it, you mean,” Lanark fairly snapped back. “What can you think of me, Jager, when you suggest that I might let things stand as they are?”

The frontier preacher massaged his shaggy jowl with thoughtful knuckles. “You have been a man of war and an officer of death,” he said heavily. “God taught your hands to fight. Yet your enemies are not those who perish by the sword.” He held out his hand. “You say you still have the book I lent you?”

From his torn pocket Lanark drew Hohman’s Long Lost Friend. Jager took it and stared at the cover. “The marks of fingers,” he muttered, in something like awe. He examined the smudges closely, putting on his spectacles to do so, then lifted the book to his nose. His nostrils wrinkled, as if in distaste, and he passed the thing back. “Smell it,” he directed.

Lanark did so. About the slimy-looking prints on the cover hung a sickening odor of decayed flesh.

“The demon that attacked you, that touched this book, died long ago,” went on Jager. “You know as much—you killed him with your own hand. Yet he fights you this very night.”

“Maybe you have a suggestion,” Lanark flung out, impatient at the assured and almost snobbish air of mystery that colored the manner of his old comrade in arms. “If this is a piece of hell broke loose, perhaps you did the breaking. Remember that image—that idol-thing with horns—that you smashed in the cellar? You probably freed all the evil upon the world when you did that.”

Jager frowned, but pursued his lecture. “This very book, this Long Lost Friend, saved you from the demon’s clutch,” he said. “It is a notable talisman and shield. But with the shield one must have a sword, with which to attack in turn.”

“All right,” challenged Lanark. “Where is your sword?”

“It is a product of a mighty pen,” Jager informed him sententiously. He turned in his seat and drew from a box against the wall a book. Like the Long Lost Friend, it was bound in paper, but of a cream color. Its title stood forth in bold black letters:

The Secrets
Of
Albertus Magnus

“A translation from the German and the Latin,” explained Jager. “Printed, I think, in New York. This book is full of wisdom, although I wonder if it is evil, unlawful wisdom.”

“I don’t care if it is.” Lanark almost snatched the book. “Any weapon must be used. And I doubt if Albertus Magnus was evil. Wasn’t he a churchman, and didn’t he teach Saint Thomas Aquinas?” He leafed through the beginning of the book. “Here’s a charm, Jager, to be spoken in the name of God. That doesn’t sound unholy.”

“Satan can recite scripture to his own ends,” misquoted Jager. “I don’t remember who said that, but—”

“Shakespeare said it, or something very like it,” Lanark informed him. “Look here, Jager, farther on. Here’s a spell against witchcraft and evil spirits.”

“I have counted at least thirty such in that book,” responded the other. “Are you coming to believe in them, sir?”

Lanark looked up from the page. His face was earnest and, in a way, humble.

“I’m constrained to believe in many unbelievable things. If my experience tonight truly befell me, then I must believe in charms of safety. Supernatural evil like that must have its contrary supernatural good.”

Jager pushed his spectacles up on his forehead and smiled in his beard. “I have heard it told,” he said, “that charms and spells work only when one believes in them.”

“You sound confident of that, at least,” Lanark smiled back. “Maybe you will help me, after all.”

“Maybe I will.”

The two gazed into each other’s eyes, and then their hands came out, at the same moment. Lanark’s lean fingers crushed Jager’s coarser ones.

“Let’s be gone,” urged Lanark at once, but the preacher shook his head emphatically.

“Slowly, slowly,” he temporized. “Cool your spirit, and take council. He that ruleth his temper is greater than he that taketh a city.” Once more he put out his hand for the cream-colored volume of Albertus Magnus, and began to search through it.

“Do you think to comfort me from that book?” asked Lanark.

“It has more than comfort,” Jager assured him. “It has guidance.” He found what he was looking for, pulled down his spectacles again, and read aloud:

“ ‘Two wicked eyes have overshadowed me, but three other eyes are overshadowing me—the one of God the Father, the second of God the Son, the third of God the Holy Spirit; they watch my body and soul, my blood and bone; I shall be protected in the name of God.’ ”

His voice was that of a prayerful man reading Scripture, and Lanark felt moved despite himself. Jager closed the book gently and kept it in his hand.

“Albertus Magnus has many such charms and assurances,” he volunteered. “In this small book, less than two hundred pages, I find a score and more of ways for punishing and thwarting evil spirits, or those who summon evil spirits.” He shook his head, as if in sudden wrath, and turned up his spectacled eyes. “O Lord!” he muttered. “How long must devils plague us for our sins?”

Growing calmer once more, he read again from the book of Albertus Magnus. There was a recipe for invisibility, which involved the making of a thumbstall from the ear of a black cat boiled in the milk of a black cow; an invocation to “Bedgoblin and all ye evil spirits”; several strange rituals, similar to those Lanark remembered from the Long Lost Friend, to render one immune to wounds received in battle; and a rime to speak while cutting and preparing a forked stick of hazel to use in hunting for water or treasure. As a boy, Lanark had once seen water “witched,” and now he wondered if the rod-bearer had gained his knowledge from Albertus Magnus.

“ ‘Take an earthen pot, not glazed,’ ” Jager was reading on, “ ‘and yarn spun by a girl not seven years old’—”

He broke off abruptly, with a little inarticulate gasp. The book slammed shut between his hands. His eyes were bright and hot, and his face pale to the roots of his beard. When he spoke, it was in a hoarse whisper:

“That was a spell to control witches, in the name of Lucifer, king of hell. Didn’t I say that this book was evil?”

“You must forget that,” Lanark counseled him soberly. “I will admit that the book might cause sorrow and wickedness, if it were in wicked hands; but I do not think that you are anything but a good man.”

“Thank you,” said Jager simply. He rose and went to his table, then returned with an iron inkpot and a stump of a pen. “Let me have your right hand.”

Lanark held out his palm, as though to a fortune-teller. Upon the skin Jager traced slowly, in heavy capital letters, a square of five words:

S A T O R

A R E P O

T E N E T

O P E R A

R O T A S

Under this, very boldly, three crosses:

X X X

“A charm,” the preacher told Lanark as he labored with the pen. “These mystic words and the crosses will defend you in your slumber, from all wicked spirits. So says Albertus Magnus, and Hohman as well.”

“What do they mean?”

“I do not know that.” Jager blew hotly upon Lanark’s palm to dry the ink. “Will you now write the same thing for me, in my right hand?”

“If you wish.” Lanark, in turn, dipped in the inkpot and began to copy the diagram. “ ‘Opera’ is a word I know,” he observed, “and ‘tenet’ is another. ‘Sator’ may be some form of the old pagan word, ‘satyr’—a kind of horned human monster—”

He finished the work in silence. Then he lighted another cigar. His hand was as steady as a gun-rest this time, and the match did not even flicker in his fingertips. He felt somehow stronger, better, more confident.

“You’ll give me a place to sleep for the night?” he suggested.

“Yes. I have only pallets, but you and I have slept on harder couches before this.”

Within half an hour both men were sound asleep.

X

Enid Mandifer Again

The silence was not so deadly the following noon as Lanark and Jager dismounted at the hitching-rack in front of Enid Mandifer’s; perhaps this was because there were two horses to stamp and snort, two bridles to jingle, two saddles to creak, two pairs of boots to spurn the pathway toward the door.

Enid Mandifer, with a home-sewn sunbonnet of calico upon her head, came around the side of the house just as the two men were about to step upon the porch. She called out to them, anxiously polite, and stood with one hand clutched upon her wide skirt of brown alpaca.

“Mr. Lanark,” she ventured, “I hoped that you would come again. I have something to show you.”

It was Jager who spoke in reply: “Miss Mandifer, perhaps you may remember me. I’m Parson Jager, I live south of here. Look.” He held out something—the Long Lost Friend book. “Did you ever see anything of this sort?”

She took it without hesitation, gazing interestedly at the cover. Lanark saw her soft pink lips move, silently framing the odd words of the title. Then she opened it and studied the first page. After a moment she turned several leaves, and a little frown of perplexity touched her bonnet-shaded brow. “These are receipts—recipes—of some kind,” she said slowly. “Why do you show them to me, Mr. Jager?”

The ex-sergeant had been watching her closely, his hands upon his heavy hips, his beard thrust forward and his head tilted back. He put forth his hand and received back the Long Lost Friend.

“Excuse me, Miss Mandifer, if I have suspected you unjustly,” he said, handsomely if cryptically. Then he glanced sidewise at Lanark, as though to refresh a memory that needed no refreshing—a memory of a living-dead horror that had recoiled at very touch of the little volume.

Enid Mandifer was speaking once more: “Mr. Lanark, I had a dreadful night after you left. Dreams … or maybe not dreams. I felt things come and stand by my bed. This morning, on a bit of paper that lay on the floor—”

From a pocket in the folds of her skirt, she produced a white scrap. Lanark accepted it from her. Jager came close to look.

“Writing,” growled Jager. “In what language is that?”

“It’s English,” pronounced Lanark, “but set down backward—from right to left, as Leonardo da Vinci wrote.”

The young woman nodded eagerly at this, as though to say that she had already seen as much.

“Have you a mirror?” Jager asked her, then came to a simpler solution. He took the paper and held it up to the light, written side away from him. “Now it shows through,” he announced. “Will one of you try to read? I haven’t my glasses with me.”

Lanark squinted and made shift to read:

“ ‘Any man may look lightly into heaven, to the highest star; but who dares require of the bowels of Earth their abysmal secrets?’ ”

“That is my stepfather’s handwriting,” whispered Enid, her head close to Lanark’s shoulder.

He read on: “ ‘The rewards of Good are unproven; but the revenges of Evil are great, and manifest on all sides. Fear will always vanquish love.’ ”

He grinned slightly, harshly. Jager remembered having seen that grin in the old army days, before a battle.

“I think we’re being warned,” Lanark said to his old sergeant. “It’s a challenge, meant to frighten us. But challenges have always drawn me.”

“I can’t believe,” said Enid, “that fear will vanquish love.” She blushed suddenly and rosily, as if embarrassed by her own words. “That is probably beside the point,” she resumed. “What I began to say was that the sight of my stepfather’s writing—why is it reversed like that?—the sight, anyway, has brought things back into my mind.”

“What things?” Jager demanded eagerly. “Come into the house, Miss Mandifer, and tell us.”

“Oh, not into the house,” she demurred at once. “It’s dark in there—damp and cold. Let’s go out here, to the seat under the tree.”

She conducted them to the bench whither Lanark had accompanied her the day before.

“Now,” Jager prompted her, and she began:

“I remember of hearing him, when I was a child, as he talked to his son Larue and they thought I did not listen or did not comprehend. He told of these very things, these views he has written. He said, as if teaching Larue, ‘Fear is stronger than love; where love can but plead, fear can command.’ ”

“A devil’s doctrine!” grunted Jager, and Lanark nodded agreement.

“He said more,” went on Enid. “He spoke of ‘Those Below,’ and of how they ‘rule by fear, and therefore are stronger than Those on High, who rule by weak love.’ ”

“Blasphemy,” commented Jager, in his beard.

“Those statements fit what I remember of his talk,” Lanark put in. “He spoke, just before we fought the guerrillas, of some great evil to come from flouting Those Below.”

“I remember,” nodded Jager. “Go on, young woman.”

“Then there was the box.”

“The box?” repeated both men quickly.

“Yes. It was a small case, of dark gray metal, or stone—or something. This, too, was when I was little. He offered it to Larue, and laughed when Larue could not open it.”

Jager and Lanark darted looks at each other. They were remembering such a box.

“My stepfather then took it back,” Enid related, “and said that it held his fate and fortune; that he would live and prosper until the secret writing within it should be taken forth and destroyed.”

“I remember where that box is,” Lanark said breathlessly to Jager. “In the old oven, at—”

“We could not open it, either,” interrupted the preacher.

“He spoke of that, too,” Enid told them. “It would never open, he told Larue, save in the ‘place of the Nameless One’—that must be where the house burned—and at midnight under a full moon.”

“A full moon!” exclaimed Lanark.

“There is a full moon tonight,” said Jager.

XI

Return of the Sacrifice

Through the crosshatching of new-leafed branches the full moon shone down from its zenith. Lanark and Enid Mandifer walked gingerly through the night-filled timber in the gulley beyond which, they knew, lay the ruins of the house where so much repellent mystery had been born.

“It’s just eleven o’clock,” whispered Lanark, looking at his big silver watch. He was dressed in white shirt and dark trousers, without coat, hat or gloves. His revolver rode in the front of his waistband, and as he limped along, the sheath of Jager’s old cavalry saber thumped and rasped his left boot-top. “We must be almost there.”

“We are there,” replied Enid. “Here’s the clearing, and the little brook of water.”

She was right. They had come to the open space where first they had met. The moonlight made the ground and its new grass pallid, and struck frosty-gold lights from the runlet in the very center of the clearing. Beyond, to the west, lay menacing shadows.

Enid stooped and laid upon the ground the hand-mirror she carried, “Stand to one side,” she said, “and please don’t look.”

Lanark obeyed, and the girl began to undress.

The young man felt dew at his mustache, and a chill in his heart that was not from dew. He stared into the trees beyond the clearing, trying to have faith in Jager’s plan. “We must make the devils come forth and face us,” the sergeant-preacher had argued. “Miss Mandifer shall be our decoy, to draw them out where we can get at them. All is very strange, but this much we know—the unholy worship did go on; Miss Mandifer was to be sacrificed as part of it; and, when the sacrifice was not completed, all these evil things happened. We have the hauntings, the blue fire of the house, the creature that attacked Mr. Lanark, and a host of other mysteries to credit to these causes. Let us profit by what little we have found out, and put an end to the Devil’s rule in this country.”

It had all sounded logical, but Lanark, listening, had been hesitant until Enid herself agreed. Then it was that Jager, strengthening his self-assumed position of leadership, had made the assignments. Enid would make the journey, as before, from her house to the gulley, there strip and say the words with which her stepfather had charged her four springs ago. Lanark, armed, would accompany her as guard. Jager himself would circle far to the east and approach the ruins from the opposite direction, observing, and, if need be, attacking.

These preparations Lanark reviewed mentally, while he heard Enid’s bare feet splashing timidly in the water. It came to him, a bit too late, that the arms he bore might not avail against supernatural enemies. Yet Jager had seemed confident. … Enid was speaking, apparently repeating the ritual that was supposed to summon the unnamed god-demon of Persil Mandifer:

“A maid, alone and pure, I stand, not upon water nor on land; I hold a mirror in my hand, in which to see what Fate may send. …” She broke off and screamed.

Lanark whipped around. The girl stood, misty-pale in the wash of moonlight, all crouched and curved together like a bow.

“It was coming!” she quavered. “I saw it in the mirror—over yonder, among those trees—”

Lanark glared across the little strip of water and the moonlit grass beyond. Ten paces away, between two trunks, something shone in the shadows—shone darkly, like tar, though the filtered moon-rays did not touch it. He saw nothing of the shape, save that it moved and lived—and watched.

He drew his revolver and fired, twice. There was a crash of twigs, as though something had flinched backward at the reports.

Lanark splashed through the water and, despite his limp, charged at the place where the presence lurked.

XII

Jager

It had been some minutes before eleven o’clock when Jager reined in his old black horse at a distance of two miles from Fearful Rock.

Most of those now alive who knew Jager personally are apt to describe him as he was when they were young and he was old—a burly graybeard, a notable preacher and exhorter, particularly at funerals. He preferred the New Testament to the Old, though he was apt to misquote his texts from either; and he loved children, and once preached a telling sermon against the proposition of infant damnation. His tombstone, at Fort Smith, Arkansas, bears as epitaph a verse from the third chapter of the first book of Samuel: Here am I, for thou didst call me.

Jager when young is harder to study and to visualize. However, the diary of a long-dead farmer’s wife of Pennsylvania records that the “Jager boy” was dull but serious at school, and that his appetite for mince pie amounted to a passion. In Topeka, Kansas, lives a retired railroad conductor whose father, on the pre-Rebellion frontier, once heard Jager defy Southern hoodlums to shoot him for voting Free-state in a territorial election. Ex-Major Kane Lanark mentioned Jager frequently and with admiration in the remarkable pen-and-ink memoir on which the present narrative is based.

How he approached Fearful Rock, and what he encountered there, he himself often described verbally to such of his friends as pretended that they believed him.

The moonlight showed him a stunted tree, with one gnarled root looping up out of the earth, and to that root he tethered his animal. Then, like Lanark, he threw off his coat, strapping it to the cantle of his saddle, and unfastened his “hickory” blue shirt at the throat. From a saddlebag he drew a trusty-looking revolver, its barrel sawed off. Turning its butt toward the moon, he spun the cylinder to make sure that it was loaded. Then he thrust it into his belt without benefit of holster, and started on foot toward the rock and its remains of a house.

Approaching, he sought by instinct the cover of trees and bush-clumps, moving smoothly and noiselessly; Jager had been noted during his service in the Army of the Frontier for his ability to scout at night, an ability which he credited to the fact that he had been born in the darkest hours. He made almost as good progress as though he had been moving in broad daylight. At eleven o’clock sharp, as he guessed—like many men who never carry watches, he had become good at judging the time—he was within two hundred yards of the rock itself, and cover had run out. There he paused, chin-deep in a clump of early weeds.

Lanark and the girl, as he surmised, must be well into the gulley by this time. He, Jager, smiled as he remembered with what alacrity Lanark had accepted the assignment of bodyguard to Enid Mandifer. Those two young people acted as if they were on the brink of falling in love, and no mistake. …

His eyes were making out details of the scene ahead. Was even the full moon so bright as all this? He could not see very clearly the ruined foundations, for they sat in a depression of the earth. Yet there seemed to be a clinging blue light at about that point, a feeble but undeniable blue. Mentally he compared it to deep, still water, then to the poorest of skimmed milk. Jager remembered the flames that once had burned there, blue as amethyst.

But the blue light was not solid, and it had no heat. Within it, dimmed as though by mist, stood and moved—figures. They were human, at least they were upright; and they stood in a row, like soldiers, all but two. That pair was dark-seeming, and one was grossly thick, the other thin as an exclamation point. The line moved, bent, formed a weaving circle which spread as its units opened their order. Jager had never seen such a maneuver in four years of army service.

Now the circle was moving, rolling around; the figures were tramping counterclockwise—“withershins” was the old-fashioned word for that kind of motion, as Jager remembered from his boyhood in Pennsylvania. The two darker figures, the ones that had stood separate, were nowhere to be seen; perhaps they were enclosed in the center of the turning circle, the moving shapes of which numbered six. There had been six of Quantrill’s guerrillas that died in almost that spot.

The ground was bare except for spring grass, but Jager made shift to crawl forward on hands and knees, his eyes fixed on the group ahead, his beard bristling nervously upon his set chin. He crept ten yards, twenty yards, forty. Some high stalks of grass, killed but not leveled by winter, afforded him a bit of cover, and he paused again, taking care not to rustle the dry stems. He could see the maneuvering creatures more plainly.

They were men, all right, standing each upon two legs, waving each two arms. No, one of them had only an arm and a stump. Had not one of Quantrill’s men—yes! It came to the back of Jager’s mind that Lanark himself had cut away an enemy’s pistol hand with a stroke of his saber. Again he reflected that there had been six dead guerrillas, and that six were the forms treading so strange a measure yonder. He began to crawl forward again. Sweat made a slow, cold trickle along his spine.

But the two that had stood separate from the six were not to be seen anywhere, inside the circle or out. And Jager began to fancy that his first far glimpse had shown him something strange about that pair of dark forms, something inhuman or subhuman.

Then a shot rang out, clear and sharp. It came from beyond the circle of creatures and the blue-misted ruins. A second shot followed it.

Jager almost rose into plain view in the moonlight, but fell flat a moment later. Indeed, he might well have been seen by those he spied upon, had they not all turned in the direction whence the shots had sounded. Jager heard voices, a murmur of them with nothing that sounded like articulate words. He made bold to rise on his hands for a closer look. The six figures were moving eastward, as though to investigate.

Jager lifted himself to hands and knees, then rose to a crouch. He ran forward, drawing his gun as he did so. The great uneven shaft that was Fearful Rock gave him a bar of shadow into which he plunged gratefully, and a moment later he was at the edge of the ruin-filled foundation hole, perhaps at the same point where Lanark had stood the night before.

From that pit rose the diluted blue radiance that seemed to involve this quarter. Staring thus closely, Jager found the light similar to that given off by rotten wood, or fungi, or certain brands of lucifer matches. It was like an echo of light, he pondered rather absently, and almost grinned at his own malapropism. But he was not here to make jokes with himself.

He listened, peered about, then began moving cautiously along the lip of the foundation hole. Another shot he heard, and a loud, defiant yell that sounded like Lanark; then an answering burst of laughter, throaty and muffled, that seemed to come from several mouths at once. Jager felt a new and fiercer chill. He, an earnest Protestant from birth, signed himself with the cross—signed himself with the right hand that clutched his revolver.

Yet there was no doubt as to which way lay his duty. He skirted the open foundation of the ruined house, moved eastward over the trampled earth where the six things had formed their open-order circle. Like Lanark, he saw the opened grave-trench. He paused and gazed down.

Two sack-like blotches of pallor lay there—Lanark had described them correctly: they were empty human skins. Jager paused. There was no sound from ahead; he peered and saw the ravine to eastward, filled with trees and gloom. He hesitated at plunging in, the place was so ideal an ambush. Even as he paused, his toes at the brink of the opened grave, he heard a smashing, rustling noise. Bodies were returning through the twigs and leafage of the ravine, returning swiftly.

Had they met Lanark and vanquished him? Had they spied or sensed Jager in their rear?

He was beside the grave, and since the first year of the war he had known what to do, with enemy approaching and a deep hole at hand. He dived in, head first like a chipmunk into its burrow, and landed on the bottom on all fours.

His first act was to shake his revolver, lest sand had stopped the muzzle.

A charm from the Long Lost Friend book whispered itself through his brain, a marksman’s charm to bring accuracy with the gun. He repeated it, half audibly, without knowing what the words might mean:

“Ut nemo in sense tentant, descendre nemo; at precedenti spectatur mantica tergo.”

At that instant his eyes fell upon the nearest of the two pallid, empty skins, which lay full in the moonlight. He forgot everything else. For he knew that collapsed face, even without the sharp stiletto-like bone of the nose to jut forth in its center. He knew that narrowness through the jowls and temples, that height of brow, that hair white as thistledown.

Persil Mandifer’s skull had been inside. It must have been there, and living, recently. Jager’s left hand crept out, and drew quickly back as though it had touched a snake. The texture of the skin was soft, clammy, moist … fresh!

And the other pallidity like a great empty bladder—that could have fitted no other body than the gross one of Larue Mandifer.

Thus, Jager realized, had Lanark entered the grave on the night before, and found these same two skins. Looking up, Lanark had found a horrid enemy waiting to grapple him.

Jager, too, looked up.

A towering silhouette shut out half the starry sky overhead.

XIII

Lanark

The combination of pluck and common sense is something of a rarity, and men who possess that combination are apt to go far. Kane Lanark was such a man, and though he charged unhesitatingly across the little strip of water and at the unknown thing in the trees, he was not outrunning his discretion.

He had seen men die in his time, many of them in abject flight, with bullets overtaking them in the spine or the back of the head. It was nothing pleasant to watch, but it crystallized within his mind the realization that dread of death is no armor against danger, and that an enemy attacked is far less formidable than an enemy attacking. That brace of maxims comforted him and bore him up in more tight places than one.

And General Blunt of the Army of the Frontier, an officer who was all that his name implies and who was never given to overstatement, once so unbent as to say in official writing that Captain Kane Lanark was an ornament to any combat force.

And so his rush was nothing frantic. All that faltered was his lame leg. He meant to destroy the thing that had showed itself, but fully as definitely he meant not to be destroyed by it. As he ran, he flung his revolver across to his left hand and dragged free the saber that danced at his side.

But the creature he wanted to meet did not bide his coming. He heard another crash and rattle—it had backed into some shrubs or bushes farther in among the trees. He paused under the branches of the first belt of timber, well aware that he was probably a fair mark for a bullet. Yet he did not expect a gun in the hands of whatever lurked ahead; he was not sure at all that it even had hands.

Of a sudden he felt, rather than saw, motion upon his left flank. He pivoted upon the heel of his sound right foot and, lifting the saber, spat professionally between hilt and palm. He meant killing, did Lanark, but nothing presented itself. A chuckle drifted to him, a contemptuous burble of sound; he thought of what Enid had said about divining her stepfather’s mockery. Again the chuckle, dying away toward the left.

But up ahead came more noise of motion, and this was identifiable as feet—heavy, measured tramping of feet. New and stupid recruits walked like that, in their first drills. So did tired soldiers on the march. And the feet were coming his way.

Lanark’s first reaction to this realization was of relief. Marching men, even enemies, would be welcome because he knew how to deal with them. Then he thought of Enid behind him, probably in retreat out of the gully. He must give her time to get away. He moved westward, toward the approaching party, but with caution and silence.

The moonlight came patchily down through the lattice-like mass of branches and twigs, and again Lanark saw motion. This time it was directly ahead. He counted five, then six figures, quite human. The moonlight, when they moved in it, gave him glimpses of butternut shirts, white faces. One had a great waterfall of beard.

Lanark drew a deep breath. “Stand!” he shouted, and with his left hand leveled his pistol.

They stood, but only for a moment. Each figure’s attitude shifted ever so slightly as Lanark moved a pace forward. The trees were sparse around him, and the moon shone stronger through their branches. He recognized the man with the great beard—he did not need to see that one arm was hewed away halfway between wrist and elbow. Another face was equally familiar, with its sharp mustaches and wide eyes; he had stared into it no longer ago than last night.

The six guerrillas stirred into motion again, approaching and closing in. Lanark had them before him in a semicircle.

“Stand!” he said again, and when they did not he fired, full for the center of that black beard in the forefront. The body of the guerrilla started and staggered—no more. It had been hit, but it was not going to fall. Lanark knew a sudden damp closeness about him, as though he stood in a small room full of sweaty garments. The six figures were converging, like beasts seeking a common trough or manger.

He did not shoot again. The man he had shot was not bleeding. Six pairs of eyes fixed themselves upon him, with a steadiness that was more than unwinking. He wondered, inconsequentially, if those eyes had lids. … Now they were within reach.

He fell quickly on guard with his saber, whirling it to left and then to right, the old moulinets he had learned in the fencing-room at the Virginia Military Institute. Again the half-dozen approachers came to an abrupt stop, one or two flinching back from the twinkling tongue of steel. Lanark extended his arm, made a wider horizontal sweep with his point, and the space before him widened. The two forms at the horns of the semicircle began to slip forward and outward, as though to pass him and take him in the rear.

“That won’t do,” Lanark said aloud, and hopped quickly forward, then lunged at the black-beard. His point met flesh, or at least a soft substance. No bones impeded it. A moment later his basket-hilt thudded against the butternut shirt front, the figure reeled backward from the force of the blow. With a practised wrench, Lanark cleared his weapon, cutting fiercely at another who was moving upon him with an unnerving lightness. His edge came home, and he drew it vigorously toward himself—a bread-slicing maneuver that would surely lay flesh open to the bone, disable one assailant. But the creature only tottered and came in again, and Lanark saw that the face he had hacked almost in two was the one with bulge eyes and spike mustaches.

All he could do was sidestep and then retreat—retreat eastward in the direction of Fearful Rock. The black-bearded thing was down, stumbled or swooning, and he sprang across it. As he did so the body writhed just beneath him, clutching with one hand upward. Hooked by an ankle, Lanark fell sprawling at full length, losing his revolver but not his sword. He twisted over at his left side, hacking murderously in the direction of his feet. As once before, he cut away a hand and wrist and was free. He surged to his feet, and found the black-beard also up, thrusting its hairy, fishy-white face at him. With dark rage swelling his every muscle, Lanark carried his right arm back across his chest, his right hand with the hilt going over his left shoulder. Then he struck at the hairy head with all the power of arm and shoulder and, turning his body, thrust in its weight behind the blow. The head flew from the shoulders, as though it had been stuck there ever so lightly.

Then the others were pushing around and upon him. Lanark smelled blood, rot, dampness, filth. He heard, for the first time, soft snickering voices, that spoke no words but seemed to be sneering at him for the entertainment of one another. The work was too close to thrust; he hacked and hewed, and struck with the curved guard as with brass knuckles. And they fell back from him, all but one form that could not see.

It tottered heavily and gropingly toward him, hunching its headless shoulders and holding out its handless arms, as though it played with him a game of blind-man’s-buff. And from that horrid truncated enemy Lanark fled, fled like a deer for all his lameness.

They followed, but they made slow, stupid work of it. Lanark’s sword, which could not kill, had wounded them all. He was well ahead, coming to rising ground, toiling upward out of the gully, into the open country shadowed by Fearful Rock.

He paused there, clear of the trees, wiped his clammy brow with the sleeve of his left arm. The moon was so bright overhead that it almost blinded him. He became aware of a kneading, clasping sensation at his right ankle, and looked down to see what caused it.

A hand clung there, a hand without arm or body. It was a pale hand that moved and crawled, as if trying to mount his bootleg and get at his belly—his heart—his throat. The bright moon showed him the strained tendons of it, and the scant coarse hair upon its wide back.

Lanark opened his lips to scream like any woman, but no sound came. With his other foot he scraped the thing loose and away. Its fingers quitted their hold grudgingly, and under the sole of his boot they curled and writhed upward, like the legs of an overturned crab. They fastened upon his instep.

When, with the point of his saber, he forced the thing free again, still he saw that it lived and groped for a hold upon him. With his lip clenched bloodily between his teeth, he chopped and minced at the horrid little thing, and even then its severed fingers humped and inched upon the ground, like worms.

“It won’t die,” Lanark murmured hoarsely, aloud; often in the past he had thought that speaking thus, when one was alone, presaged insanity. “It won’t die—not though I chop it into atoms until the evil is driven away.”

Then he wondered, for the first time since he had left Enid, where Jager was. He turned in the direction of the rock and the ruined house, and walked wearily for perhaps twenty paces. He was swimming in sweat, and blood throbbed in his ears.

Then he found himself looking into the open grave where the guerrillas had lain, whence they had issued to fight once more. At the bottom he saw the two palenesses that were empty skins.

He saw something else—a dark form that was trying to scramble out. Once again he tightened his grip upon the hilt of his saber.

At the same instant he knew that still another creature was hurrying out of the gulley and at him from behind.

XIV

Enid

Lanark’s guess was wrong; Enid Mandifer had not retreated westward up the gulley.

She had stared, all in a heart-stopping chill, as Lanark made for the thing that terrified her. As though of themselves, her hands reached down to the earth, found her dress, and pulled it over her head. She thrust her feet into her shoes. Then she moved, at only a fast walk, after Lanark.

There was really nothing else she could have done, and Lanark might have known that, had he been able to take thought in the moments that followed. Had she fled, she would have had no place to go save to the house where once her stepfather had lived; and it would be no refuge, but a place of whispering horror. Too, she would be alone, dreadfully alone. It took no meditation on her part to settle the fact that Lanark was her one hope of protection. As a matter of simple fact, he would have done well to remain with her, on the defensive; but then, he could not have foreseen what was waiting in the shadowed woods beyond.

She did carry something that might serve as a weapon—the hand-mirror. And in a pocket of her dress lay the Bible, of which she had once told Lanark. She had read much in it, driven by terror, and I daresay it was as much a talisman to her as was the Long Lost Friend to Jager. Her lips pattered a verse from it: “Deliver me from mine enemies, O my God … for lo, they lie in wait for my soul.”

It was hard for her to decide what she had expected to find within the rim of trees beyond the clearing. Lanark was not in sight, but a commotion had risen some little distance ahead. Enid moved onward, because she must.

She heard Lanark’s pistol shot, and then what sounded like several men struggling. She tried to peer and see, but there was only a swirl of violent motion, and through it the flash of steel—that would be Lanark’s saber. She crouched behind a wide trunk.

“That is useless,” said an accented voice she knew, close at her elbow.

She spun around, stared and sprang away. It was not her stepfather that stood there. The form was human to some degree—it had arms and legs, and a featureless head; but its nakedness was slimy wet and dark, and about it clung a smell of blood.

“That is useless,” muttered once more the voice of Persil Mandifer. “You do not hide from the power that rules this place.”

Behind the first dark slimness came a second shape, a gross immensity, equally black and foul and shiny. Larue?

“You have offered yourself,” said Persil Mandifer, though Enid could see no lips move in the filthy-seeming shadow that should have been a face. “I think you will be accepted this time. Of course, it cannot profit me—what I am now, I shall be always. Perhaps you, too—”

Larue’s voice chuckled, and Enid ran, toward where Lanark had been fighting. That would be more endurable than this mad dream forced upon her. Anything would be more endurable. Twigs and thorns plucked at her skirt like spiteful fingers, but she ripped away from them and ran. She came into another clearing, a small one. The moon, striking between the boughs, made here a pool of light and touched up something of metal.

It was Lanark’s revolver. Enid bent and seized it. A few feet away rested something else, something rather like a strangely shaggy cabbage. As Enid touched the gun, she saw what that fringed rondure was. A head, but living, as though its owner had been buried to his bearded chin.

“What—” she began to ask aloud. It was surely living, its eyebrows arched and scowled and its gleaming eyes moved. Its tongue crawled out and licked grinning, hairy lips. She saw its smile, hard and brief as a knife flashed for a moment from its scabbard.

Enid Mandifer almost dropped the revolver. She had become sickeningly aware that the head possessed no body.

“There is the rest of him,” spoke Persil Mandifer, again behind her shoulder. And she saw a heart-shaking terror, staggering and groping between the trees, a body without a head or hands.

She ran again, but slowly and painfully, as though this were in truth a nightmare. The headless hulk seemed to divine her effort at retreat, for it dragged itself clumsily across, as though to cut her off. It held out its handless stumps of arms.

“No use to shoot,” came Persil Mandifer’s mocking comment—he was following swiftly. “That poor creature cannot be killed again.”

Other shapes were approaching from all sides, shapes dressed in filthy, ragged clothes. The face of one was divided by a dark cleft, as though Lanark’s saber had split it, but no blood showed. Another seemed to have no lower jaw; the remaining top of his face jutted forward, like the short visage of a snake lifted to strike. These things had eyes, turned unblinkingly upon her; they could see and approach.

The headless torso blundered at her again, went past by inches. It recovered itself and turned. It knew, somehow, that she was there; it was trying to capture her. She shrank away, staring around for an avenue of escape.

“Be thankful,” droned Persil Mandifer from somewhere. “These are no more than dead men, whipped into a mockery of life. They will prepare you a little for the wonders to come.”

But Enid had commanded her shuddering muscles. She ran. One of the things caught her sleeve, but the cloth tore and she won free. She heard sounds that could hardly be called voices, from the mouths of such as had mouths. And Persil Mandifer laughed quietly, and said something in a language Enid had never heard before. The thick voice of his son Larue answered him in the same tongue, then called out in English:

“Enid, you only run in the direction we want you to run!”

It was true, and there was nothing that she could do about it. The entities behind her were following, not very fast, like herdsmen leisurely driving a sheep in the way it should go. And she knew that the sides of the gulley, to north and south, could never be climbed. There was only the slope ahead to the eastward, up which Lanark must have gone. The thought of him strengthened her. If the two of them found the king-horror, the Nameless One, at the base of Fearful Rock, they could face it together.

She was aware that she had come out of the timber of the ravine.

All was moonlight here, painted by the soft pallor in grays and silvers and shadow-blacks. There was the rock lifted among the stars, there the stretch of clump-dotted plain—and here, almost before her, Lanark.

He stood poised above a hole in the ground, his saber lifted above his head as though to begin a downward sweep. Something burly was climbing up out of that hole. But, even as he tightened his sinews to strike, Lanark whirled around, and his eyes glared murderously at Enid.

XV

Evil’s End

“Don’t!” Enid screamed. “Don’t, it’s only I—”

Lanark growled, and spun back to face what was now hoisting itself above ground level.

“And be careful of me, too,” said the object. “It’s Jager, Mr. Lanark.”

The point of the saber lowered. The three of them were standing close together on the edge of the opened grave. Lanark looked down. He saw at the bottom the two areas of loose white.

“Are those the—”

“Yes,” Jager replied without waiting for him to finish. “Two human skins. They are fresh; soft and damp.” Enid was listening, but she was past shuddering. “One of them,” continued Jager, “was taken from Persil Mandifer. I know his face.”

He made a scuffing kick-motion with one boot. Clods flew into the grave, falling with a dull plop, as upon wet blankets. He kicked more earth down, swiftly and savagely.

“Help me,” he said to the others. “Salt should be thrown on those skins—that’s what the old legends say—but we have no salt. Dirt will have to do. Don’t you see?” he almost shrieked. “Somewhere near here, two bodies are hiding, or moving about, without these skins to cover them.”

Both Lanark and Enid knew they had seen those bodies. In a moment three pairs of feet were thrusting earth down into the grave.

“Don’t!” It was a wail from the trees in the ravine, a wail in the voice of Persil Mandifer. “We must return to those skins before dawn!”

Two black silhouettes, wetly shiny in the moonlight, had come into the open. Behind them straggled six more, the guerrillas.

“Don’t!” came the cry again, this time a command. “You cannot destroy us now. It is midnight, the hour of the Nameless One.”

At the word “midnight” an idea fairly exploded itself in Lanark’s brain. He thrust his sword into the hands of his old sergeant.

“Guard against them,” he said in the old tone of command. “That book of yours may serve as shield, and Enid’s Bible. I have something else to do.”

He turned and ran around the edge of the grave, then toward the hole that was filled with the ruins of the old house; the hole that emitted a glow of weak blue light.

Into it he flung himself, wondering if this diluted gleam of the old unearthly blaze would burn him. It did not; his booted legs felt warmth like that of a hot stove, no more. From above he heard the voice of Jager, shouting, tensely and masterfully, a formula from the Long Lost Friend:

“Ye evil things, stand and look upon me for a moment, while I charm three drops of blood from you, which you have forfeited. The first from your teeth, the second from your lungs, the third from your heart’s own main.” Louder went his voice, and higher, as though he had to fight to keep down his hysteria: “God bid me vanquish you all!”

Lanark had reached the upward column of the broken chimney. All about his feet lay fragments, glowing blue. He shoved at them with his toe. There was an oblong of metal. He touched it—yes, that had been a door to an old brick oven. He lifted it. Underneath lay what he had hidden four years ago—a case of unknown construction.

But as he picked it up, he saw that it had a lid. What had Enid overheard from her stepfather, so long ago? “… that he would live and prosper until the secret writing should be taken forth and destroyed … it would never open, save at the place of the Nameless One, at midnight under a full moon.”

With his thumbnail he pried at the lid, and it came open easily. The box seemed full of darkness, and when he thrust in his hands he felt something crumble, like paper burned to ashes. That was what it was—ashes. He turned the case over, and let the flakes fall out, like strange black snow.

From somewhere resounded a shriek, or chorus of shrieks. Then a woman weeping—that would be Enid—and a cry of “God be thanked!” unmistakably from Jager. The blue light died away all around Lanark, and his legs were cool. The old basement had fallen strangely dark. Then he was aware of great fatigue, the trembling of his hands, the ropy weakness of his lamed leg. And he could not climb out again, until Jager came and put down a hand.

At rosy dawn the three sat on the front stoop of Jager’s cabin. Enid was pouring coffee from a serviceable old black pot.

“We shall never know all that happened and portended,” said Jager, taking a mouthful of homemade bread, “but what we have seen will tell us all that we should know.”

“This much is plain,” added Lanark. “Persil Mandifer worshipped an evil spirit, and that evil spirit had life and power.”

“Perhaps we would know everything, if the paper in the box had not burned in the fire,” went on Jager. “That is probably as well—that it burned, I mean. Some secrets are just as well never told.” He fell thoughtful, pulled his beard, and went on. “Even burned, the power of that document worked; but when the ashes fell from their case, all was over. The bodies of the guerrillas were dry bones on the instant, and as for the skinless things that moved and spoke as Mandifer and his son—”

He broke off, for Enid had turned deathly pale at memory of that part of the business.

“We shall go back when the sun is well up,” said Lanark, “and put those things back to rest in their grave.”

He sat for a moment, coffee-cup in hand, and gazed into the brightening sky.

To the two items he had spoken of as plainly indicated, he mentally added a third; the worship carried on by Persil Mandifer—was that name French, perhaps Main-de-Fer?—was tremendously old. He, Persil, must have received teachings in it from a former votary, his father perhaps, and must have conducted a complex and secret ritual for decades.

The attempted sacrifice rite for which Enid had been destined was something the world would never know, not as regards the climax. For a little band of Yankee horsemen, with himself at their head, had blundered into the situation, throwing it completely out of order and spelling for it the beginning of the end.

The end had come. Lanark was sure of that. How much of the power and motivity of the worship had been exerted by the Nameless One that now must continue nameless, how much of it was Persil Mandifer’s doing, how much was accident of nature and horror-hallucination of witnesses, nobody could now decide. As Jager had suggested, it was probably as well that part of the mystery would remain. Things being as they were, one might pick up the threads of his normal human existence, and be happy and fearless.

But he could not forget what he had seen. The two Mandifers, able to live or to counterfeit life by creeping from their skins at night, had perished as inexplicably as they had been resurrected. The guerrillas, too, whose corpses had challenged him, must be finding a grateful rest now that the awful semblance of life had quitted their slack, butchered limbs. And the blue fire that had burst forth in the midst of the old battle, to linger ghostwise for years; the horned image that Jager had broken; the seeming powers of the Long Lost Friend, as an amulet and a storehouse of charms—these were items in the strange fabric. He would remember them forever, without rationalizing them.

He drank coffee, into which someone, probably Enid, had dropped sugar while he mused. Rationalization, he decided, was not enough, had never been enough. To judge a large and dark mystery by what vestigial portions touched one, was to err like the blind men in the old doggerel who, groping at an elephant here and there, called it in turn a snake, a spear, a tree, a fan, a wall. Better not to brood or ponder upon what had happened. Try to be thankful, and forget.

“I shall build my church under Fearful Rock,” Jager was saying, “and it shall be called Fearful Rock no more, but Welcome Rock.”

Lanark looked up. Enid had come and seated herself beside him. He studied her profile. Suddenly he could read her thoughts, as plainly as though they were written upon her cheek.

She was thinking that grass would grow anew in her front yard, and that she would marry Kane Lanark as soon as he asked her.

The Valley Was Still

Wind touched the pines on the ridge, and stirred the thicket forest on the hills opposite; but the grassy valley between, with its red and white houses at the bottom, was as still as a painted backdrop in a theater. Not even a grasshopper sang in it.

Two cavalrymen sat their mounts at the edge of the pines. The one in the torn butternut blouse hawked and spat, and the sound was strangely loud at the brink of that silence.

“I’d reckoned the Yanks was down in that there little town,” he said. “Channow, it’s called. Joe, you look like a Yank yourself in them clothes.”

His mate, who wore half-weathered blue, did not appear complimented. The garments had been stripped from an outraged sergeant of Pennsylvania Lancers, taken prisoner at the Seven Days. They fitted their new wearer’s lean body nicely, except across the shoulders. His boots were likewise trophies of war—from the Second Manassas, where the Union Army had learned that lightning can strike twice in the same place; and his saddlecloth, with its U.S. stamp, had also been unwillingly furnished by the Federal army. But the gray horse had come from his father’s Virginia farm, and had lived through a year of fierce fighting and fiercer toil. The rider’s name was Joseph Paradine, and he had recently declined, with thanks, the offer of General J. E. B. Stuart to recommend him for a commission.

He preferred to serve as a common trooper. He was a chivalric idealist, and a peerless scout.

“You’d better steal some Yankee blues yourself, Dauger,” he advised. “Those homespun pants would drop off of you if you stood up in your stirrups. … Yes, the enemy’s expected to take up a position in Channow Valley. But if he had done so, we’d have run into his videttes by now, and that town would be as noisy as a county fair.”

He rode from among the pines and into the open on the lower slope.

“You’re plumb exposin’ yourself, Joe,” warned Dauger anxiously.

“And I’m going to expose myself more,” returned Paradine, his eyes on the valley. “We’ve been told to find the Yankees, establish their whereabouts. Then our people will tackle them.” He spoke with the confidence of triumph that in the summer of 1862 possessed Confederates who had driven the Union’s bravest and best all through Virginia. “I’m going all the way down.”

“There’ll be Yanks hidin’,” suggested Dauger pessimistically. “They’ll plug you plumb full of lead.”

“If they do,” called Paradine, “ride back and tell the boys, because then you’ll know the Yankees actually are in Channow.” He put his horse to the slope, feeling actually happy at the thought that he might suffer for the sake of his cause. It is worthy of repetition that he was a chivalric idealist.

Dauger, quite as brave but more practical, bode where he was. Paradine, riding downhill, passed out of reach of any more warnings.

Paradine’s eyes were kept on the village as he descended deep into silence as into water. He had never known such silence, not even at the frequent prayings of his very devout regiment. It made him nervous, a different nervousness from the tingling elation brought by battle thunders, and it fairly daunted his seasoned and intelligent horse. The beast tossed its head, sniffed, danced precariously, and had to be urged to the slope’s foot and the trail that ran there.

From the bottom of the slope, the village was a scant two miles away. Its chimneys did not smoke, nor did its trees stir in the windless air. Nor was there sign or motion upon its streets and among its houses of red brick and white wood—no enemy soldiers, or anything else.

Was this a trap? But Paradine smiled at the thought of a whole Yankee brigade or more, lying low to capture one lone Southerner.

More likely they thought him a friend, wearing blue as he did; but why silence in that case, either?

He determined to make noise. If there were hostile forces in and among the houses of Channow, he would draw their attention, perhaps their musket fire. Spurring the gray so that it whickered and plunged, he forced it to canter at an angle toward the nearest houses. At the same time he drew his saber, whetted to a razor-edge contrary to regulations, and waved it over his head. He gave the rebel yell, high and fierce.

“Yee-hee!”

Paradine’s voice was a strong one, and it could ring from end to end of a brigade in line; but, even as he yelled, that yell perished—dropped from his lips, as though cut away.

He could not have been heard ten yards. Had his throat dried up? Then, suddenly, he knew. There was no echo here, for all the ridge lay behind, and the hills in front to the north. Even the galloping hoofs of the gray sounded muffled, as if in cotton. Strange … there was no response to his defiance.

That was more surprising still. If there were no enemy troops, what about the people of the town? Paradine felt his brown neck-hair, which needed cutting badly, rise and stiffen. Something sinister lay yonder, and warned him away. But he had ridden into this valley to gather intelligence for his officers. He could not turn back, and respect himself thereafter, as a gentleman and a soldier. Has it been noted that Paradine was a chivalric idealist?

But his horse, whatever its blood and character, lacked such selfless devotion to the cause of State’s Rights. It faltered in its gallop, tried first to turn back, and then to throw Paradine. He cursed it feelingly, fought it with bit, knee and spur, and finally pulled up and dismounted. He drew the reins forward over the tossing gray head, thrust his left arm through the loop, and with his left hand drew the big cap-and-ball revolver from his holster. Thus ready, with shot or saber, he proceeded on foot, and the gray followed him protestingly.

“Come on,” he scolded, very loudly—he was sick of the silence. “I don’t know what I’m getting into here. If I have to retreat, it won’t be on foot.”

Half a mile more, at a brisk walk. A quarter-mile beyond that, more slowly; for still there was no sound or movement from the village. Then the trail joined a wagon track, and Paradine came to the foot of the single street of Channow.

He looked along it, and came to an abrupt halt.

The street, with its shaded yards on either side, was littered with slack blue lumps, each the size of a human body.

The Yankee army, or its advance guard, was there—but fallen and stony still.

“Dead!” muttered Paradine, under his breath.

But who could have killed them? Not his comrades, who had not known where the enemy was. Plague, then? But the most withering plague takes hours, at least, and these had plainly fallen all in the same instant.

Paradine studied the scene. Here had been a proper entry of a strange settlement—first a patrol, watchful and suspicious; then a larger advance party, in two single files, each file hugging one side of the street with eyes and weapons commanding the other side; and, finally, the main body—men, horses and guns, with a baggage train—all as it should be; but now prone and still, like tin soldiers strewn on a floor after a game.

The house at the foot of the street had a hitching-post, cast from iron to represent a Negro boy with a ring in one lifted hand. To that ring Paradine tethered the now almost unmanageable gray. He heard a throbbing roll, as of drums, which he identified as the blood beating in his ears. The saber-hilt was slippery with the sweat of his palm.

He knew that he was afraid, and did not relish the knowledge. Stubbornly he turned his boot-toes forward, and approached the fallen ranks of the enemy. The drums in his ears beat a cadence for his lone march.

He reached and stood over the nearest of the bodies. A blue-bloused infantryman this, melted over on his face, his hands slack upon the musket lying crosswise beneath him. The peaked forage cap had fallen from rumpled, bright hair. The cheek, what Paradine could see of it, was as downy as a peach. Only a kid, young to die; but was he dead?

There was no sign of a wound. Too, a certain waxy finality was lacking in that slumped posture. Paradine extended the point of his saber and gingerly prodded a sun-reddened wrist.

No response. Paradine increased the pressure. A red drop appeared under the point, and grew. Paradine scowled. The boy could bleed. He must be alive, after all.

“Wake up, Yankee,” said Joseph Paradine, and stirred the blue flank with his foot. The flesh yielded, but did not stir otherwise. He turned the body over. A vacant pink face stared up out of eyes that were fixed, but bright. Not death—and not sleep.

Paradine had seen men in a swoon who looked like that. Yet even swooners breathed, and there was not a hair’s line of motion under the dimmed brass buttons.

“Funny,” thought Paradine, not meaning that he was amused. He walked on, because there was nothing left to do. Just beyond that first fallen lad lay the rest of the patrol, still in the diamond-shaped formation they mast have held when awake and erect. One man lay at the right side of the street, another opposite him at the left. The corporal was in the center and, to his rear, another private.

The corporal was, or had been, an excitable man. His hands clutched his musket firmly, his lips drew back from gritted teeth, his eyes were narrow instead of staring. A bit of awareness seemed to remain upon the set, stubbly face. Paradine forbore to prod him with the saber, but stooped and twitched up an eyelid. It snapped back into its squint. The corporal, too, lived but did not move.

“Wake up,” Paradine urged him, as he had urged the boy. “You aren’t dead.” He straightened up, and stared at the more distant and numerous blue bodies in their fallen ranks. “None of you are dead!” he protested at the top of his lungs, unable to beat down his hysteria. “Wake up, Yankees!”

He was pleading with them to rise, even though he would be doomed if they did.

“Yee-hee!” he yelled. “You’re all my prisoners! Up on your feet!”

“Yo’re wastin’ yore breath, son.”

Paradine whirled like a top to face this sudden quiet rebuke.

A man stood in the front yard of a shabby house opposite, leaning on a picket fence. Paradine’s first impression was of noble and vigorous old age, for a mighty cascade of white beard covered the speaker’s chest, and his brow was fringed with thick cottony hair. But next moment Paradine saw that the brow was strangely narrow and sunken, that the mouth in the midst of its hoary ambush hung wryly slack, and that the eyes were bright but empty, like cheap imitation jewels.

The stranger moved slowly along the fence until he came to a gate. He pushed it creakily open, and moved across the dusty road toward Paradine. His body and legs were meager, even for an old man, and he shook and shuffled as though extremely feeble. His clothing was a hodgepodge of filthy tatters.

At any rate, he was no soldier foe. Paradine holstered his revolver, and leaned on his saber. The bearded one came close, making slow circuit of two fallen soldiers that lay in his path. Close at hand, he appeared as tall and gaunt as a flagstaff, and his beard was a fluttering white flag, but not for truce.

“I spoke to ’em,” he said, quietly but definitely, “an’ they dozed off like they was drunk.”

“You mean these troops?”

“Who else, son? They come marchin’ from them hills to the north. The folks scattered outa here like rabbits—all but me. I waited. An’—I put these here Yanks to sleep.”

Hhe reached under his veil of beard, apparently fumbling in the bosom of his ruined shirt. His brown old fork of a hand produced a dingy book, bound in gray paper.

“This does it,” he said.

Paradine looked at the front cover. It bore the woodcut of an owl against a round moon.

The title was in black capitals:

John George Hohman’s
Powwows
or
Long Lost Friend

“Got it a long time back, from a Pennsylvany witch-man.”

Paradine did not understand, and was not sure that he wanted to. He still wondered how so many fighting-men could lie stunned.

“I thought ye was a Yank, an’ I’d missed ye somehow,” the quiet old voice informed him. “That’s a Yank sojer suit, hain’t it? I was goin’ to read ye some sleep words, but ye give the yell, an’ I knew ye was secesh.”

Paradine made a gesture, as though to brush away a troublesome fly. He must investigate further. Up the street he walked, among the prone soldiers.

It took him half an hour to complete his survey, walking from end to end of that unconscious host. He saw infantry, men and officers sprawling together in slack comradeship; three batteries of Parrott guns, still coupled to their limbers, with horses slumped in their harness and riders and drivers fallen in the dust beneath the wheels; a body of cavalry—it should have been scouting out front, thought Paradine professionally—all down and still, like a whole parkful of equestrian statues overturned; wagons; and finally, last of the procession save for a prudently placed rearguard, a little clutter of men in gold braid. He approached the oldest and stoutest of these, noting the two stars on the shoulder straps—a major general.

Paradine knelt, unbuttoned the frock coat, and felt in the pockets. Here were papers. The first he unfolded was the copy of an order:

General T. F. Kottler,
Commanding ——— Division, U.S.A.

General:

You will move immediately, with your entire force, taking up a strong defensive position in the Channow Valley. …

This, then, was Kottler’s Division. Paradine estimated the force as five thousand bluecoats, all veterans by the look of them, but nothing that his own comrades would have feared. He studied the wagon-train hungrily. It was packed with food and clothing, badly needed by the Confederacy. He would do well to get back and report his find. He turned, and saw that the old man with the white beard had followed him along the street. “I reckon,” he said to Paradine, in tones of mild reproach, “ye think I’m a-lyin’ about puttin’ these here Yanks to sleep.”

Paradine smiled at him, as he might have smiled at an importunate child. “I didn’t call you a liar,” he temporized, “and the Yankees are certainly in dreamland. But I think there must be some natural explanation for—”

“Happen I kin show ye better’n tell ye,” cut in the dotard. His paper-bound book was open in his scrawny hands. Stooping close to it, he began rapidly to mumble something. His voice suddenly rose, sounded almost young:

“Now, stand there till I tell ye to move!”

Paradine, standing, fought for explanations. What was happening to him could be believed, was even logical. Mesmerism, scholars called it, or a newer name, hypnotism.

As a boy he, Paradine, had amused himself by holding a hen’s beak to the floor and drawing a chalk line therefrom. The hen could never move until he lifted it away from that mock tether. That was what now befell him, he was sure. His muscles were slack, or perhaps tense; he could not say by the feel. In any case, they were immovable. He could not move eye. He could not loosen grip on his saber-hilt. Yes, hypnotism. If only he rationalized it, he could break the spell.

But he remained motionless, as though he were the little iron figure to which his horse was tethered, yonder at the foot of the street.

The old man surveyed him with a flicker of shrewdness in those bright eyes that had seemed foolish.

“I used only half power. Happen ye kin still hear me. So listen:

“My name’s Teague. I live down yon by the crick. I’m a witch-man, an’ my pappy was a witch-man afore me. He was the seventh son of a seventh son—an’ I was his seventh son. I know conjer stuff—black an’ white, forrard an’ back’ard. It’s my livin’.

“Folks in Channow make fun o’ me, like they did o’ my pappy when he was livin’ but they buy my charms. Things to bring love or hate, if they hanker fer ’em. Cures fer sick hogs an’ calves. Sayin’s to drive away fever. All them things. I done it fer Channow folks all my life.”

It was a proud pronouncement, Paradine realized. Here was the man diligent in business, who could stand before kings. So might speak a statesman who had long served his constituency, or the editor of a paper that had built respectful traditions, or a doctor who had guarded a town’s health for decades, or a blacksmith who took pride in his lifetime of skilled toil. This gaffer who called himself a witch-man considered that he had done service, and was entitled to respect and gratitude. The narrator went on, more grimly:

“Sometimes I been laffed at, an’ told to mind my own bizness. Young ’uns has hooted, an’ throwed stones. I coulda cursed ’em—but I didn’t. Nossir. They’s my friends an’ neighbors—Channow folks. I kep’ back evil from ’em.”

The old figure straightened, the white beard jutted forward. An exultant note crept in.

“But when the Yanks come, an’ everybody run afore ’em but me, I didn’t have no scruples! Invaders! Tyrants! Thievin’ skunks in blue!” Teague sounded like a recruiting officer for a Texas regiment. “I didn’t owe them nothin’—an’ here in the street I faced ’em. I dug out this here little book, an’ I read the sleep words to ’em. See,” and the old hands gestured sweepingly, “they sleep till I tell ’em to wake. If I ever tell ’em!”

Paradine had to believe this tale of occult patriotism. There was nothing else to believe in its place. The old man who called himself Teague smiled twinklingly.

“Yo’re secesh. Ye fight the Yanks. If ye’ll be good, an’ not gimme no argyments, blink yore left eye.”

Power of blinking returned to that lid, and Paradine lowered it submissively.

“Now ye kin move again—I’ll say the words.”

He leafed through the book once more, and read out; “Ye horsemen an’ footmen, conjered here at this time, ye may pass on in the name of …” Paradine did not catch the name, but it had a sound that chilled him. Next instant, motion was restored to his arms and legs. The blood tingled sharply in them, as if they had been asleep.

Teague offered him a hand, and Paradine took it. That hand was froggy cold and soft, for all its boniness.

“Arter this,” decreed Teague, “do what I tell ye, or I’ll read ye somethin’ ye’ll like less.” And he held out the open book significantly.

Paradine saw the page—it bore the number 60 in one corner, and at its top was a heading in capitals: To release spellbound persons. Beneath were the lines with which Teague had set him in motion again, and among them were smudged inky marks.

“You’ve crossed out some words,” Paradine said at once.

“Yep. An’ wrote in others.” Teague held the book closer to him.

Paradine felt yet another chill, and beat down a desire to turn away. He spoke again, because he felt that he should.

“It’s the name of God that you’ve cut out, Teague. Not once, but three times. Isn’t that blasphemy? And you’ve written in—”

“The name of somebody else.” Teague’s beard ruffled into a grin. “Young feller, ye don’t understand. This book was wrote full of the name of God. That name is good—fer some things. But fer curses an’ deaths an’ overthrows, sech as this ’un—well, I changed the names an’ spells by puttin’ in that other name ye saw. An’ it works fine.” He grinned wider as he surveyed the tumbled thousands around them, then shut the book and put it away.

Paradine had been wwell educated. He had read Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, at the University of Virginia, and some accounts of the New England witchcraft cases. He could grasp, though he had never been called upon to consider, the idea of an alliance with evil. All he could reply was:

“I don’t see more than five thousand Yankees in this town. Our boys can whip that many and more, without any spells.”

Teague shook his old head. “Come on, let’s go an’ set on them steps,” he invited, pointing.

The two walked back down the street, entered a yard and dropped down upon a porch. The shady leaves above them hung as silent as chips of stone. Through the fence-pickets showed the blue lumps of quiet that had been a fighting division of Federals. There was no voice, except Teague’s.

“Ye don’t grasp what war means, young feller. Sure, the South is winnin’ now—but to win, men must die. Powder must burn. An’ the South hain’t got men an’ powder enough to keep it up.”

If Paradine had never thought of that before, neither had his superiors, except possibly General Lee. Yet it was plainly true.

Teague extended the argument:

“But if every Yank army was put to sleep, fast’s it got in reach—what then? How’d ye like to lead yore own army into Washington an’ grab ole Abe Lincoln right outen the White House? How’d ye like to be the second greatest man o’ the South?”

“Second greatest man?” echoed Paradine breathlessly, forgetting to fear. He was being tempted as few chivalric idealists can endure. “Second only to—Robert E. Lee!”

The name of his general trembled on his lips. It trembles to this day, on the lips of those who remember. But Teague only snickered, and combed his beard with fingers like skinny sticks.

“Ye don’t ketch on yet. Second man, not to Lee, but to—me, Teague! Fer I’d be a-runnin’ things!”

Paradine, who had seen and heard so much to amaze him during the past hour, had yet the capacity to gasp. His saber was between his knees, and his hands tightened on the hilt until the knuckles turned pale. Teague gave no sign. He went on:

“I hain’t never got no respect here in Channow. Happen it’s time I showed ’em what I can do.” His eyes studied the windrows of men he had caused to drop down like sickled wheat. Creases of proud triumph deepened around his eyes. “We’ll do all the Yanks this way, son. Yore gen’rals hain’t never done nothing like it, have they?”

His generals—Paradine had seen them on occasion. Jackson, named Stonewall for invincibility, kneeling in unashamed public prayer; Jeb Stuart, with his plume and his brown beard, listening to the clang of Sweeney’s banjo; Hood, who outcharged even his wild Texans; Polk blessing the soldiers in the dawn before battle, like a prophet of brave old days; and Lee, the gray knight, at whom Teague had laughed. No, they had never done anything like it. And, if they could, they would not.

“Teague,” said Paradine, “this isn’t right.”

“Not right? Oh, I know what ye mean. Ye don’t like them names I wrote into the Powwows, do ye? But ain’t everything fair in love an’ war?”

Teague laid a persuasive claw on the sleeve of Paradine’s looted jacket. “Listen this oncet. Yore idee is to win with sword an’ gun. Mine’s to win by conjurin’. Which is the quickest way? The easiest way? The only way?”

“To my way of thinking, the only way is by fair fight. God,” pronounced Paradine, as stiffly as Leonidas Polk himself, “watches armies.”

“An’ so does somebody else,” responded Teague. “Watches—an’ listens. Happen he’s listenin’ this minit. Well, lad, I need a sojer to figger army things fer me. You joinin’ me?”

Not only Teague waited for Paradine’s answer. … The young trooper remembered, from Pilgrim’s Progress, what sort of dealings might be fatal. Slowly he got to his feet.

“The South doesn’t need that kind of help,” he said flatly.

“Too late to back out,” Teague told him.

“What do you mean?”

“The help’s been asked fer already, son. An’ it’s been given. A contract, ye might call it. If the contract’s broke—well, happen the other party’ll get mad. They can be worse enemies ’n Yanks.”

Teague, too, rose to his feet. “Too late,” he said again. “That power can sweep armies away fer us. But if we say no—well, it’s been roused up, it’ll still sweep away armies—Southern armies. Ye think I shouldn’t have started sech a thing? But I’ve started it. Can’t turn back now.”

Victory through evil—what would it become in the end? Faust’s story told, and so did the legend of Gilles de Retz, and the play about Macbeth. But there was also the tale of the sorcerer’s apprentice, and of what befell him when he tried to reject the force he had thoughtlessly evoked.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked, through lips that muddled the words.

“Good lad, I thought ye’d see sense. First off, I want yore name to the bargain. Then me ’n’ you can lick the Yanks.”

Lick the Yankees! Paradine remembered a gayly profane catchphrase of the Confederate camp: “Don’t say Yankee, say damned Yankee.” But what about a damned Confederacy? Teague spoke of the day of victory; what of the day of reckoning?

What payment would this ally ask in the end?

Again Faust popped into his mind. He imagined the Confederacy as a Faust among the nations, devil-lifted, devil-nurtured—and devil-doomed, by the connivance of one Joseph Paradine.

Better disaster, in the way of man’s warfare.

The bargain was offered him for all the South. For all the South he must reject, completely and finally.

Aloud he said: “My name? Signed to something?”

“Right here’ll do.”

Once more Teague brought forth the Powwows book which he had edited so strangely. “Here, son, on this back page—in blood.”

Paradine bowed his head. It was to conceal the look in his eyes, and he hoped to look as though he acquiesced. He drew his saber, passed it to his left hand. Upon its tip he pressed his right forefinger. A spot of dull pain, and a drop of blood creeping forth, as had appeared on the wrist of the ensorcelled boy lying yonder among the Yankees in the street.

“That’ll be enough to sign with,” approved Teague.

He flattened out the book, exposing the rear flyleaf. Paradine extended his reddened forefinger. It stained the rough white paper.

“J for Joseph,” dictated Teague. “Yep, like that—”

Paradine galvanized into action. His bloody right hand seized the book, wrenching it from the trembling fingers. With the saber in his left hand, he struck.

A pretty stroke for even a practised swordsman; the honed edge of the steel found the shaggy side of Teague’s scrawny neck. Paradine felt bone impeding his powerful drawing slash. Then he felt it no longer. The neck had sliced in two, and for a moment Teague’s head hung free in the air, like a lantern on a wire.

The bright eyes fixed Paradine’s, the mouth fell open in the midst of the beard, trying to speak a word that would not come. Then it fell, bounced like a ball, and rolled away. The headless trunk stood on braced feet, crumpling slowly. Paradine stepped away from it, and it collapsed upon the steps of the house.

Again there was utter silence in the town and valley of Channow. The blue soldiers did not budge where they lay. Paradine knew that he alone moved and breathed and saw—no, not entirely alone. His horse was tethered at the end of the street.

He flung away his saber and ran, ashamed no more of his dread. Reaching the gray, he found his fingers shaky, but he wrenched loose the knotted reins. Flinging himself into the saddle, he rode away across the level and up the slope.

The pines sighed gently, and that sound gave him comfort after so much soundlessness.

He dismounted, his knees swaying as though their tendons had been cut, and studied the earth. Here were the footprints of Danger’s horse. Here also was a cleft stick, and in it a folded scrap of paper, a note. He lifted it, and read the penciled scrawl:

Dear frend Joe, you ant com back so I left like you said to bring up the boys. I hope your alright & if the Yankies have got you well get you back.

L. Dauger.

His comrades were coming, then, with gun and sword. They expected to meet Union soldiers. Paradine gazed back into the silence-brimmed valley, then at what he still held in his right hand. It was the Poiu-Wows book, marked with a wet capital J in his own blood.

What had Teague insisted? The one whose name had been invoked would be fatally angry if his help were refused. But Paradine was going to refuse it.

He turned to Page 60. His voice was shaky, but be managed to read aloud:

“Ye horsemen and footmen, conjured here at this time, ye may pass on in the name of”—he faltered, but disregarded the ink-blotting, and the substituted names—“of Jesus Christ, and through the word of God.”

Again he gulped, and finished. “Ye may now ride on and pass.”

From under his feet burst a dry, startling thunder of sound, a partridge rising to the sky. Farther down the slope a crow took wing, cawing querulously. Wind wakened in the Channow Valley; Paradine saw the distant trees of the town stir with it. Then a confused din came to his ears, as though something besides wind was wakening.

After a moment he heard the notes of a bugle, shrill and tremulous, sounding an alarm.

Paradine struck fire, and built it up with fallen twigs. Into the hottest heart of it he thrust Teague’s book of charms. The flame gnawed eagerly at it, the pages crumpled and fanned and blackened with the heat. For a moment he saw, standing out among charred fragments, a bloodred J, his writing, as though it fought for life. Then it, too, was consumed, and there were only ashes. Before the last red tongue subsided, his ears picked up a faint rebel yell, and afar into the valley rode Confederate cavalry.

He put his gray to the gallop, got down the slope and joined his regiment before it reached the town. On the street a Union line was forming. There was hot, fierce fighting, such as had scattered and routed many a Northern force.

But, at the end of it, the Southerners ran like foxes before hounds, and those who escaped counted themselves lucky.

In his later garrulous years, Joseph Paradine was apt to say that the war was lost, not at Antietam or Gettysburg, but at a little valley hamlet called Channow. Refusal of a certain alliance, he would insist, was the cause; that offered ally fought thenceforth against the South.

But nobody paid attention, except to laugh or to pity. So many veterans go crazy.

The Witch’s Cat

Old Jael Bettiss, who lived in the hollow among the cypresses, was not a real witch.

It makes no difference that folk thought she was, and walked fearfully wide of her shadow. Nothing can be proved by the fact that she was as disgustingly ugly without as she was wicked within. It is quite irrelevant that evil was her study and profession and pleasure. She was no witch; she only pretended to be.

Jael Bettiss knew that all laws providing for the punishment of witches had been repealed, or at the least forgotten. As to being feared and hated, that was meat and drink to Jael Bettiss, living secretly alone in the hollow.

The house and the hollow belonged to a kindly old villager, who had been elected marshal and was too busy to look after his property. Because he was easygoing and perhaps a little daunted, he let Jael Bettiss live there rent-free. The house was no longer snug; the back of its roof was broken in, the eaves drooped slackly. At some time or other the place had been painted brown, before that with ivory black. Now both coats of color peeled away in huge flakes, making the clapboards seem scrofulous. The windows had been broken in every small, grubby pane, and mended with coarse brown paper, so that they were like cast and blurred eyes. Behind was the muddy, bramble-choked back yard, and behind that yawned the old quarry, now abandoned and full of black water. As for the inside—but few ever saw it.

Jael Bettiss did not like people to come into her house. She always met callers on the old cracked doorstep, draped in a cloak of shadowy black, with gray hair straggling, her nose as hooked and sharp as the beak of a buzzard, her eyes filmy and sore-looking, her wrinkle-bordered mouth always grinning and showing her yellow, chisel-shaped teeth.

The nearby village was an old-fashioned place, with stone flags instead of concrete for pavements, and the villagers were the simplest of men and women. From them Jael Bettiss made a fair living, by selling love philtres, or herbs to cure sickness, or charms to ward off bad luck. When she wanted extra money, she would wrap her old black cloak about her and, tramping along a country road, would stop at a cow-pen and ask the farmer what he would do if his cows went dry. The farmer, worried, usually came at dawn next day to her hollow and bought a good-luck charm. Occasionally the cows would go dry anyway, by accident of nature, and their owner would pay more and more, until their milk returned to them.

Now and then, when Jael Bettiss came to the door, there came with her the gaunt black cat, Gib.

Gib was not truly black, any more than Jael Bettiss was truly a witch. He had been born with white markings at muzzle, chest and forepaws, so that he looked to be in full evening dress. Left alone, he would have grown fat and fluffy. But Jael Bettiss, who wanted a fearsome pet, kept all his white spots smeared with thick soot, and underfed him to make him look rakish and lean.

On the night of the full moon, she would drive poor Gib from her door. He would wander to the village in search of food, and would wail mournfully in the yards. Awakened householders would angrily throw boots or pans or sticks of kindling. Often Gib was hit, and his cries were sharpened by pain. When that happened, Jael Bettiss took care to be seen next morning with a bandage on head or wrist. Some of the simplest villagers thought that Gib was really the old woman, magically transformed. Her reputation grew, as did Gib’s unpopularity. But Gib did not deserve mistrust—like all cats, he was a practical philosopher, who wanted to be comfortable and quiet and dignified. At bottom, he was amiable. Like all cats, too, he loved his home above all else; and the house in the hollow, be it ever so humble and often cruel, was home. It was unthinkable to him that he might live elsewhere.

In the village he had two friends—black-eyed John Frey, the storekeeper’s son, who brought the mail to and from the county seat, and Ivy Hill, pretty blond daughter of the town marshal, the same town marshal who owned the hollow and let Jael Bettiss live in the old house. John Frey and Ivy Hill were so much in love with each other that they loved everything else, even black-stained, hungry Gib. He was grateful; if he had been able, he would have loved them in return. But his little heart had room for one devotion only, and that was given to the house in the hollow.

One day, Jael Bettiss slouched darkly into old Mr. Frey’s store, and up to the counter that served for postoffice. Leering, she gave John Frey a letter. It was directed to a certain little-known publisher, asking for a certain little-known book. Several days later, she appeared again, received a parcel, and bore it to her home.

In her gloomy, secret parlor, she unwrapped her purchase. It was a small, drab volume, with no title on cover or back. Sitting at the rickety table, she began to read. All evening and most of the night she read, forgetting to give Gib his supper, though he sat hungrily at her feet.

At length, an hour before dawn, she finished. Laughing loudly and briefly, she turned her beak-nose toward the kerosene lamp on the table. From the book she read aloud two words. The lamp went out, though she had not blown at it. Jael Bettiss spoke one commanding word more, and the lamp flamed alight again.

“At last!” she cried out in shrill exultation, and grinned down at Gib. Her lips drew back from her yellow chisels of teeth. “At last!” she crowed again. “Why don’t you speak to me, you little brute? … Why don’t you, indeed?”

She asked that final question as though she had been suddenly inspired. Quickly she glanced through the back part of the book, howled with laughter over something she found there, then sprang up and scuttled like a big, filthy crab into the dark, windowless cell that was her kitchen. There she mingled salt and malt in the palm of her skinny right hand. After that, she rummaged out a bundle of dried herbs, chewed them fine and spat them into the mixture. Stirring again with her forefinger, she returned to the parlor. Scanning the book to refresh her memory, she muttered a nasty little rime. Finally she dashed the mess suddenly upon Gib.

He retreated, shaking himself, outraged and startled. In a corner he sat down, and bent his head to lick the smeared fragments of the mixture away. But they revolted his tongue and palate, and he paused in the midst of this chore, so important to cats; and meanwhile Jael Bettiss yelled, “Speak!”

Gib crouched and blinked, feeling sick. His tongue came out and steadied his lips. Finally he said: “I want something to eat.”

His voice was small and high, like a little child’s, but entirely understandable. Jael Bettiss was so delighted that she laughed and clapped her bony knees with her hands, in self-applause.

“It worked!” she cried. “No more humbug about me, you understand? I’m a real witch at last, and not a fraud!”

Gib found himself able to understand all this, more clearly than he had ever understood human affairs before. “I want something to eat,” he said again, more definitely than before. “I didn’t have any supper, and it’s nearly—”

“Oh, stow your gab!” snapped his mistress. “This book, crammed with knowledge and strength, that made me able to do it. I’ll never be without it again, and it’ll teach me all the things I’ve only guessed at and mumbled about. I’m a real witch now, I say. And if you don’t think I’ll make those ignorant sheep of villagers realize it—”

Once more she went off into gales of wild, cracked mirth, and threw a dish at Gib. He darted away into a corner just in time, and the missile crashed into blue-and-white china fragments against the wall. But Jael Bettiss read aloud from her book an impressive gibberish, and the dish reformed itself on the floor; the bits crept together and joined and the cracks disappeared, as trickling drops of water form into a pool. And finally, when the witch’s twig-like forefinger beckoned, the dish floated upward like a leaf in a breeze and set itself gently back on the table. Gib watched warily.

“That’s small to what I shall do hereafter,” swore Jael Bettiss.

When next the mail was distributed at the general store, a dazzling stranger appeared.

She wore a cloak, an old-fashioned black coat, but its drapery did not conceal the tall perfection of her form. As for her face, it would have stirred interest and admiration in larger and more sophisticated gatherings than the knot of letter-seeking villagers. Its beauty was scornful but inviting, classic but warm, with something in it of Grecian sculpture and Oriental allure. If the nose was cruel, it was straight; if the lips were sullen, they were full; if the forehead was a suspicion low, it was white and smooth. Thick, thunder-black hair swept up from that forehead, and backward to a knot at the neck. The eyes glowed with strange, hot lights, and wherever they turned they pierced and captivated.

People moved away to let her have a clear, sweeping pathway forward to the counter. Until this stranger had entered, Ivy Hill was the loveliest person present; now she looked only modest and fresh and blond in her starched gingham, and worried to boot. As a matter of fact. Ivy Hill’s insides felt cold and topsy-turvy, because she saw how fascinated was the sudden attention of John Frey.

“Is there,” asked the newcomer in a deep, creamy voice, “any mail for me?”

“Wh-what name, ma’am?” asked John Frey, his brown young cheeks turning full crimson.

“Bettiss. Jael Bettiss.”

He began to fumble through the sheaf of envelopes, with hands that shook. “Are you,” he asked, “any relation to the old lady of that name, the one who lives in the hollow?”

“Yes, of a sort.” She smiled a slow, conquering smile. “She’s my—aunt. Yes. Perhaps you see the family resemblance?” Wider and wider grew the smile with which she assaulted John Frey. “If there isn’t any mail,” she went on, “I would like a stamp. A one-cent stamp.”

Turning to his little metal box on the shelf behind, John Frey tore a single green stamp from the sheet. His hand shook still more as he gave it to the customer and received in exchange a copper cent.

There was really nothing exceptional about the appearance of that copper cent. It looked brown and a little worn, with Lincoln’s head on it, and a date—1917. But John Frey felt a sudden glow in the hand that took it, a glow that shot along his arm and into his heart. He gazed at the coin as if he had never seen its like before. And he put it slowly into his pocket, a different pocket from the one in which he usually kept change, and placed another coin in the till to pay for the stamp. Poor Ivy Hill’s blue eyes grew round and downright miserable. Plainly he meant to keep that copper piece as a souvenir. But John Frey gazed only at the stranger, raptly, as though he were suddenly stunned or hypnotized.

The dark, sullen beauty drew her cloak more tightly around her, and moved regally out of the store and away toward the edge of town.

As she turned up the brush-hidden trail to the hollow, a change came. Not that her step was less young and free, her figure less queenly, her eyes dimmer or her beauty short of perfect. All these were as they had been; but her expression became set and grim, her body tense and her head high and truculent. It was as though, beneath that young loveliness, lurked an old and evil heart—which was precisely what did lurk there, it does not boot to conceal. But none saw except Gib, the black cat with soot-covered white spots, who sat on the doorstep of the ugly cottage. Jael Bettiss thrust him aside with her foot and entered.

In the kitchen she filled a tin basin from a wooden bucket, and threw into the water a pinch of coarse green powder with an unpleasant smell. As she stirred it in with her hands, they seemed to grow skinny and harsh. Then she threw great palmfuls of the liquid into her face and over her head, and other changes came. …

The woman who returned to the front door, where Gib watched with a cat’s apprehensive interest, was hideous old Jael Bettiss, whom all the village knew and avoided.

“He’s trapped,” she shrilled triumphantly. “That penny, the one I soaked for three hours in a love-philtre, trapped him the moment he touched it!” She stumped to the table, and patted the book as though it were a living, lovable thing.

“You taught me,” she crooned to it. “You’re winning me the love of John Frey!” She paused, and her voice grew harsh again. “Why not? I’m old and ugly and queer, but I can love, and John Frey is the handsomest man in the village!”

The next day she went to the store again, in her new and dazzling person as a dark, beautiful girl. Gib, left alone in the hollow, turned over in his mind the things that he had heard. The new gift of human speech had brought with it, of necessity, a human quality of reasoning; but his viewpoint and his logic were as strongly feline as ever.

Jael Bettiss’ dark love that lured John Frey promised no good to Gib. There would be plenty of trouble, he was inclined to think, and trouble was something that all sensible cats avoided. He was wise now, but he was weak. What could he do against danger? And his desires, as they had been since kittenhood, were food and warmth and a cozy sleeping-place, and a little respectful affection. Just now he was getting none of the four.

He thought also of Ivy Hill. She liked Gib, and often had shown it. If she won John Frey despite the witch’s plan, the two would build a house all full of creature comforts—cushions, open fires, probably fish and chopped liver. Gib’s tongue caressed his soot-stained lips at the savory thought. It would be good to have a home with Ivy Hill and John Frey, if once he was quit of Jael Bettiss. …

But he put the thought from him. The witch had never held his love and loyalty. That went to the house in the hollow, his home since the month that he was born. Even magic had not taught him how to be rid of that cat-instinctive obsession for his own proper dwelling-place. The sinister, strife-sodden hovel would always call and claim him, would draw him back from the warmest fire, the softest bed, the most savory food in the world. Only John Howard Payne could have appreciated Gib’s yearnings to the full, and he died long ago, in exile from the home he loved.

When Jael Bettiss returned, she was in a fine trembling rage. Her real self shone through the glamor of her disguise, like murky fire through a thin porcelain screen.

Gib was on the doorstep again, and tried to dodge away as she came up, but her enchantments, or something else, had made Jael Bettiss too quick even for a cat. She darted out a hand and caught him by the scruff of the neck.

“Listen to me,” she said, in a voice as deadly as the trickle of poisoned water. “You understand human words. You can talk, and you can hear what I say. You can do what I say, too.” She shook him, by way of emphasis. “Can’t you do what I say?”

“Yes,” said Gib weakly, convulsed with fear.

“All right, I have a job for you. And mind you do it well, or else—” She broke off and shook him again, letting him imagine what would happen if he disobeyed.

“Yes,” said Gib again, panting for breath in her tight grip. “What’s it about?”

“It’s about that little fool. Ivy Hill. She’s not quite out of his heart. … Go to the village tonight,” ordered Jael Bettiss, “and to the house of the marshal. Steal something that belongs to Ivy Hill.”

“Steal something?”

“Don’t echo me, as if you were a silly parrot.” She let go of him, and hurried back to the book that was her constant study. “Bring me something that Ivy Hill owns and touches—and be back here with it before dawn.”

Gib carried out her orders. Shortly after sundown he crept through the deepened dusk to the home of Marshal Hill. Doubly black with the soot habitually smeared upon him by Jael Bettiss, he would have been almost invisible, even had anyone been on guard against his coming. But nobody watched; the genial old man sat on the front steps, talking to his daughter.

“Say,” the father teased, “isn’t young Johnny Frey coming over here tonight, as usual?”

“I don’t know, daddy,” said Ivy Hill wretchedly.

“What’s that daughter?” The marshal sounded surprised. “Is there anything gone wrong between you two young ’uns?”

“Perhaps not, but—oh, daddy, there’s a new girl come to town—”

And Ivy Hill burst into tears, groping dolefully on the step beside her for her little wadded handkerchief. But she could not find it.

For Gib, stealing near, had caught it up in his mouth and was scampering away toward the edge of town, and beyond to the house in the hollow.

Meanwhile, Jael Bettiss worked hard at a certain project of wax-modeling. Any witch, or student of witchcraft, would have known at once why she did this.

After several tries, she achieved something quite interesting and even clever—a little female figure, that actually resembled Ivy Hill.

Jael Bettiss used the wax of three candles to give it enough substance and proportion. To make it more realistic, she got some fresh, pale-gold hemp, and of this made hair, like the wig of a blond doll, for the wax head. Drops of blue ink served for eyes, and a blob of berry-juice for the red mouth. All the while she worked, Jael Bettiss was muttering and mumbling words and phrases she had gleaned from the rearward pages of her book.

When Gib brought in the handkerchief, Jael Bettiss snatched it from his mouth, with a grunt by way of thanks. With rusty scissors and coarse white thread, she fashioned for the wax figure a little dress. It happened that the handkerchief was of gingham, and so the garment made all the more striking the puppet’s resemblance to Ivy Hill.

“You’re a fine one!” tittered the witch, propping her finished figure against the lamp. “You’d better be scared!”

For it happened that she had worked into the waxen face an expression of terror. The blue ink of the eyes made wide round blotches, a stare of agonized fear; and the berry-juice mouth seemed to tremble, to plead shakily for mercy.

Again Jael Bettiss refreshed her memory of goetic spells by poring over the back of the book, and after that she dug from the bottom of an old pasteboard box a handful of rusty pins. She chuckled over them, so that one would think triumph already hers. Laying the puppet on its back, so that the lamplight fell full upon it, she began to recite a spell.

“I have made my wish before,” she said in measured tones. “I will make it now. And there was never a day that I did not see my wish fulfilled.” Simple, vague—but how many have died because those words were spoken in a certain way over images of them?

The witch thrust a pin into the breast of the little wax figure, and drove it all the way in, with a murderous pressure of her thumb. Another pin she pushed into the head, another into an arm, another into a leg; and so on, until the gingham-clad puppet was fairly studded with transfixing pins.

“Now,” she said, “we shall see what we shall see.”

Morning dawned, as clear and golden as though wickedness had never been born into the world. The mysterious new paragon of beauty—not a young man of the village but mooned over her, even though she was the reputed niece and namesake of that unsavory old vagabond, Jael Bettiss—walked into the general store to make purchases. One delicate pink ear turned to the gossip of the housewives.

Wasn’t it awful, they were agreeing, how poor little Ivy Hill was suddenly sick almost to death—she didn’t seem to know her father or her friends. Not even Doctor Melcher could find out what was the matter with her. Strange that John Frey was not interested in her troubles; but John Frey sat behind the counter, slumped on his stool like a mud idol, and his eyes lighted up only when they spied lovely young Jael Bettiss with her market basket.

When she had heard enough, the witch left the store and went straight to the town marshal’s house. There she spoke gravely and sorrowfully about how she feared for the sick girl, and was allowed to visit Ivy Hill in her bedroom. To the father and the doctor, it seemed that the patient grew stronger and felt less pain while Jael Bettiss remained to wish her a quick recovery; but, not long after this new acquaintance departed. Ivy Hill grew worse. She fainted, and recovered only to vomit.

And she vomited—pins, rusty pins. Something like that happened in old Salem Village, and earlier still in Scotland, before the grisly cult of North Berwick was literally burned out. But Doctor Melcher, a more modern scholar, had never seen or heard of anything remotely resembling Ivy Hill’s disorder.

So it went, for three full days. Gib, too, heard the doleful gossip as he slunk around the village to hunt for food and to avoid Jael Bettiss, who did not like him near when she did magic. Ivy Hill was dying, and he mourned her, as for the boons of fish and fire and cushions and petting that might have been his. He knew, too, that he was responsible for her doom and his loss—that handkerchief that he had stolen had helped Jael Bettiss to direct her spells.

But philosophy came again to his aid. If Ivy Hill died, she died. Anyway, he had never been given the chance to live as her pensioner and pet. He was not even sure that he would have taken the chance—thinking of it, he felt strong, accustomed clamps upon his heart. The house in the hollow was his home forever. Elsewhere he’d be an exile.

Nothing would ever root it out of his feline soul.

On the evening of the third day, witch and cat faced each other across the tabletop in the old house in the hollow.

“They’ve talked loud enough to make his dull ears hear,” grumbled the fearful old woman—with none but Gib to see her, she had washed away the disguising enchantment that, though so full of lure, seemed to be a burden upon her. “John Frey has agreed to take Ivy Hill out in his automobile. The doctor thinks that the fresh air, and John Frey’s company, will make her feel better—but it won’t. It’s too late. She’ll never return from that drive.”

She took up the pin-pierced wax image of her rival, rose and started toward the kitchen.

“What are you going to do?” Gib forced himself to ask.

“Do?” repeated Jael Bettiss, smiling murderously. “I’m going to put an end to that baby-faced chit—but why are you so curious? Get out, with your prying!”

And, snarling curses and striking with her claw-like hands, she made him spring down from his chair and run out of the house. The door slammed, and he crouched in some brambles and watched. No sound, and at the half-blinded windows no movement; but, after a time, smoke began to coil upward from the chimney. Its first puffs were dark and greasy-looking. Then it turned dull gray, then white, then blue as indigo. Finally it vanished altogether.

When Jael Bettiss opened the door and came out, she was once more in the semblance of a beautiful dark girl. Yet Gib recognized a greater terror about her than ever before.

“You be gone from here when I get back,” she said to him.

“Gone?” stammered Gib, his little heart turning cold. “What do you mean?”

She stooped above him, like a threatening bird of prey.

“You be gone,” she repeated. “If I ever see you again. I’ll kill you—or I’ll make my new husband kill you.”

He still could not believe her. He shrank back, and his eyes turned mournfully to the old house that was the only thing he loved.

“You’re the only witness to the things I’ve done,” Jael Bettiss continued. “Nobody would believe their ears if a cat started telling tales, but anyway, I don’t want any trace of you around. If you leave, they’ll forget that I used to be a witch. So run!”

She turned away. Her mutterings were now only her thoughts aloud:

“If my magic works—and it always works—that car will find itself idling around through the hill road to the other side of the quarry. John Frey will stop there. And so will Ivy Hill—forever.”

Drawing her cloak around her, she stalked purposefully toward the old quarry behind the house.

Left by himself, Gib lowered his lids and let his yellow eyes grow dim and deep with thought. His shrewd beast’s mind pawed and probed at this final wonder and danger that faced him and John Frey and Ivy Hill.

He must run away if he would live. The witch’s house in the hollow, that had never welcomed him, now threatened him. No more basking on the doorstep, no more ambushing wood-mice among the brambles, no more dozing by the kitchen fire. Nothing for Gib henceforth but strange, forbidding wilderness, and scavenger’s food, and no shelter, not on the coldest night. The village? But his only two friends, John Frey and Ivy Hill, were being taken from him by the magic of Jael Bettiss and her book. …

That book had done this. That book must undo it. There was no time to lose.

The door was not quite latched, and he nosed it open, despite the groans of its hinges. Hurrying in, he sprang up on the table.

It was gloomy in that tree-invested house, even for Gib’s sharp eyes. Therefore, in a trembling fear almost too big for his little body, he spoke a word that Jael Bettiss had spoken, on her first night of power. As had happened then, so it happened now; the dark lamp glowed alight.

Gib pawed at the closed book, and contrived to lift its cover. Pressing it open with one front foot, with the other he painstakingly turned leaves, more leaves, and more yet. Finally he came to the page he wanted.

Not that he could read; and, in any case, the characters were strange in their shapes and combinations. Yet, if one looked long enough and levelly enough—even though one were a cat, and afraid—they made sense, conveyed intelligence.

And so into the mind of Gib, beating down his fears, there stole a phrase:

Beware of mirrors. …

So that was why Jael Bettiss never kept a mirror—not even now, when she could assume such dazzling beauty.

Beware of mirrors, the book said to Gib, for they declare the truth, and truth is fatal to sorcery. Beware, also, of crosses, which defeat all spells. …

That was definite inspiration. He moved back from the book, and let it snap shut. Then, pushing with head and paws, he coaxed it to the edge of the table and let it fall. Jumping down after it, he caught a corner of the book in his teeth and dragged it to the door, more like a retriever than a cat. When he got it into the yard, into a place where the earth was soft, he dug furiously until he had made a hole big enough to contain the volume. Then, thrusting it in, he covered it up.

Nor was that all his effort, so far as the book was concerned. He trotted a little way off to where lay some dry, tough twigs under the cypress trees. To the little grave he bore first one, then another of these, and laid them across each other, in the form of an X. He pressed them well into the earth, so that they would be hard to disturb. Perhaps he would keep an eye on that spot henceforth, after he had done the rest of the things in his mind, to see that the cross remained. And, though he acted thus only by chance reasoning, all the demonologists, even the Reverend Montague Summers, would have nodded approval. Is this not the way to foil the black wisdom of the Grand Albert? Did not Prospero thus inter his grimoires, in the fifth act of The Tempest?

Now back to the house once more, and into the kitchen. It was even darker than the parlor, but Gib could make out a basin on a stool by the moldy wall, and smelled an ugly pungency—Jael Bettiss had left her mixture of powdered water after last washing away her burden of false beauty.

Gib’s feline nature rebelled at a wetting; his experience of witchcraft bade him be wary, but he rose on his hind legs and with his forepaws dragged at the basin’s edge. It tipped and toppled. The noisome fluid drenched him. Wheeling, he ran back into the parlor, but paused on the doorstep. He spoke two more words that he remembered from Jael Bettiss. The lamp went out again.

And now he dashed around the house and through the brambles and to the quarry beyond.

It lay amid uninhabited wooded hills, a wide excavation from which had once been quarried all the stones for the village houses and pavements. Now it was full of water, from many thaws and torrents. Almost at its lip was parked John Frey’s touring-car, with the top down, and beside it he lolled, slack-faced and dreamy. At his side, cloak-draped and enigmatically queenly, was Jael Bettiss, her back to the quarry, never more terrible or handsome. John Frey’s eyes were fixed dreamily upon her, and her eyes were fixed commandingly on the figure in the front seat of the car—a slumped, defeated figure, hard to recognize as poor sick Ivy Hill.

“Can you think of no way to end all this pain. Miss Ivy?” the witch was asking. Though she did not stir, nor glance behind her, it was as though she had gestured toward the great quarry-pit, full to unknown depths with black, still water. The sun, at the very point of setting, made angry red lights on the surface of that stagnant pond.

“Go away,” sobbed Ivy Hill, afraid without knowing why. “Please, please!”

“I’m only trying to help,” said Jael Bettiss. “Isn’t that so, John?”

“That’s so, Ivy,” agreed John, like a little boy who is prompted to an unfamiliar recitation. “She’s only trying to help.”

Gib, moving silently as fate, crept to the back of the car. None of the three human beings, so intent upon each other, saw him.

“Get out of the car,” persisted Jael Bettiss. “Get out, and look into the water. You will forget your pain.”

“Yes, yes,” chimed in John Frey, mechanically. “You will forget your pain.”

Gib scrambled stealthily to the running-board, then over the side of the car and into the rear seat. He found what he had hoped to find. Ivy Hill’s purse—and open.

He pushed his nose into it. Tucked into a little side-pocket was a hard, flat rectangle, about the size and shape of a visiting-card. All normal girls carry mirrors in their purse—all mirrors show the truth. Gib clamped the edge with his mouth, and struggled to drag the thing free.

“Miss Ivy,” Jael Bettiss was commanding, “get out of this car, and come and look into the water of the quarry.”

No doubt what would happen if once Ivy Hill should gaze into that shiny black abyss; but she bowed her head, in agreement or defeat, and began slowly to push aside the catch of the door.

Now or never, thought Gib. He made a little noise in his throat, and sprang up on the side of the car next to Jael Bettiss. His black-stained face and yellow eyes were not a foot from her.

She alone saw him; Ivy Hill was too sick, John Frey too dull. “What are you doing here?” she snarled, like a bigger and fiercer cat than he; but he moved closer still, holding up the oblong in his teeth. Its back was uppermost, covered with imitation leather, and hid the real nature of it. Jael Bettiss was mystified, for once in her relationship with Gib. She took the thing from him, turned it over, and saw a reflection.

She screamed.

The other two looked up, horrified through their stupor. The scream that Jael Bettiss uttered was not deep and rich and young; it was the wild, cracked cry of a terrified old woman.

“I don’t look like that,” she choked out, and drew back from the car. “Not old—ugly—”

Gib sprang at her face. With all four claw-bristling feet he seized and clung to her. Again Jael Bettiss screamed, flung up her hands, and tore him away from his hold; but his soggy fur had smeared the powdered water upon her face and head.

Though he fell to earth, Gib twisted in midair and landed upright. He had one glimpse of his enemy. Jael Bettiss, no mistake—but a Jael Bettiss with hooked beak, rheumy eyes, hideous wry mouth and yellow chisel teeth—Jael Bettiss exposed for what she was, stripped of her lying mask of beauty!

And she drew back a whole staggering step. Rocks were just behind her. Gib saw, and flung himself. Like a flash he clawed his way up her cloak, and with both forepaws ripped at the ugliness he had betrayed. He struck for his home that was forbidden him—Marco Bozzaris never strove harder for Greece, nor Stonewall Jackson for Virginia.

Jael Bettiss screamed yet again, a scream loud and full of horror. Her feet had slipped on the edge of the abyss. She flung out her arms, the cloak flapped from them like frantic wings. She fell, and Gib fell with her, still tearing and fighting.

The waters of the quarry closed over them both.

Gib thought that it was a long way back to the surface, and a longer way to shore. But he got there, and scrambled out with the help of projecting rocks. He shook his drenched body, climbed back into the car and sat upon the rear seat. At least Jael Bettiss would no longer drive him from the home he loved. He’d find food some way, and take it back there each day to eat. …

With tongue and paws he began to rearrange his sodden fur.

John Frey, clear-eyed and wide awake, was leaning in and talking to Ivy Hill. As for her, she sat up straight, as though she had never known a moment of sickness.

“But just what did happen?” she was asking.

John Frey shook his head, though all the stupidity was gone from his face and manner. “I don’t quite remember. I seem to have wakened from a dream. But are you all right, darling?”

“Yes, I’m all right.” She gazed toward the quarry, and the black water that had already subsided above what it had swallowed. Her eyes were puzzled, but not frightened. “I was dreaming, too,” she said. “Let’s not bother about it.”

She lifted her gaze, and cried out with joy. “There’s that old house that daddy owns. Isn’t it interesting?”

John Frey looked, too. “Yes. The old witch has gone away—I seem to have heard she did.”

Ivy Hill was smiling with excitement. “Then I have an inspiration. Let’s get daddy to give it to us. And we’ll paint it over and fix it up, and then—” She broke off, with a cry of delight. “I declare, there’s a cat in the car with me!”

It was the first she had known of Gib’s presence.

John Frey stared at Gib. He seemed to have wakened only the moment before. “Yes, and isn’t he a thin one? But he’ll be pretty when he gets through cleaning himself. I think I see a white shirtfront.”

Ivy Hill put out a hand and scratched Gib behind the ear. “He’s bringing us good luck, I think. John, let’s take him to live with us when we have the house fixed up and move in.”

“Why not?” asked her lover. He was gazing at Gib. “He looks as if he was getting ready to speak.”

But Gib was not getting ready to speak. The power of speech was gone from him, along with Jael Bettiss and her enchantments. But he understood, in a measure, what was being said about him and the house in the hollow. There would be new life there, joyful and friendly this time. And he would be a part of it, forever, and of his loved home.

He could only purr to show his relief and gratitude.

The Song of the Slaves

Gender paused at the top of the bald rise, mopped his streaming red forehead beneath the wide hat-brim, and gazed backward at his forty-nine captives. Naked and black, they shuffled upward from the narrow, ancient slave trail through the jungle. Forty-nine men, seized by Gender’s own hand and collared to a single long chain, destined for his own plantation across the sea. … Gender grinned in his lean, drooping mustache, a mirthless grin of greedy triumph.

For years he had dreamed and planned for this adventure, as other men dream and plan for European tours, holy pilgrimages, or returns to beloved birthplaces. He had told himself that it was intensely practical and profitable. Slaves passed through so many hands—the raider, the caravaner, the seashore factor, the slaver captain, the dealer in New Orleans or Havana or at home in Charleston. Each greedy hand clutched a rich profit, and all profits must come eventually from the price paid by the planter. But he, Gender, had come to Africa himself, in his own ship; with a dozen staunch ruffians from Benguela he had penetrated the Bihé-Bailundu country, had sacked a village and taken these forty-nine upstanding natives between dark and dawn. A single neck-shackle on his long chain remained empty, and he might fill even that before he came to his ship. By the Lord, he was making money this way, fairly coining it—and money was worth the making, to a Charleston planter in 1853.

So he reasoned, and so he actually believed, but the real joy to him was hidden in the darkest nook of his heart. He had conceived the raider-plan because of a nature that fed on savagery and mastery. A man less fierce and cruel might have been satisfied with hunting lions or elephants, but Gender must hunt men. As a matter of fact, the money made or saved by the journey would be little, if it was anything. The satisfaction would be tremendous. He would broaden his thick chest each day as he gazed out over his lands and saw there his slaves hoeing seashore cotton or pruning indigo; his forty-nine slaves, caught and shipped and trained by his own big, hard hands, more indicative of assured conquest than all the horned or fanged heads that ever passed through the shops of all the taxidermists.

Something hummed in his ears, like a rhythmic swarm of bees. Men were murmuring a song under their breath. It was the long string of pinch-faced slaves. Gender stared at them, and mouthed one of the curses he always kept at tongue’s end.

“Silva!” he called.

The lanky Portuguese who strode free at the head of the file turned aside and stood before Gender. “Patrao?” he inquired respectfully, smiling teeth gleaming in his walnut face.

“What are those men singing?” demanded Gender. “I didn’t think they had anything to sing about.”

“A slave song, Patrao.” Silva’s tapering hand, with the silver bracelet at its wrist, made a graceful gesture of dismissal. “It is nothing. One of the things that natives make up and sing as they go.”

Gender struck his boot with his coiled whip of hippopotamus hide. The afternoon sun, sliding down toward the shaggy jungle-tops, kindled harsh pale lights in his narrow blue eyes. “How does the song go?” he persisted.

The two fell into step beside the caravan as, urged by a dozen red-capped drivers, it shambled along the trail. “It is only a slave song, patrao,” said Silva once again. “It means something like this: ‘Though you carry me away in chains, I am free when I die. Back will I come to bewitch and kill you.’ ”

Gender’s heavy body seemed to swell, and his eyes grew narrower and paler. “So they sing that, hmm?” He swore again. “Listen to that!”

The unhappy procession had taken up a brief, staccato refrain:

“Hailowa—Genda! Haipana—Genda!”

“Genda, that’s my name,” snarled the planter. “They’re singing about me, aren’t they?”

Silva made another fluid gesture, but Gender flourished his whip under the nose of the Portuguese. “Don’t you try to shrug me off. I’m not a child, to be talked around like this. What are they singing about me?”

“Nothing of consequence, patrao,” Silva made haste to reassure him. “It might be to say: ‘I will bewitch Gender, I will kill Gender.’ ”

“They threaten me, do they?” Gender’s broad face took on a deeper flush. He ran at the line of chained black men. With all the strength of his arm he slashed and swung with the whip. The song broke up into wretched howls of pain.

“I’ll give you a music lesson!” he raged, and flogged his way up and down the procession until he swayed and dripped sweat with the exertion.

But as he turned away, it struck up again:

“Hailowa—Genda! Haipana—Genda!”

Whirling back, he resumed the rain of blows. Silva, rushing up to second him, also whipped the slaves and execrated them in their own tongue. But when both were tired, the flayed captives began to sing once more, softly but stubbornly, the same chant.

“Let them whine,” panted Gender at last. “A song never killed anybody.”

Silva grinned nervously. “Of course not, patrao. That is only an idiotic native belief.”

“You mean, they think that a song will kill?”

“That, and more. They say that if they sing together, think together of one hate, all their thoughts and hates will become a solid strength—will strike and punish for them.”

“Nonsense!” exploded Gender.

But when they made camp that night, Gender slept only in troubled snatches, and his dreams were of a song that grew deeper, heavier, until it became visible as a dark, dense cloud that overwhelmed him.

The ship that Gender had engaged for the expedition lay in a swampy estuary, far from any coastal town, and the dawn by which he loaded his goods aboard was strangely fiery and forbidding. Dunlapp, the old slaver-captain that commanded for him, met him in the cabin.

“All ready, sir?” he asked Gender. “We can sail with the tide. Plenty of room in the hold for that handful you brought. I’ll tell the men to strike off those irons.”

“On the contrary,” said Gender, “tell the men to put manacles on the hands of each slave.”

Dunlapp gazed in astonishment at his employer. “But that’s bad for blacks, Mr. Gender. They get sick in chains, won’t eat their food. Sometimes they die.”

“I pay you well, Captain,” Gender rumbled, “but not to advise me. Listen to those heathen.”

Dunlapp listened. A moan of music wafted in to them.

“They’ve sung that cursed song about me all the way to the coast,” Gender told him. “They know I hate it—I’ve whipped them day after day—but they keep it up. No chains come off until they hush their noise.”

Dunlapp bowed acquiescence and walked out to give orders. Later, as they put out to sea, he rejoined Gender on the after deck.

“They do seem stubborn about their singing,” he observed.

“I’ve heard it said,” Gender replied, “that they sing together because they think many voices and hearts give power to hate, or to other feelings.” He scowled. “Pagan fantasy!”

Dunlapp stared overside, at white gulls just above the wave-tips. “There may be a tithe of truth in that belief, Mr. Gender; sometimes there is in the faith of wild people. Hark ye, I’ve seen a good fifteen hundred Mohammedans praying at once, in the Barbary countries. When they bowed down, the touch of all those heads to the ground banged like the fall of a heavy rock. And when they straightened, the motion of their garments made a swish like the gust of a gale. I couldn’t help but think that their prayer had force.”

“More heathen foolishness,” snapped Gender, and his lips drew tight.

“Well, in Christian lands we have examples, sir,” Dunlapp pursued. “For instance, a mob will grow angry and burn or hang someone. Would a single man do that? Would any single man of the mob do it? No, but together their hate and resolution becomes—”

“Not the same thing at all,” ruled Gender harshly. “Suppose we change the subject.”

On the following afternoon, a white sail crept above the horizon behind them. At the masthead gleamed a little blotch of color. Captain Dunlapp squinted through a telescope, and barked a sailorly oath.

“A British ship-of-war,” he announced, “and coming after us.”

“Well?” said Gender.

“Don’t you understand, sir? England is sworn to stamp out the slave trade. If they catch us with this cargo, it’ll be the end of us.” A little later, he groaned apprehensively, “They’re overtaking us. There’s their signal, for us to lay to and wait for them. Shall we do it, sir?”

Gender shook his head violently. “Not we! Show them our heels. Captain.”

“They’ll catch us. They are sailing three feet to our two.”

“Not before dark,” said Gender. “When dark comes, we’ll contrive to lessen our embarrassment.”

And so the slaver fled, with the Britisher in pursuit. Within an hour, the sun was at the horizon, and Gender smiled grimly in his mustache.

“It’ll be dark within minutes,” he said to Dunlapp. “As soon as you feel they can’t make out our actions by glass, get those slaves on deck.”

In the dusk the forty-nine naked prisoners stood in a line along the bulwark. For all their chained necks and wrists, they neither stood nor gazed in a servile manner. One of them began to sing and the others joined, in the song of the slave trail:

“Hailowa—Genda! Haipana—Genda!”

“Sing on,” Gender snapped briefly, and moved to the end of the line that was near the bow. Here dangled the one empty collar, and he seized it in his hand. Bending over the bulwark, he clamped it shut upon something—the ring of a heavy spare anchor, that swung there upon a swivel-hook. Again he turned, and eyed the line of dark singers.

“Have a bath to cool your spirits,” he jeered, and spun the handle of the swivel-hook.

The anchor fell. The nearest slave jerked over with it, and the next and the next. Others saw, screamed, and tried to brace themselves against doom; but their comrades that had already gone overside were too much weight for them. Quickly, one after another, the captives whipped from the deck and splashed into the sea. Gender leaned over and watched the last of them as he sank.

“Gad, sir!” exclaimed Dunlapp hoarsely.

Gender faced him almost threateningly.

“What else to do, hmm? You yourself said that we could hope for no mercy from the British.”

The night passed by, and by the first gray light the British ship was revealed almost upon them. A megaphoned voice hailed them; then a shot hurtled across their bows. At Gender’s smug nod, Dunlapp ordered his men to lay to. A boat put out from the pursuer, and shortly a British officer and four marines swung themselves aboard.

Bowing in mock reverence. Gender bade the party search. They did so, and remounted the deck crestfallen.

“Now, sir,” Gender addressed the officer, “don’t you think that you owe me an apology?”

The Englishman turned pale. He was a lean, sharp-featured man with strong, white teeth. “I can’t pay what I owe you,” he said with deadly softness. “I find no slaves, but I smell them. They were aboard this vessel within the past twelve hours.”

“And where are they now?” teased Gender.

“We both know where they are,” was the reply. “If I could prove in a court of law what I know in my heart, you would sail back to England with me. Most of the way you would hang from my yards by your thumbs.”

“You wear out your welcome, sir,” Gender told him.

“I am going. But I have provided myself with your name and that of your home city. From here I go to Madeira, where I will cross a packet bound west for Savannah. That packet will bear with it a letter to a friend of mine in Charleston, and your neighbors shall hear what happened on this ship of yours.”

“You will stun slave-owners with a story of slaves?” inquired Gender, with what he considered silky good-humor.

“It is one thing to put men to work in cotton fields, another to tear them from their homes, crowd them chained aboard a stinking ship, and drown them to escape merited punishment.” The officer spat on the deck. “Good day, butcher. I say, all Charleston shall hear of you.”

Gender’s plantation occupied a great, bluff-rimmed island at the mouth of a river, looking out toward the Atlantic. Ordinarily that island would be called beautiful, even by those most exacting followers of Chateaubriand and Rousseau; but, on his first night at home again. Gender hated the fields, the house, the environs of fresh and salt water.

His home, on a seaward jut, resounded to his grumbled curses as he called for supper and ate heavily but without relish. Once he vowed, in a voice that quivered with rage, never to go to Charleston again.

At that, he would do well to stay away for a time. The British officer had been as good as his promise, and all the town had heard of Gender’s journey to Africa and what he had done there. With a perverse squeamishness beyond Gender’s understanding, the hearers were filled with disgust instead of admiration. Captain Hogue had refused to drink with him at the Jefferson House. His oldest friend, Mr. Lloyd Davis of Davis Township, had crossed the street to avoid meeting him. Even the Reverend Doctor Lockin had turned coldly away as he passed, and it was said that a sermon was forthcoming at Doctor Lockin’s church attacking despoilers and abductors of defenseless people.

What was the matter with everybody? savagely demanded Gender of himself; these men who snubbed and avoided him were slaveholders. Some of them, it was quite possible, even held slaves fresh from raided villages under the Equator. Unfair! … Yet he could not but feel the animosity of many hearts, chafing and weighing upon his spirit.

“Brutus,” he addressed the slave that cleared the table, “do you believe that hate can take form?”

“Hate, Marsa?” The sooty face was solemnly respectful.

“Yes. Hate, of many people together.” Gender knew he should not confide too much in a slave, and chose his words carefully. “Suppose a lot of people hated the same thing, maybe they sang a song about it—”

“Oh, yes, Marsa,” Brutus nodded. “I heah ’bout dat, from ole gran-pappy when I was little. He bin in Affiky, he says many times day sing somebody to deff.”

“Sing somebody to death?” repeated Gender. “How?”

“Dey sing dat dey kill him. Afta while, maybe plenty days, he die—”

“Shut up, you black rascal!” Gender sprang from his chair and clutched at a bottle. “You’ve heard about this somewhere, and you dare to taunt me!”

Brutus darted from the room, mortally frightened. Gender almost pursued, but thought better and tramped into his parlor. The big, brown-paneled room seemed to give back a heavier echo of his feet. The windows were filled with the early darkness, and a hanging lamp threw rays into the corners.

On the center table lay some mail, a folded newspaper and a letter. Gender poured whisky from a decanter, stirred in spring water, and dropped into a chair. First he opened the letter.

“Stirling Manor,” said the return address at the top of the page. Gender’s heart twitched. Evelyn Stirling, he had hopes of her … but this was written in a masculine hand, strong and hasty.

“Sir:

“Circumstances that have come to my knowledge compel me, as a matter of duty, to command that you discontinue your attentions to my daughter.”

Gender’s eyes took on the pale tint of rage. One more result of the Britisher’s letter, he made no doubt.

“I have desired her to hold no further communication with you, and I have been sufficiently explicit to convince her how unworthy you are of her esteem and attention. It is hardly necessary for me to give you the reasons which have induced me to form this judgment, and I add only that nothing you can say or do will alter it.

“Your obedient servant,
“Judge Forrester Stirling.”

Gender hastily swigged a portion of his drink, and crushed the paper in his hand. So that was the judge’s interfering way—it sounded as though he had copied it from a complete letter-writer for heavy fathers. He, Gender, began to form a reply in his mind:

“Sir:

“Your unfeeling and abitrary letter admits of but one response. As a gentleman grossly misused, I demand satisfaction on the field of honor. Arrangements I place in the hands of …”

By what friend should he forward that challenge? It seemed that he was mighty short of friends just now. He sipped more whisky and water, and tore the wrappings of the newspaper.

It was a Massachusetts publication, and toward the bottom of the first page was a heavy cross of ink, to call attention to one item. A poem, evidently, in four-line stanzas. Its title signified nothing—The Witnesses. Author, Henry W. Longfellow; Gender identified him vaguely as a scrawler of Abolitionist doggerel. Why was this poem recommended to a southern planter?

In Ocean’s wide domains,
Half buried in the sands,
Lie skeletons in chains,
With shackled feet and hands.

Once again the reader swore, but the oath quavered on his lips. His eye moved to a stanza farther down the column:

These are the bones of Slaves;
They gleam from the abyss;
They cry, from yawning waves …

But it seemed to Gender that he heard, rather than read, what that cry was.

He sprang to his feet, paper and glass falling from his hands. His thin lips drew apart, his ears strained. The sound was faint, but unmistakable—many voices singing.

The Negroes in his cabins? But no Negro on his plantation would know that song. The chanting refrain began:

“Hailowa—Genda! Haipana—Genda!”

The planter’s lean mustaches bristled tigerishly. This would surely be the refined extremity of his persecution, this chanting of a weird song under his windowsill. It was louder now. I will bewitch, I will kill—but who would know that fierce mockery of him?

The crew of his ship, of course; they had heard it on the writhing lips of the captives, at the very moment of their destruction. And when the ship docked in Charleston, with no profit to show, Gender had been none too kindly in paying them off.

Those unsavory mariners must have been piqued. They had followed him, then, were setting up this vicious serenade.

Gender stepped quickly around the table and toward the window. He flung up the sash with a violence that almost shattered the glass, and leaned savagely out.

On that instant the song stopped, and Gender could see only the seaward slope of his land, down to the lip of the bluff that overhung the water. Beyond that stretched an expanse of waves, patchily agleam under a great buckskin-colored moon, that even now stirred the murmurous tide at the foot of the bluff. Here were no trees, no brush even, to hide pranksters. The singers, now silent, must be in a boat under the shelter of the bluff.

Gender strode from the room, fairly tore open a door, and made heavy haste toward the sea. He paused, on the lip of the bluff. Nothing was to be seen, beneath him or farther out. The mockers, if they had been here, had already fled. He growled, glared, and tramped back to his house. He entered the parlor once more, drew down the sash, and sought his chair again. Choosing another glass, he began once more to mix whisky and water. But he stopped in the middle of his pouring.

There it was again, the song he knew; and closer.

He rose, took a step in the direction of the window, then thought better of it. He had warned his visitors by one sortie, and they had hidden. Why not let them come close, and suffer the violence he ached to pour out on some living thing?

He moved, not to the window, but to a mantelpiece opposite. From a box of dark, polished wood he lifted a pistol, then another. They were duelling weapons, handsomely made, with hair-triggers; and Gender was a dead shot. With orderly swiftness he poured in glazed powder from a flask, rammed down two leaden bullets, and laid percussion caps upon the touch-holes. Returning, he placed the weapons on his center table, then stood on tiptoe to extinguish the hanging lamp. A single light remained in the room, a candle by the door, and this he carried to the window, placing it on a bracket there. Moving into the gloomy center of the parlor, he sat in his chair and took a pistol in either hand.

The song was louder now, lifted by many voices:

“Hailowa—Genda! Haipana—Genda!”

Undoubtedly the choristers had come to land by now, had gained the top of the bluff. They could be seen. Gender was sure, from the window. He felt perspiration on his jowl, and lifted a sleeve to blot it. Trying to scare him, hmm? Singing about witchcraft and killing? Well, he’d show them who was the killer.

The singing had drawn close, was just outside. Odd how the sailors, or whoever they were, had learned that chant so well! It recalled to his mind the slave trail, the jungle, the long procession of crooning prisoners. But here was no time for idle revery on vanished scenes. Silence had fallen again, and he could only divine the presence, just outside, of many creatures.

Scratch-scratch-scratch; it sounded like the stealthy creeping of a snake over rough lumber. That scratching resounded from the window where something stole into view in the candlelight. Gender fixed his eyes there, and his pistols lifted their muzzles.

The palm of a hand, as gray as a fish, laid itself on the glass. It was wet; Gender could see the trickle of water descending along the pane. Something clinked, almost musically. Another hand moved into position beside it, and between the two swung links of chain.

This was an elaborately devilish joke, thought Gender, in an ecstasy of rage. Even the chains, to lend reality … and as he stared he knew, in a split moment of terror that stirred his flesh on his bones, that it was no joke after all.

A face had moved into the range of the candlelight, pressing close to the pane between the two palms.

It was darker than those palms, of a dirty, slaty deadness of color. But it was not dead, not with those dull, intent eyes that moved slowly in their blistery sockets … not dead, though it was foully wet, and its thick lips hung slackly open, and seaweed lay plastered upon the cheeks, even though the flat nostrils showed crumbled and gnawed away, as if by fish. The eyes quested here and there across the floor and walls of the parlor. They came to rest, gazing full into the face of Gender.

He felt as though stale seawater had trickled upon him, but his right hand abode steady as a gun-rest. He took aim and fired.

The glass crashed loudly, and fell in shattering flakes to the floor beneath the sill.

Gender was on his feet, moving forward, dropping the empty pistol on the table and whipping the loaded one into his right hand. Two leaping strides took him almost to the window, before he reeled backward.

The face had not fallen. It stared at him, a scant yard away. Between the dull, living eyes showed a round black hole, where the bullet had gone in. But the thing stood unflinchingly, somehow serenely. Its two wet hands moved slowly, methodically, to pluck away the jagged remains of the glass.

Gender rocked where he stood, unable for the moment to command his body to retreat. The shoulders beneath the face heightened. They were bare and wet and deadly dusky, and they clinked the collar-shackle beneath the lax chin. Two hands stole into the room, their fish-colored palms opening toward Gender.

He screamed, and at last he ran. As he turned his back, the singing began yet again, loud and horribly jaunty—not at all as the miserable slaves had sung it. He gained the seaward door, drew it open, and looked full into a gathering of black, wet figures, with chains festooned among them, awaiting him. Again he screamed, and tried to push the door shut.

He could not. A hand was braced against the edge of the panel—many hands. The wood fringed itself with gleaming black fingers. Gender let go the knob, whirled to flee into the house. Something caught the back of his coat, something he dared not identify. In struggling loose, he spun through the doorway and into the moonlit open.

Figures surrounded him, black, naked, wet figures; dead as to sunken faces and flaccid muscles, but horribly alive as to eyes and trembling hands and slack mouths that formed the strange primitive words of the song; separate, yet strung together with a great chain and collar-shackles, like an awful fish on the gigantic line of some demon-angler. All this Gender saw in a rocking, moon-washed moment, while he choked and retched at a dreadful odor of death, thick as fog.

Still he tried to run, but they were moving around him in a weaving crescent, cutting off his retreat toward the plantation. Hands extended toward him, manacled and dripping. His only will was to escape the touch of those sodden fingers, and one way was open—the way to the sea.

He ran toward the brink of the bluff. From its top he would leap, dive and swim away. But they pursued, overtook, surrounded him. He remembered that he held a loaded pistol, and fired into their black midst. It had no effect. He might have known that it would have no effect.

Something was clutching for him. A great, inhuman talon? No, it was an open collar of metal, with a length of chain to it, a collar that had once clamped to an anchor, dragging down to ocean’s depths a line of shackled men. It gaped at him, held forth by many dripping hands. He tried to dodge, but it darted around his throat, shut with a ringing snap. Was it cold … or scalding hot? He knew, with horror vividly etching the knowledge into his heart, that he was one at last with the great chained procession.

“Hailowa—Genda! Haipana—Genda!”

He found his voice. “No, no!” he pleaded. “No, in the name of—”

But he could not say the name of God. And the throng suddenly moved explosively, concertedly, to the edge of the bluff.

A single wailing cry from all those dead throats, and they dived into the waves below.

Gender did not feel the clutch and jerk of the chain that dragged him alone. He did not even feel the water as it closed over his head.

The Dreadful Rabbits

“… there are a hundred things one has to know, which we understand and you don’t, as yet. I mean passwords, and signs, and sayings which have power and effect, and plants you carry in your pocket, and verses you repeat, and dodges and tricks you practise; all simple enough when you know them, but they’ve got to be known. …”

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

At a point about four miles out of Crispinville, a lean-looking rabbit, with black-and-white smudgings on the gray of his ears and long hind legs, came flopping out on the pavement and paused in full way of the car. Morgan Pitts put on the brakes, drew out a handkerchief and mopped the summer heat from his flushed, seamed brow. He said, with casual courtesy; “Howdy, Mister Rabbit!”

The animal immediately finished its crossing of the road, and sat up in a tussock of grass, gazing while Pitts started the car again. Judge Keith Hilary Pursuivant, big and blond and bespectacled, returned the gaze of those bulging black eyes. They seemed to have a green flash in them. He made no remark, but appeared deeply interested, and he was. He had come all the way to Crispinville for tire very purpose of learning about the custom of rabbit-greeting.

After they rounded a curve and left the little town well out of sight, Judge Pursuivant ventured his query:

“How old is that custom of speaking to rabbits, Mr. Pitts? And how did it start?”

Pitts scratched his grizzled head. He was little and spry-looking, with a face as red as a rooster’s comb. “Dunno, Judge Pursuivant. Ain’t kept up much on things, been pretty busy with my work. But I guess it’s been goin’ on since the Year One. …” He took a hand from the wheel and pointed ahead. “There’s my place, up yonder, next to Hungry Hill. Your friend’s rented a room there for you. You and him are my only boarders this summer.”

A phrase had caught the judge’s ear. “Hungry Hill?” he repeated, and gazed at the great green swelling, with its thatchy covering of evergreen brush and thicket. “It doesn’t look hungry.”

“I think that’s the old Injun name. And there’s a cave or pit, like an open mouth—” The driver broke off. “Well, here we are, getting there.”

The house nestled comfortably at the foot of the big hill, with plump-looking trees around it—a house old and modest, but well built and well kept, with a stable and barn and rail-enclosed stock pen behind.

As the car stopped, someone came out on the porch and waved a long arm, then hurried down to shake hands with Pursuivant.

It was Ransome. He looked much improved in health and spirits since Pursuivant had last seen him, at New York in early spring. The doctors had apparently sent him to the right part of the country to get over his nervous breakdown. He was still gaunt, but there was color in his flat checks and sparkle in the dark eyes set deep under the bushy brows. Ransome was forty and looked younger, with a square, shallow jaw and black hair and mustache like curls of astrakhan.

“I saw your train come in, over yonder along the horizon,” he told the judge, “and I sat out here to wait for Mr. Pitts to bring you back. Come on, both of you, and have a drink.”

They followed him into a pleasant front room, with ancient flower-figured paper and white-painted woodwork, and massive old furniture that was older and better preserved than any of them. Ransome had set out a tray, with bottles, glasses, and a bowl of cracked ice.

“I thought that rabbit legend would fetch you when I wrote to you about it,” he said to Pursuivant. “You collect such things, don’t you? Hard to believe—but I’ve seen the bunny greeted on every road and path in Crispinville Township.”

“Mr. Pitts here told me something about it,” said Pursuivant. “Not much, though—not as much as I’d like to hear.”

“Nobody seems to know much about it,” Ransome said, pouring. “It’s pretty well a local thing. Over in the next county, people hadn’t even heard of it—said I was making it up. There’s ice here, gentlemen. Take it or leave it?”

“Take it,” said Pitts, with relish.

“Leave it,” said Pursuivant, “and not much soda. … If you haven’t any information, Ransome, you must have a theory. You skeptics always have theories.”

Ransome poured whiskey and spurted soda into the glasses. “Hnnn,” he said, “might be a Negro thing—this used to be slave territory. One storekeeper in Crispinville thinks it may have come from the first English colonists; again, it might be Indian. But what keeps it so local? Can’t you tell us, Pitts?”

“Not me,” said Pitts, his eyes on the dewy glass held out to him.

They all drank. Pursuivant wiped his blond mustache. His spectacles were full of thoughtful lights.

“The rabbit’s a great figure in folklore,” he observed. “A witch named Julian Cox was tried in England in the 1660’s, for turning into a rabbit. And Jules de Grandin once told me that southern French will turn back from a day’s work because a hare hopped across their trail—bad luck, like a black cat.”

“Never heard that,” rejoined Ransome. “Of course, de Grandin’s a fable-collector, like you. Of course, I read Uncle Remus when I was a boy—plenty of rabbit stuff there.”

“And I used to carry the left hind foot of a graveyard rabbit for luck,” contributed Pitts, sipping at his highball.

Pursuivant was also turning over the Uncle Remus tales in his mind. They were impressive and sometimes grim, for all the bright humor of Joel Chandler Harris. Br’er Rabbit, seemingly so harmless and plausible, had tricked all the larger and fiercer creatures in self-defense, or for profit, or for mere cruel fun; hadn’t Br’er Wolf been deluded into killing his own children, and Br’er Fox shunted into a fire so that all his progeny looked singed, down into the present day?

“Don’t you think,” Ransome was saying, “that you’re paying too much attention to a silly little custom—a triviality?”

“Hey,” protested Pitts, taking his nose from his glass, “it ain’t silly when it’s a township ordinance—you can’t even hunt rabbits.”

“And there are no trivialities in life, as Sherlock Holmes or somebody said,” added Pursuivant. “As Mr. Pitts suggests, there must be a good reason for making the rule, and for observing it as well.”

Ransome laughed loudly. His own drink had been long and strong, and he was at the bottom of it. “Time for me to do some missionary work,” said he. Rising, he took two objects from the table.

They were the stock and barrels of an excellent shotgun, and they snicked neatly together in his knowing hands. He grinned above the weapon. “It’s summer, and rabbit’s aren’t fit to eat, but just for the sake of smashing a superstition—” And he fed two shells into the double breech.

Pitts got up. “Better not do it, Mr. Ransome. It’s ’gainst the law.”

“I’ll pay any fine, or whatever,” laughed Ransome.

Pursuivant also rose, and set down his empty glass. “I want to go back to town and look into the community records. I’ll leave my suitcase, and be back before sundown.”

“Shall I run you back in the car?” offered Pitts.

“No, thanks. It’s fine weather and lovely country, and only four miles. I’ll walk.” Pursuivant turned to Ransome. “Promise me you won’t go rabbit-hunting until I return.”

“Oh, all right,” Ransome agreed, and stood the gun in a corner. He saw the judge to the door.

Crispinville was not the county seat, but Pursuivant knew that there would be a township trustee, a clerk and a constable. When he reached the hamlet, he approved once again the well-painted old houses and the quaint little stores with canopy-like arcades jutting out over the wooden sidewalk, admired the square-steepled church that dominated all. He estimated that what Pitts called “the Year One” for this community would be well before the middle of the Eighteenth Century.

“There were settlers here before Daniel Boone’s time,” he thought, and inquired for the home of the township clerk. Finding it, he introduced himself.

The clerk was a frail ancient named Simmons, who prided himself on having most of his teeth and needing no spectacles. He was vague about old records, and only when Pursuivant pleaded did he pry into the clutter of files and trunks that jammed a rear room of his house.

“I been the Crispinville clerk for forty-four years,” he grumbled, “and nobody never asked to see them original papers. Huh, they must be in this here oldest chest.”

The oldest chest was very old indeed, made of unpainted hard wood from which a covering of rawhide was all but rotted away. Mr. Simmons probed and fiddled in the rusty lock with a brass key that might have gone with Noah’s strong box, once or twice calling on heaven to witness his displeasure that the guards did not turn; but then Pursuivant stepped to his side and lifted the lid with a creak of the hinges—the lock had never been fastened. Inside lay papers, yellow and dusty, tied into bundles with antediluvian-looking twine. Simmons examined one handful, then another.

“Yep, these is the old records. Huh, the oldest bunch will be on the bottom, I expect.” He dug down, and brought up a sheaf. “This is what you’ll want. Judge.”

Pursuivant took the papers, unfastened the string, and carefully unfolded them to avoid breaking at the creases. They were covered with writing in rusty ink. At the head of the first was printed in block letters, crude and archaic but forceful:

Recordes of
Ye Town Council of Crispinville,
Founded Yis Day Ye 14 June,
Anno Regnii Georgii II
Nono

The ninth year of the region of George II; Pursuivant computed that it would be 1735 when Crispinville was founded as a formal community. The clerk let him carry the documents into the dining-room and spread them on the top of the table.

The paper on which the records had been written was not of the best, and two centuries had made it brittle and tea-tan; but the first clerk of the township had written fluently and in a good bold hand, with all the underlinings and capitalizations of his age. There was a list of names, with official titles opposite, some half-dozen members of that original council. Then, as the first item of history:

This day we, the Chosen Council of the Town of Crispinville, did pay to certain Indians the Price agreed upon for the Lands whereon our Company will live and plant and reap. …

The price was itemized, and Pursuivant saw that, as usual in such matters, the Indians had all the worst of it—gaudy cheap cloth, beads, rickety hatchets and knives, one or two muskets and a horn of powder, and certain bottles of raw New England rum. The screed went on, and suddenly Pursuivant was aware that, upon the very threshold of his researches, he had found the origin of the custom he was tracing:

… The Indians engaging on their Part to respect our Rights and Boundaries and to keep the Peace, asking only that we observe their Manner of (as our Interpreter putteth) Greeting the Hare; that is, we shall not hunt Hares nor snare them, but upon meeting them, salute and bespeak them as apertly as it were a Christian Man, and not a silly Hare.

To this last, certain of our Company did take Exception, and notably Capt. Scadlock, that such Custom was Childish and Fond; but the Chief Person of the Savages, him they call King Mosh, did bide firm, saying that the Rabbit was the Ototemon of their People and sacred; and further that if we pledged not our Word to continue their Custom, they would never sell the Land, be the Price paid Ten Times Over. And finally the Rev. Mr. Horton, our Minister of God, did earnestly pray us to give over, shewing that we had Precedent in that the First Missionaries to Britain did respect and observe certain Festivals and Useages of the old Heathen; saying further that, right so as we took pity of these simple Indians their Beliefs, right so would they incline to stand our Friends. And so it was agreed upon both Sides, we all signing our Names, saving only Capt. Scadlock, and the Matter placed of Record and made a Rule whereby to Govern and guide the Town henceforth.

Pursuivant smiled in his mustache as he read, a smile of scholarly relish. He could see in his mind’s eye that meeting, the stark jack-booted colonists and the brown, insistent savages. King Mosh—he had spoken out well for his people and faith, even against Captain Scadlock, who undoubtedly was the chief of the colony’s armed forces; and the minister, Mr. Horton, had shown rare tact and liberality—perhaps, good man, he had hoped for converts among those Indians on whose behalf he spoke.

But that hope had been in vain, Pursuivant saw as he read further in the records. Less than a year later there had been a fight, and it had gone against the Indians. The same clerk wrote:

… and a Searching Party, following the tracks of Captain Scadlock upon the Second Day after his Vanishment, did trace him to that Hill which the Indians do call Gontolah (that is, the Hungry Hill). …

“Hello!” muttered Pursuivant, half aloud. “That’s the hill back of Pitt’s place!”

… and did find him, at the Mouth of the Cave near the Summit; and he had perished miserably, of many small Wounds, so thick upon him that no Inch of his Skin remained whole, nor did any Jot of his Blood remain unto him. And the Indians swore by their false gods that he came to his Death for failing to greet the Hare, rather pursuing and slaying Hares upon the Hill; which we took as meaning to say, that they themselves had slain the Captain. Wherefore, falling to our Arms. …

The remainder of the account was unsavory, and dealt with a one-sided conflict. The dead Indians were scalped, it seems, and the prisoners taken all hanged. A few survived and escaped the carnage. That had finished the savages in the vicinity. Only the name of the hill, and the rabbit-greeting, remained to memorialize them.

At this moment, the clerk came in and tapped his shoulder.

“Judge,” he said, “here’s Morgan Pitts come to find you.”

Pursuivant looked up, his big forefinger marking the place on the old sheet of paper. Pitts came in, his eyes wide with serious wonder. “Judge Pursuivant,” he said, “Mr. Ransome hasn’t come back.”

“Hasn’t come back from where?”

“He went hunting for a rabbit—”

Simmons made a choking sound of protest, and Pursuivant sprang to his feet, quick as a cat for all his bulk. “Hunting for a rabbit? He promised me—”

Pitts nodded glumly. “Yes, sir, I know he did. But when you left, Mr. Ransome, he took his gun and went out. Said he’d be back in fifteen minutes. But”—the man’s lips were quivering—“but he ain’t. I think. Judge, you better come.”

The old records of Crispinville, telling of superstition and pioneering and grim battle, had cracked and crumbled in Pursuivant’s clenching hands. He laid down the remains.

“Have you brought your car, Mr. Pitts? All right, we’ll drive back together.”

The house was still empty when they got there. Pursuivant moved away through the back yard, across a meadow and among brush and small trees at the foot of the hillside. It was as bright and hot as a tropical seashore. The judge’s blue eyes had found and followed the trail of Ransome’s tennis shoes. Pitts followed just behind.

“It’s bad stuff, hunting rabbits,” he chattered. “Folks around here don’t believe in it—and when people don’t believe—”

“It’s best to string along with such beliefs, I agree,” finished Pursuivant for him. “Look, Mr. Pitts. He found a rabbit trail here—fresh.”

They could see that Ransome had squatted down above the pattern of little paw-prints in the leaf-mold; his toes only made deep depressions, and beside them was the narrow oval where he had rested the gunstock. Then he had risen and followed the game slantwise up the hill. Pursuivant and Pitts went up after him, through dragging belts and tangles of brush, some of it thorny. Pitts spoke again:

“Look, Judge.” He pointed with a knobby old forefinger to a whole clutter of tracks. “More rabbits—Mr. Ransome’s hunting a mess of them.”

The judge’s shaggy head shook. “I’m afraid not. See here—some of the paw-prints fall over Mr. Ransome’s shoe-marks. This bunch—flock—whatever you call a number of rabbits—it came along later. Mr. Ransome is hunting only that first one that made the lone trail.”

“I see,” said Pitts softly. “I see; and these other rabbits—are—hunting Mr. Ransome!”

It was hotter than they had thought, as they pushed through one more clump of brambly growth, and came to where hunters and hunted had met.

They had not the time nor the wish to read more than the essentials of the story written in large tracks and small upon the soft, spurned earth. Pursuivant began talking swiftly, pointing here and there.

“Look! Ransome stopped and, probably, aimed his gun. He was looking yonder, perhaps at that dark hollow place among those vine-grown saplings. The rabbit must have stopped there.” He crossed over and peered. “Yes—see! The tracks were turned toward Ransome. It stopped and turned on its heels, to look at him.”

“Like it was mocking him,” said Pitts, and swallowed hard.

Pursuivant looked at the leaves behind the tracks. They were cut to pieces by shot—Ransome must have fired both barrels at that rabbit as it sat up to gaze at him. And then—

Pitts was down on one knee. “They swarmed over him as he fired!” he cried shakily. “Look, Judge—they rushed him from behind, right here!”

Pursuivant made a step and bent to pick up something from a patch of leafy weeds. “His gun!” he said, and snapped open the breech. “Both barrels were fired—he must have thrown it at them. Then he was unarmed.”

He returned to where Pitts kneeled. The flurry of tracks seemed to say that Ransome had fallen, as under the impact of many missiles; what those missiles were could be deduced from the strength of certain hind-leg marks, telling of how rabbits had sprung straight upward and at the face or chest. The gun still in his hand, Pursuivant stooped to make out what had happened to Ransome then.

Here were hand-prints, deeply driven, as though weight had been supported upon the palms. Here was the scrape of a dragged knee, and another, with repetitions beyond—yes, Ransome had crept upon his hands and knees, stunned, wretched, driven. For at either flank of his trail were the trails of his little adversaries, herding and harrying him, toward the dark opening among the vines where he had seen and fired upon the quarry that was really a decoy.

“Poor Mr. Ransome,” Pitts was saying. “He should have obeyed the law—you got to respect things like that, or—”

“Stay behind me,” commanded Pursuivant, and bent, thrusting with the muzzle of the shotgun into the space among the vines.

Within was empty gloom, for here the hill rose abruptly under a masking of herbage, and in it was a cave.

“Gontolah—the Hungry Hill,” remembered Pursuivant. Yes, as Pitts had said, this place looked like an open, starved mouth, a lune-shape hole with a flat rim of rock above and another below, like gaping lips. And something was wedged in that mouth-like cavern.

He forced himself to touch it. His fingers closed on a slack, damp wrist. With a heave and a scrape, he dragged the body into view.

Yes, it was Ransome, or what had been Ransome. Pursuivant knew him by the contours of that pounded, lacerated head, by the leanness of the blood-boltered body inside chopped-up rags.

Pitts whimpered as the thing came into the light.

“Poor Mr. Ransome,” he said again. “Now I know how—oh!”

Pursuivant whirled like a top at that final gasp of horror. He saw, too, what Spencer had seen.

The spaces among the bushes along their back trail were full of rabbits, all lean and gray with black and white blazings on legs and ear-tips, and all a trifle larger than ordinary. Every eye in that horde was turned upon the two men, and the eyes of meat-eating animals. They were an army, moving concertedly and purposefully upon the judge and Pitts, who stood cut off with their backs to the cave.

Pursuivant’s big fists tightened on Ransome’s shotgun. He would not throw it, he told himself at once—clubbed, its metal-shod butt would smash these little assailants to rags. But Pitts was trying another weapon.

With eyes and outstretched hands he addressed himself to the foremost of the rabbits, the one that moved cautiously but steadily ahead of the press, like an officer leading troops in an orderly advance. He spoke, audibly and with a tremble of fear:

“H‑howdy, Mister Rabbit!”

There was a momentary pause in the oncoming torrent of fur. A little eddy showed, then a parting in the ranks. They were making a way for Pitts to retreat through them, and he needed not a moment to make up his mind. He fairly darted along that open lane, which closed behind him. The expanse of fuzzy backs and upturned green eyes resolidified, and above it Pitts looked back at Pursuivant.

“Better say the words,” he advised huskily. “They’re closing in on you.”

They converged slowly and smoothly, flowing like a puddle of grease—but grease scummed over with fur and green-black eyes, sprouting a meadow of ears. Pursuivant lifted the clubbed shotgun and set himself to strike. The leader-rabbit sprang suddenly at him. Pursuivant swung the gun, as a batter strikes at a ball. He could not miss—but the weapon swished thinly in the air, and the little sinewy body struck him at the base of the throat. A moment later more rabbits were springing at him—a dozen, a score, hundreds. His flailing with the gun did not find a single mark. He swayed under the bombardment, but kept his feet—he was stronger and bulkier than Ransome, he would take more battering to bring down—

“Say the words. Judge!” Pitts’s voice pleaded with him from beyond. “They ain’t real rabbits—they’ll finish you!”

Fighting, clawing at the rain of buffets, Pursuivant found his mind turning from the struggle to consideration of something else. What had the Indian, King Mosh, called the rabbit? Ototemon. Strange word. But with a familiar sound … suddenly he saw blue expanse, fringed with green. The sky among the treestops looked into his face, for he had come down upon his back. The rabbits had felled him. They were swarming around and upon him, their feet striking like great raindrops, incessantly and with precision—a rhythm that sapped his strength and his consciousness—again and again, on the same places.

How could he escape these airy blows and kicks? There seemed one way to crawl along—but it would lead to the cave, where Ransome had been. And once caught there, they’d have him. They’d dance upon him forever and forever, until he died, torn and bled to death by uncountable strokes—it would be like the falling of water upon a Chinese victim of the old drop-death—

“Say the words!” beseeched Pitts tearfully, his voice faint as an echo. “Say the words—howdy—”

Ototemon—the term meant something sacred to the Indians. And the minister, Mr. Horton, had gone on record as saying that the honest faith of savages could be respected, must be respected—

Somehow he got upon his feet, and lifted his hands as Pitts had done.

“Howdy,” he mumbled thickly. “Howdy, Mister Rabbit.”

And he stumbled and staggered away. Nothing prevented him. Pitts’s hand caught his arm, supporting him. He was safe, being led downhill.

“Who’ll believe?” he was saying to himself. “Who’ll believe? …”

“Don’t worry. Judge,” Pitts replied. “We’re all right now. And this has happened before—all the folks say that the rabbits kill people near that cave. When some stranger drops out of sight, the folks go look for them and bury them—it ain’t thought strange any more—I’ll get a couple of men from town to help me bring back Mr. Ransome—”

Pursuivant was content to leave it at that. Later he would write and make an inquiry of Dr. Trowbridge, de Grandin’s friend and fellow-scholar of the occult.

Trowbridge’s letter came after the judge had returned to New York.

My Dear Pursuivant:

The meaning of the word ototemon should betray itself because of the familiarity of its corruption—totem. It’s Algonquin and, as well as I can establish, means a local sacrosanctity, generally embodied in some animal. A tribe or clan or community would claim that such animals were in reality the reincarnated spirits of dead ancestors, and full of supernatural power for good or evil.

I was sorry to hear about Ransome’s death. Why are you so mysterious? De Grandin joins me in inviting you out to Huntingdon, to tell us about it. We have a strange story or two of our own that might intrigue you.

Yours, etc.,

And Trowbridge’s almost indecipherable signature wound it up.

Pursuivant laid down the letter and reasoned himself out of any sense of defeat. He had wanted to respect the custom from the first, had blamed Ransome for defying it. Mr. Horton, the long-dead minister of Crispinville, had felt the same. “We had precedent in that the first Missionaries to Britain did respect and observe certain festivals. …” It might be heathen to greet a rabbit, yet it was part of formal and sincere religion. And when you were in Crispinville, you should do what the Crispinvillagers did.

Judge Pursuivant decided not to feel fouled by his experience. Only he would never look at a rabbit again, and keep his heart from thumping nervously.

Bratton’s Idea

Old Bratton, janitor at the studios of Station XCV in Hollywood, was as gaunt as Karloff, as saturnine as Rathbone, as enigmatic as Lugosi. He was unique among Californians in professing absolutely no motion picture ambitions. Once, it is true, a director had stopped him on the street and offered to test him for a featured role, but old Bratton had refused with loud indignation when he heard that the role would be that of a mad scientist. Old Bratton was touchy about mad scientists, because he was one.

For a time he had been a studio electrician, competent though touchy; but then it developed that he had lied about his age—he was really eighty years old, and he had been fooling with electricity ever since Edison put apparatus of various sorts within the reach of everyone. Studio rules imposed pretty strict age limits on the various jobs, and so he was demoted to a janitorship.

He accepted, grumbling, because he needed money for the pursuit he had dreamed of when a boy and maintained from his youth onward. In his little two-room apartment he had gathered a great jumble of equipment—coils, transformers, cathodes, lenses, terminals—some of it bought new, some salvaged from studio junk, and a great deal curiously made and not to be duplicated elsewhere save in the eccentric mind of its maker. For old Bratton, with the aid of electricity, thought to create life.

“Electricity is life,” he would murmur, quoting Dr. C. W. Roback, who had been venerable when old Bratton was young. And again: “All these idiots think that ‘Frankenstein’ is a romance and ‘R.U.R.’ a flight of fancy. But all robot stories are full of truth. I’ll show them.”

But he hadn’t shown them yet, and he was eighty-two. His mechanical arrangements were wonderful and crammed with power. They could make dead frogs kick, dead birds flutter. They could make the metal figures he constructed, whether large or small, stir and seem about to wake. But only while the current animated them.

“The fault isn’t with the machine,” he would say again, speaking aloud but taking care none overheard. “It’s perfect—I’ve seen to that. No, it’s in the figures. They’re too clumsy and creaky. All the parts are good, but the connections are wrong, somehow. Wish I knew anatomy better. And a dead body, even a fresh one, has begun dissolution. I must try and get—”

Haranguing himself thus one evening after the broadcast, he pushed his mop down a corridor to the open door of a little rehearsal hall, then stopped and drew into a shadowy corner, for he had almost blundered upon Ben Gascon in the act of proposing marriage.

Ben Gascon, it will be remembered, was at the time one of radio’s highest paid performers, and well worthy of his hire for the fun he made. Earlier in life he had been a competent vaudeville artist. When, through no fault of his, vaudeville died, Gascon went into sound pictures and radio.

He was a ventriloquist, adroit and seasoned by years of performance, and a man of intelligence and showmanship as well. Coming to the stage from medical school, he had constructed with his own skilful hands the small figure of wood, metal, rubber and cloth that had become known to myriads as Tom-Tom. Tom-Tom the impish, the witty, the leering cynic, the gusty little clown, the ironical jokester, who sat on the knee of Ben Gascon and, by a seeming misdirection of voice, roused the world to laughter by his sneers and sallies. Tom-Tom was so droll, so dynamic, so uproariously wicked in thought and deed, that listeners were prone to forget the seemingly quiet, grave, Ben Gascon who held him and fed him solemn lines on which to explode firecracker jokes—Ben Gascon, who really did the thinking and the talking that Tom-Tom the dummy might be a headliner in the entertainment world.

Not really a new thing—the combination of comedian and stooge may or may not have begun with Aristophanes in ancient Greece—but Ben Gascon was offering both qualities in his own person, and in surpassing excellence. Press agents and commentators wrote fascinating conjectures about his dual personality. In any case, Tom-Tom was the making of him. It was frequently said that Gascon would be as lost without Tom-Tom as Tom-Tom without Gascon.

But tonight Ben Gascon and Tom-Tom were putting on a show for an audience of one.

Shannon Cole was the prima donna and co-star of the program. She was tall, almost as tall as Gascon, and her skin was delectably creamy, and her dark hair wound into a glossy coronet of braids. Usually she seemed stately and mournful, to match the songs of love and longing she sang in a rich contralto; but now she almost groaned with laughter as she leaned above the impudent Tom-Tom, who sat on the black broadcloth knee of Ben Gascon and cocked his leering wooden face up at her. Above Gascon’s tuxedo his slender, wide-lined face was a dusky red. His lips seemed tight, even while they stealthily formed words for Tom-Tom.

“Oh, Shanny,” it seemed that Tom-Tom was crooning, in that ingratiating drawl that convulsed listeners from coast to coast, “don’t you think that you and I might just slip away alone somewhere and—and—” The wooden head writhed around toward Gascon. “Get away, Gaspipe! Don’t you see that I’m in conference with a very lovely lady? Can’t you learn when you’re not wanted?”

Shannon Cole leaned back in her own chair, sighing because she had not enough breath to laugh any more. “I never get enough of Tom-Tom,” she vowed between gasps. “We’ve been broadcasting together for two years now, and he’s still number one in my heart. Ben, how do you ever manage—”

“Shanny,” drawled the voice that was Tom-Tom’s, “this idiot Ben Gascon has something to say. He wants me to front for him—but why do I always have to do the talking while he gets the profit. Speak up, Gaspipe—who’s got your tongue this time, the cat, or the cat?”

Shannon Cole looked at the ventriloquist, and suddenly stopped laughing. Her face was pale, as his had gone red. She folded her slender hands in her lap, and her eyes were all for Gascon, though it was as if Tom-Tom still spoke:

“I’ll be John Alden,” vowed Tom-Tom with shrill decision. “I’ll talk up for this big yokel—I always do, don’t I, Shanny? As Gaspipe’s personal representative—engaged at enormous expense—I want to put before you a proposition. One in which I’m interested. After all, I should have a say as to who will be my—well, my stepmother—”

“It won’t work!” came the sudden, savage voice of Ben Gascon.

Rising, he abruptly tossed Tom-Tom upon a divan. Shannon Cole, too, was upon her feet. “Ben!” she quavered. “Why, Ben!”

“I’ve done the most foolish thing a ventriloquist could do,” he flung out.

“Well—if you were really serious, you didn’t need to clown. You think it was fair to me?”

He shook his head. “Tom-Tom’s done so much of my saucy talking for me these past years that I thought I’d use him to get out what I was afraid to tell you myself,” he confessed wretchedly.

“Then you were afraid of me,” Shannon accused. She, too, was finding it hard to talk. Gascon made a helpless gesture.

“Well, it didn’t work,” he groaned. “I’m sorry. You’re right if you think I’ve been an idiot. Just pretend it never happened.”

“Why, Ben—” she began once more, and broke off.

“We’ve just finished our last program for the year,” said Ben Gascon. “Next year I won’t be around. I think I’ll stop throwing my voice for a while and live like a human being. Once I studied to be a doctor. Perhaps once more I can—”

He walked out. The rush of words seemed to have left him spiritually limp and wretched.

Shannon Cole watched him go. Then she bent above the discarded figure of little Tom-Tom, who lay on his back and goggled woodenly up at her. She put out a hand toward him, and her full raspberry-tinted lips trembled. Then she, too, left.

And old Bratton stole from his hiding, to where lay the dummy. Lifting it, he realized that here was what he wanted. Again he spoke aloud—he never held with the belief that talking to oneself is the second or third stage of insanity:

“Clever one, that Gascon. This thing’s anatomically perfect, even to the jointed fingers.” Thrusting his arm through the slit in the back, he explored the hollow body and head. “Space for organs—yes, every movement and reaction provided for—and a personality.”

He straightened up, the figure in his arms. “That’s it! That’s why I’ve failed! My figures were dead before they began, but this one has life!” He was muttering breathlessly. “It’s like a worn shoe, or an inhabited house, or a favorite chair. I don’t have to add the life force, I need only to stimulate what’s here.”

Ben Gascon, at the stage door, had telephoned for a taxi. He turned at the sound of approaching footsteps, and faced old Bratton, who carried Tom-Tom.

“Mr. Gascon—this dummy—”

“I’m through with him,” said Gascon shortly.

“Then, can I have him?”

Tom-Tom seemed to stare at Gascon. Was it mockery, or pleading, in those bulging eyes?

“Take him and welcome,” said Gascon, and strode out to wait for his taxi.

When old Bratton finished his cleaning that night, he carried away a bulky bundle wrapped in newspapers. He returned to his lodgings, but not to eat or sleep. First he filled the emptiness of Tom-Tom’s head and body with the best items culled from his unsuccessful robots—a cunning brain-device, all intricate wiring and radiating tubes set in a mass of synthetic plasm; a complex system of wheels, switches and tubes, in the biggest hollow where a heart, lungs and stomach should be; special wires, of his own alloy, connecting to the ingenious muscles of rubberette that Ben Gascon had devised for Tom-Tom’s arms, legs and fingers; a jointed spinal column of aluminum; an artificial voice-box just inside the moveable jaws; and wondrous little marble-shaped camera developments for eyes, in place of the moveable mockeries in Tom-Tom’s sockets.

It was almost dawn before old Bratton stitched up the slit in the back of Tom-Tom’s little checked shirt, and laid the completed creation upon the bedlike slab that was midmost of his great fabric of machinery in the rear room. To Tom-Tom’s wrists, ankles, and throat he clamped the leads of powerful terminals. With a gingerly care like that of a surgeon at a delicate operation, he advanced a switch so as to throw the right amount of current into play.

The whole procession of wheeled machinery whispered into motion, its voice rising to a clear hum. A spark sprang from a knob at the top, extended its blinding length to another knob, and danced and struggled there like a radiant snake caught between the beaks of two eagles. Old Bratton gave the mechanism more power, faster and more complicated action. His bright eyes clung greedily to the little body lying on the slab.

“He moves, he moves,” old Bratton cackled excitedly. “His wheels are going round, all right. Now, if only—”

Abruptly he shut off the current. The machinery fell dead silent.

“Sit up, Tom-Tom!” commanded old Bratton harshly.

And Tom-Tom sat up, his fingers tugging at the clamps that imprisoned him.

The Los Angeles papers made little enough fuss over the death of old Bratton. True, he was murdered—they found him stabbed, lying face down across the threshold of his rear room that was jammed full of strange mechanical junk—but the murder of a janitor is not really big crime news in a city the size of Los Angeles.

The police were baffled, more so because none of them could guess what the great mass of machinery could be, if indeed it were anything. But they forgot their concern the following week, when they had a more important murder to consider, that of one Digs Dilson.

Digs Dilson was high in the scale of local gang authority. He had long occupied a gaudy apartment in that expensive Los Angeles hotel which has prospered by catering to wealthy criminals. He was prudent enough to have a bedroom with no fire escape. He feared climbing assassins from without more than flames from within. In front of his locked room slept two bodyguards on cots, and his own bedside window was tightly wedged in such a fashion that no more than five inches of opening showed between sill and sash. The electric power-line that was clamped along the brickwork just outside could hardly have supported a greater weight than thirty or forty pounds.

Yet Digs Dilson had been killed at close range, by a stab with an ordinary kitchen knife, as he slept. The knife still remained in the wound, as if defying investigators to trace fingerprints that weren’t there. And the bodyguards had not been wakened and the door had remained locked on the inside.

The blade of the knife, had anyone troubled to compare wounds, could have been demonstrated to be the exact size and shape as the one that had killed old Bratton. His landlord might have been able to testify that it came from old Bratton’s little store of kitchen utensils. But nobody at police headquarters bothered to connect the murders of a friendless janitor and a grand duke of gangdom. After considerable discussion and publicity, the investigators called the case one of suicide. How else could Digs Dilson have received a knife in his body?

Hope was expressed that the Dilson mob, formerly active and successful in meddling with film extras’ organizations and the sea food racket, would now dissolve. But the hope was short-lived.

A spruce lieutenant of the dead chief, a man by the name of Juney Saltz, was reputed to have taken command. He appeared briefly at the auction of old Bratton’s effects, buying all the mysterious machinery at junk prices and carting it away. After that, the organization, now called the Salters, blossomed out into the grim but well-paid professions of kidnapping, alien-running and counterfeiting.

The first important kidnapping they achieved, that of a very frightened film director, gained them a ransom of ninety thousand dollars and the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The victim, once released, told of imprisonment in a dank cellar, blindfolded and shackled. Once, fleetingly, he saw a captor who looked like the rogue’s gallery photographs of Juney Saltz, but that person was plainly not the one in authority. In fact, he seemed to listen with supple respect to a high but masterful voice that gave orders. And the owner of that high voice once came close to the chair where the prisoner sat bound; the point from which the voice seemed to issue was very, very close to the cellar floor, as though the speaker was no more than two feet high.

An individual short and shrill! Did a child rule that desperate band? The sages of the law were more apt to consider this a clever simulation, with the order-giver crouching low and squeaking high lest he be identified. A judicious drag-netting of several unsavory drinking places brought in one of the old Dilson crowd, who was skilfully, if roughly, induced to talk.

He admitted a part in the kidnapping and ransom collection. He described the cellar hideout as being located in a shabby suburb. He implicated several of his comrades by name, including Juney Saltz. But he shut up with a snap when his interrogators touched on the subject of the Salters’ real chief. No, it wasn’t Juney Saltz—Juney was only a front. No, nobody on the police records but, he insisted pallidly, he wouldn’t say any more. Let them kill him if they wanted to, he was through talking.

“I’d rather die in the chair this minute than get my turn with the boss,” he vowed hysterically. “Don’t tell me you’ll take care of me, either. There’s things can get between bars, through keyholes even, into the deepest hole you got. And you can smack me around all week before I’ll pipe up with another word.”

His captors shut him in an inside cell generally reserved for psychopathic cases—a solidly plated cubicle, with no window, grating, or other opening save a narrow ventilator in the ceiling that gave upon a ten-inch shaft leading to the roof. Then they gathered reinforcements and weapons and descended on the house with the cellar where the kidnapped director had been held for ransom.

Stealthily surrounding that house, they shouted the customary invitation to surrender. Silence for a few seconds, then a fainthearted member of the Salters appeared at the front door with his hands up. He took a step into the open, and dropped dead to the accompaniment of a pistol-report from inside. And the besiegers heard the shrill voice about which they had been wondering:

“Come in and take us. This place is as full of death as a drug store!”

Followed a loud and scientific bombardment with machine guns, gas bombs and riot guns. The mobster who had been placed on guard at the back door showed too much of himself and was picked off. A contingent of officers made a quick, planned rush. More fighting inside, with three more Salters dying in hot blood in the parlor and kitchen. What seemed to be the sole survivor fled to the cellar and locked himself in a rear compartment. The walls were of concrete, the one door of massive planking. The chief of the attacking force stood in front of this door and raised his voice:

“Hello, in there! You’re Juney Saltz, aren’t you?”

Gruff was the reply: “What if I am? Don’t try to crack in here. I’ll get the first copper shows me his puss, and the second and the third.”

“You can’t get us all, Juney. And we’ve got more men out here than you’ve got bullets in there. Come out with your hands up while you still have the chance to stand a fair trial.”

“Not me,” growled Juney Saltz from within. “Come in and catch me before you talk about what kind of a trial I’ll get.”

There was a keyhole, only partially blocked by the turnkey. One of the G-men bent and thrust in the point of something that looked like a fountain pen. Carefully he pressed a stud. The little tube spurted a cloud of tear gas through the keyhole into Juney Saltz’s fortress. The besiegers grinned at each other, and all relaxed to wait.

The waiting was not long, as it developed. Juney Saltz spoke up within, his voice a blubber: “Hey! I—I’m s-smothering—”

“But I’m not,” drawled the same high voice that was becoming familiar. “Sit back, Juney, and put your head between your knees. You’ll stand it better that way.”

“I’m—done for!” wailed Juney Saltz. “If they crack in, I—I can’t s-see to shoot!”

“I can see to shoot.” The shrill voice had become deadly. “And you’ll be the first thing I shoot at if you don’t do what I tell you.”

A strangled howl burst from Juney Saltz. “I’d rather be shot than—” And next moment he was scrabbling at the door. “I surrender! I’ll let you bulls in!”

He had turned the key in the lock just as the shot that killed him rang out. A rush of police foiled an attempt from within to fasten the door again. Sneezing and gurgling, two of the raiders burst into the final stronghold, stumbling over the subsiding lump of flesh that had been Juney Saltz.

Blinded by tears from their own gas, they could not be sure afterward of what the scurrying little thing was that they saw and fired at. Those outside knew that nothing could have won past them, and the den itself had no window that was not bricked up. When the gas had been somewhat blown out, an investigator gave the place a thorough searching. Yes, there was one opening, a stovepipe hole through which a cat might have slipped. That was all. And the place was empty but for the body of Juney Saltz.

“Juney was shot in the back,” announced another operative, bending to examine the wound. “I think I see what happened. Squeaky-Voice was at that stovepipe hole, and plugged him from there as he tried to let us in. Then Juney tried to lock up again, just as we pushed the door open.”

Upstairs they went, and investigated further. The hole had joined a narrow chimney, with no way out except the upper end, a rectangle eight inches by ten. Even with six corpses to show, the agents returned to their headquarters with a feeling of failure. “In the morning,” they promised one another, “we’ll give that one Salter we’re holding another little question bee.”

But in the morning, the jailer with breakfast found that prisoner dead.

He had been caught with a noose of thin, strong cord, tightened around his throat from behind. Suicide? But the cord had been drawn into the little ventilator hole, and tied to a projecting rivet far inside and above.

On the same day, police, federal agents, newspapers and the public generally were exercised by the information that Shannon Cole, popular contralto star of stage, screen and radio, had been kidnapped from her Beverly Hills bedroom. No clues, and so the investigation turned to her acquaintances, among whom was Ben Gascon, recently retired from stage, screen and radio.

Benjamin Franklin Gascon left the office of the Los Angeles chief of detectives, where he had spent a most trying forenoon convincing his interrogators that he had no idea why he should be brought into the case. He knew nothing of the underworld. True, he knew Miss Cole professionally, but—and his face was rueful—had no reason to count himself a really close friend of hers. He had not seen her since the termination of their latest radio assignment. His personal affairs, meanwhile, were quite open to investigation; he had grown weary of ventriloquism, and had retired to live on the income from his investments. Later, he might resume his earlier profession, medicine. He was attending lectures now at the University of California in Los Angeles. And once again, he had no idea of how he was being brought into this case, or of who could have kidnapped Miss Cole.

But, even as he departed, he suddenly got that idea.

“Tom-Tom!”

It took moments to string together the bits of logic which brought that thought into his mind.

Things had happened to people, mostly gangsters, at the hands of a malevolent creature; that is, if the creature had hands—but it must have hands, if it could wield a gun, a slip-cord, a knife! It must also be notably small and nimble, if it really traveled up chimneys, down ventilator shafts, along power-lines and through stovepipe holes. Gascon’s imagination, as good as anyone’s, toyed with the conception of a wise and wicked monkey, or of a child possessed by evil like the children of old Salem, or a dwarf.

But the point at which he coupled on his theory was the point at which police had paused, or rather begun.

Digs Dilson had been killed with a knife. So had old Bratton.

He, Ben Gascon, had given old Bratton the dummy that people called Tom-Tom. And old Bratton was forthwith murdered. Gascon had meant to go to the funeral, but something had turned up to interfere. What else concerned the janitor? What, for instance, had the younger electricians and engineers teased him about so often? “Electricity is life,” that was old Bratton’s constant claim. And he was said to have whole clutters of strange machinery at his shabby rooms.

Bratton had taken Tom-Tom. Thereafter Bratton and others had been killed. In the background of their various tragedies had lurked and plotted something small, evil, active, and strange enough to frighten the most hardened of criminals. “Electricity is life”—and Bratton had toiled over some kind of electrical apparatus that might or might not be new and powerful in ways unknown to ordinary electricians.

Gascon left the rationalization half completed in the back of his mind, and sought out the shabby street where the janitor had lodged.

The landlord could not give him much help. To be sure old Bratton had made a nuisance of himself with his machines, mumbling that they would startle the world some day; but after his death, someone had bought those machines, loaded them upon a truck and carted them off. The landlord had seen the purchase, and later identified the purchaser from newspaper photographs as the late Juney Saltz.

And Juney Saltz, pondered Gascon, had been killed by something with a shrill voice, that could crawl through a stovepipe hole. … “You saw the sale of the goods?” he prompted the landlord. “Was there a dummy—a thing like a big doll, such as ventriloquists use?”

The landlord shook his head. “Nothing like that. I’d have noticed if there was.”

So Tom-Tom, who had gone home with old Bratton, had vanished.

Gascon left the lodgings and made a call at a newspaper office, where he inserted a personal notice among the classified advertisements:

T-T. I have you figured out. Clever, but your old partner can add two and two and get four. Better let S. C. go. B. F. G.

The notice ran for three days. Then a reply, in the same column:

B. F. G. So what? T-T.

It was bleak, brief defiance, but Gascon felt a sudden blaze of triumph. Somehow he had made a right guess, on a most fantastic proposition. Tom-Tom had come to life as a lawless menace. All that he, Gascon, need do, was act accordingly. He made plans, then inserted another message:

T-T. I made you, and I can break you. This is between us. Get in touch with me, or I’ll come looking for you. You won’t like that. B. F. G.

Next day his telephone rang. A hoarse voice called him by name:

“Look, Gascon, you better lay off if you know what’s good for you.”

“Ah,” replied Gascon gently, “Tom-Tom seems to have taken up conventional gangster methods. It means that he’s afraid—which I’m not. Tell him I’m not laying off, I’m laying on.”

That night he took dinner at a restaurant on a side street. As he left it, two men sauntered out of a doorway and came up on either side of him. One was as squat and bulky as a wrestler, with a truculent square face. The other, taller but scrawny, had a broad brow and a narrow chin, presenting the facial triangle which phrenologists claim denotes shrewdness. Both had their hands inside their coats, where bulges betrayed the presence of holstered guns.

“This is a stickup,” said Triangle-Face. “Don’t make a move or a peep, or we’ll cut down on you.”

They walked him along the street.

“I’m not moving or peeping,” Gascon assured them blandly, “but where are you taking me?”

“Into this car,” replied the triangle-faced one, and opened the rear door of a parked sedan. Gascon got in, with the powerful gunman beside him. The other got into the front seat and took the wheel.

“No funny business,” he cautioned as he trod on the starter. “The boss wants to talk to you.”

The car drew away from the curb, heading across town. Gascon produced his cigarette case—Shannon Cole had given it to him on his last birthday—opened it, and offered it to the man beside him. Smiling urbanely at the curt growl of refusal, he then selected a cigarette and lighted it.

“Understand one thing,” he bade his captors, through a cloud of smoke. “I’ve expected this. I’ve worked for it. And I have written very fully about all angles of this particular case. If anything happens to me, the police will get my report.”

It was patently a bluff, and in an effort to show that it did not work both men laughed scornfully.

“We’re hotter than a couple wolves in a prairie fire right now,” the triangle-faced one assured him. “Anyway, no dumb cop would believe the truth about the boss.”

That convinced Gascon that he was on his way to Tom-Tom. Too, the remark about “a coupla wolves” showed that the driver thought of only two members of the gang. Tom-Tom’s following must have been reduced to these. Gascon sat back with an air of enjoying the ride. Growling again, his big companion leaned over and slapped him around the body. There was no hard lump to betray knife or pistol, and the bulky fellow grunted to show that he was satisfied. Gascon was satisfied as well. His pockets were not probed into, and he was carrying a weapon that, if unorthodox, was nevertheless efficient. He foresaw the need and the chance to use it.

“Is Miss Cole all right?” he asked casually.

“Sure she is,” replied Square-Face.

“Pipe down, you!” snapped his companion from the driver’s seat. “Let the boss do the talking to this egg.”

“Your boss likes to do the talking, I judge,” put in Gascon, still casually. “Do you like to listen? Or,” and his voice took on a mocking note, “does he give you the creeps?”

“Never mind,” Square-Face muttered. “He’s doing okay.”

“But not his followers,” suggested Gascon. “Quite a few of them have been killed, eh? And aren’t you two the only survivors of the old Dilson crowd? How long will your luck hold out, I wonder?”

“Longer than yours,” replied the man at the wheel sharply. “If you talk any more, we’ll put the slug on you.”

The remainder of the ride was passed in silence, and the car drew up at length before a quiet suburban cottage, on the edge of town almost directly opposite the scene of the recent fight between police and the Salters.

The three entered a dingy parlor, full of respectable looking furniture. “Keep him here,” Triangle-Face bade Square-Face. “I’ll go help the boss get ready to talk to him.”

He was gone. His words suggested that there would be some moments alone with Square-Face, and Gascon meant to make use of them.

The big fellow sat down. “Take a chair,” he bade, but Gascon shook his head and lighted another cigarette. He narrowed his eyes, in his best diagnostician manner, to study his guard.

“You look as if there was something wrong with your glands,” he said crisply.

“Ain’t nothing wrong with me,” was the harsh response.

“Are you sure? How do you feel?”

“Good enough to pull a leg off of you if you don’t shut that big mouth.”

Gascon shrugged, and turned to a rear wall. A picture hung there, a very unsightly oil painting. He put his hand up, as if to straighten it on its hook. Then he glanced toward a window, letting his eyes dilate. “Ahhhh!” he said softly.

Up jumped the gangster, gun flashing into view. “What did you say?” he demanded.

“I just said ‘Ahhhh,’ ” replied Gascon, his eyes fixed on the window.

“If anybody’s followed you here—” The giant broke off and tramped toward the window to look out.

Like a flash Gascon leaped after him. With him he carried the picture, lifted from where it hung. He swept it through the air, using the edge of the frame like a hatchet and aiming at the back of the thick neck.

The blow was powerful and well placed. Knocked clean out, the gangster fell on his face. Gascon stooped, hooked his hands under the armpits, and made shift to drag the slack weight back to its chair. It took all his strength to set his victim back there. Then he drew from his side pocket the thing he had been carrying for days—a wad of cotton which he soaked in chloroform. Holding it to the broad nose, he waited until the last tenseness went out of the great limbs. Then he crossed one leg over the other knee, poised the head against the chair-back, an elbow on a cushioned arm. Clamping the nerveless right hand about the pistol-butt, he arranged it in the man’s lap. Now the attitude was one of assured relaxation. Gascon hung the picture back in place, and himself sat down. He still puffed on the cigarette that had not left his lips.

He had more than a minute to wait before the leaner mobster returned. “Ready for you now,” he said to Gascon, beckoning him through a rear door. He gave no more than a glance to his quiet, easy-seeming comrade.

They went down some stairs into a basement—plainly basements were an enthusiasm of the commander of this enterprise—and along a corridor. At the end was a door, pulled almost shut, with light showing through the crack. “Go in,” ordered Triangle-Face, and turned as if to mount the stairs again.

But it was not Gascon’s wish that he find his companion senseless. In fact, Gascon had no intention of leaving anyone in the way of the retreat he hoped to make later. With his hand on the doorknob, he spoke:

“One thing, my friend.”

Triangle-Face paused and turned. “I’m no friend of yours. What do you want?”

Gascon extended his other hand. “Wish me luck.”

“The only luck I wish you is bad. Don’t try to grab hold of me.”

The gangster’s hand slid into the front of his coat, toward that bulge that denoted an armpit holster. Gascon sprang upon him, catching him by the sleeve near the elbow so that he could not whip free with the weapon. Gascon’s other hand dived into his own pocket, again clutching the big wad of chloroform-soaked cotton.

He whipped the wad at and upon the triangular face. The man tried to writhe away but Gascon, heavier and harder-muscled than he, shoved him against the wall, where the back of his head could be clamped and held. Struggling, the fellow breathed deeply, again, again. His frantic flounderings suddenly went feeble. Gascon judged the dose sufficient, and let go his holds. The man subsided limply and Gascon, still holding to his sleeve, dragged the right hand out of the coat. Dropping his wad of cotton, he took up the big pistol.

“I’m afraid, Gaspipe,” said a shrill, wise voice he should know better than anyone in the world, “that that gun won’t really help you a nickel’s worth.”

Gascon spun around. A moment ago he had put his hand on the doorknob. When he had turned to leap at the triangle-faced man, he had pulled the door open. Now he could see inside a bare, officelike room, a big sturdy desk and a figure just beyond; a figure calm and assured, but so tiny, so grotesque.

“Come in, Gaspipe,” commanded Tom-Tom, the dummy.

Tom-Tom did not look as Gascon had remembered him. The checked jacket was filthy and frayed, and in the breast of it was a round black hole the size of a fingertip. The paint had been flaked away from the comical face, one broad ear was half broken off, the wig was tousled and matted. And the eyes goggled no more in the clownish fashion that had been made so famous in publicity photographs. They crouched deep in Tom-Tom’s wooden face and glowed greenly, like the eyes of a meat-eating animal.

“You’re the only man I ever expected to figure me out, Gaspipe,” said Tom-Tom. “And even you can’t do much about it, can you? Put away the gun. I’ve been shot at and shot at, and it does nothing but make little holes like this.”

He tapped the black rent in his jacket-front with a jointed forefinger.

“As a matter of fact, I was glad to see your notice in the agony column. I think I’d have hunted you up, anyway. You see, we make a fine team, Gaspipe. There are things we can still do for each other, but you must be reasonable.”

“I’m not here to let you make fun of me,” said Gascon. “You’re just a little freak, brought to life by the chance power evolved by a cracked old intelligence. Once I puzzled it out, I knew that I needn’t be afraid. You can’t do anything to me.”

“No?” said Tom-Tom, with what seemed a chuckle. “Let me show you something, Gaspipe.”

His wooden hand moved across the desktop and touched a button. A section of the wall slid back like a stage curtain, revealing an opening the size of a closet door. The opening was fenced in with a metal grating. Behind it stood Shannon Cole, her long black hair awry, her face pale, her cloth-of-gold pajamas rumpled.

“Ben!” she said, in a voice that choked. “Did he get you, too?”

Gascon exclaimed, and turned as if to spring toward the grating. But at the same instant, with a swiftness that was more than a cat’s, Tom-Tom also moved. He seemed to fly across his desk as though flung by a catapult. His hard head struck Gascon’s stomach, doubling him up, and then Tom-Tom’s arms whipped around Gascon’s ankles, dragging them sidewise. Down fell the ventriloquist, heavily and clumsily. The gun flew from his hand, bouncing on the floor like a ball. Tom-Tom caught it in mid-bounce, and lifted it with both hands.

“I won’t kill you, Gaspipe,” he announced, “but I’ll most emphatically shoot off your kneecap, if you try anything sudden again. Sit up. Put your back against that wall. And listen.”

“Do what he says, Ben! He means business!” Shannon Cole urged tremulously from behind her bars.

Gascon obeyed, trying to think of a way to grapple that imp of wood and fabric. Tom-Tom chuckled again, turned back to his desk and scrambled lightly upon it. As before he touched the button, and Shannon was instantly shut from sight.

“Good thing I kidnapped her,” he observed. “Not only is she worth thousands to her managers, but she brought you to me. Now we’ll have a dandy conference. Just like old times, isn’t it, Gaspipe?”

Gascon sat still, eyeing the gun. He might have risked its menace, but for the thought of Shannon behind those bars. Tom-Tom, so weirdly strong, might fight him off even if disarmed, then turn on his captive. The dummy that was no longer a dummy seemed to read his mind:

“No violence, Gaspipe. I tell you, it’s been tried before. When the Dilson mobsters were through laughing at the idea of my taking over, one or two thought that Digs Dilson should be avenged. But their guns didn’t even make me blink. I killed a couple, and impressed the others. I put into them the fear of Tom-Tom.” Again the chuckle. “I’m almost as hard to hurt as I am to fool, Gaspipe. And that’s very, very hard indeed.”

“What do you want of me?” blurted Gascon, scowling.

“Now that’s a question,” nodded Tom-Tom. “It might be extended a little. What do I want of life, Gaspipe? Life is here with me, but I never asked for it. It was thrust into me, and upon me. My first feeling was of crazy rage toward the life-giver—”

“And so you killed him?” interrupted Gascon.

“I did. And the killing gave me the answer. The only thing worth while in life is taking life.”

Tom-Tom spread his wooden hands, as though he felt that he had made a neat point. Gascon made a quick gesture of protest, then subsided as Tom-Tom picked up the gun again.

“You’re wrong, Tom-Tom,” he said earnestly.

“Am I? You’re going to give me a moral lecture, are you? But men invented morals, so as to protect their souls. I don’t have a soul, Gaspipe. I don’t have to worry about protecting it. I’m not human. I’m a thing.” Sitting on the desk, he crossed his legs and fiddled with the gun. “You’ve lived longer than I. What else, besides killing, is worth while in life?”

“Why—enjoyment—”

The marred head waggled. “Enjoyment of what? Food? I can’t eat. Companionship? I doubt it, where a freak like me is concerned. Possessions? But I can’t use clothes or houses or money or anything like that. They’re for men, not dummies. What else, Gaspipe?”

“Why—why—” This time Gascon fell silent.

“Love, you were going to say?” The chuckle was louder, and the glowing yellow eyes flickered aside toward the place behind the wall where Shannon was penned up. “You’re being stupid, Gaspipe. Because you know what love is, you think others do. Gaspipe, I’ll never know what love is. I’m not made for it.”

“I see you aren’t,” Gascon nodded solemnly. “All right, Tom-Tom. You can find life worth living if you try for supremacy in some line—leadership—”

“That,” said Tom-Tom, “is where killing comes in. And where you come in, too.”

He laid down the gun and put the tips of his jointed fingers together, in a pose grotesquely like that of a mild lecturer. “I’ve given my case a lot of time and thought, you see. I realize that I don’t fit in—humanity hasn’t ever considered making a place for me. I don’t have needs or reactions or wishes to fit those of humanity.”

“Is that why you turn to criminals? Because they don’t fit into normal human ethics, either?”

“Exactly, exactly.” Tom-Tom nodded above his poised hands. “And criminals understand me, and I understand them better than you think. But,” and he sounded a little weary, “they’re no good, either.

“You see, Gaspipe, they scare too easily. They die too easily. Just now you overpowered one. They’re not fit to associate with me on the terms I dictate. If I’m going to have power, it will turn what passes for my stomach if I have only people—people of meat and bone—under me.” He made a spitting sound, such as Gascon had often faked for him in the days when the two were performing. “As I say, this is where you come in.”

“In heaven’s name, what do you mean?”

“You’re smart, Gaspipe. You made me—the one thing that has been given artificial life. Well, you’ll make other things to be animated.”

“More robots?” demanded Gascon. “You want a science factory.”

“I am the apex of science come true. Oh, it’s practical. A couple at first. Then ten. Then a hundred. Then enough, perhaps, to grab a piece of the world and rule it. Don’t bug out your eyes, Gaspipe. My followers bought up the life-making machinery and other things for me. I have lots of money—from that ransom—and I can get more.”

Gascon was finding the idea not so surprising as at first, but he shook his head over it. “I won’t.”

“Yes, you will. We’ll be partners again. Understand?”

“If I refuse?”

Tom-Tom made no audible answer. He only turned and gazed meaningly at the place where Shannon was shut up.

Gascon sighed and rose. “Show me this machinery of yours.”

“Step this way.” Monkey-nimble, Tom-Tom hopped to the floor. He had taken up the gun again, and gestured with it for Gascon to walk beside him. Together they crossed the office to a rear corner, where Tom-Tom touched what looked like a projecting nail head. As with the door to Shannon’s cell, a panel slid back. They passed into a corridor, and the panel closed behind them.

“Straight ahead,” came the voice of Tom-Tom in the darkness. “Being mechanical, I have a head for mechanics. I devised all these secret panels. Neat?”

“Dramatic,” replied Gascon, who could be ironical himself. “Now, Tom-Tom, if I do what you want, what happens to me and to Miss Cole?”

“You both stay with me.”

“You won’t let them ransom her?”

A chuckle, and: “I’ll take the ransom money, but she’s seen too much to go free. Maybe I’ll make the two of you a nice suite of rooms for housekeeping—barred in, of course. Didn’t you use to carry me around in a little case, Gaspipe? I’ll take just as good care of you, if you do what I want.”

The little monster did something or other to open a second door, and beyond showed the light of a strong electric lamp. They passed into a big windowless room, with rough wooden walls, probably a deep cellar. It held a complicated arrangement of electrical machinery.

Hopping lightly to a bench the height of Gascon’s shoulder, Tom-Tom seized a switch and closed it. There were emissions of sparks, a stir of wheels and belts, and the hum of machinery being set in motion.

“This, Gaspipe, is what brought me to life. And look!” The jointed wooden hand flourished toward a corner. “There’s the kind of thing that was tried and failed.”

It looked like a caricature of an armored knight—a tall, jointed, gleaming thing, half again as big as a big man, with a head shaped like a bucket. There were no features except two vacant eyes of quartz, staring through the blank metal as through a mask. Gascon walked around it, his doctor-mind and builder-hands immediately interested. The body was but loosely pinned together, and he drew aside a plate, peering into the works.

“The principle’s wrong,” he announced at once. “The fellow didn’t understand anatomical balance—”

“I knew it, I knew it!” cried Tom-Tom. “You can add the right touch, Gaspipe. That’s the specimen that came closest to success before me. I’ll help. After all, my brain was made by the old boy who did all these things. Through it, I know what he knew.”

“Why didn’t you save him to help you?” demanded Gascon. He picked up a pair of tapering pincers and a small wrench, and began to tinker.

“I told you about that once. I was angry. My first impulse was a killing rage. The death of my life-giver was my first pleasure and triumph. I hadn’t dreamed up the plan I’ve been describing.”

Anger was Tom-Tom’s first emotion. Not so different from human beings as the creature imagined, mused Gascon. What had the lecturer at medical school once quoted from Emmanuel Kant:

“The outcry that is heard from a child just born was not the note of lamentation, but of indignation and aroused wrath.”

Of course, a newborn baby has not the strength to visit its rage on mother or nurse or doctor, but a creature as organized and powerful in body and mind as Tom-Tom—or as huge and overwhelming as this metal giant he fiddled with—

Gascon decided to think such thoughts with the greatest stealth. If Tom-Tom could divine them, something terrible was due to happen. Stripping off his coat, he went to work on the robot with deadly earnestness.

Morning had probably come to the outside world. Gascon, wan and weary, stepped back and mopped his brow with a shirt sleeve. Tom-Tom spoke from where he sat cross-legged on the bench beside the controls.

“Is he pretty much in shape, Gaspipe?”

“As much as you ever were, Tom-Tom. If you are right, and this machine gave you life, it will give him life, too.”

“I can’t wait for my man Friday. Get him over and lay him on the slab.”

The metal man was too heavy to lift, but Gascon’s hours of work had provided his joints with beautiful balance. An arm around the tanklike waist was enough to support and guide. The weight shifted from one big shovel-foot to the other and the massive bulk actually walked to the table-like slab in the midst of the wheels and tubes, and Gascon eased it down at full length. Now Tom-Tom approached, bringing a spongy-looking object on a metal tray, an amorphous roundness that sprouted copper wires in all directions. He slid it into the open top of the robot’s bucketlike head.

“That’s a brain for Friday,” explained Tom-Tom. “Not as complex as mine, but made the same way. He’ll have simple reactions and impulses. A model servant.”

Simple reactions—and Tom-Tom had sprung up from his birthcouch to kill the man who brought him to life. Gascon’s hands trembled ever so slightly as he connected the brain wires to terminals that did duty as nerves. Tom-Tom himself laid a plate over the orifice and stuck it down with a soldering iron.

“My own brain’s armored inside this wooden skull,” he commented. “No bullet or axe could reach it. And nobody can hurt the brain of Friday here unless they get at him from above. He’s pretty tall to get at from above, eh, Gaspipe?”

“That’s right,” nodded Gascon, and in his mind rose a picture of the big metal thing bending down, exposing that vulnerable soldered patch. Tom-Tom and he clamped the leads to wrists, ankles and neck.

“Get back to the wall, Gaspipe,” commanded Tom-Tom bleakly, and Gascon obeyed. “Now watch. And don’t move, or I’ll set Friday on you when he wakes up.”

Gascon sat down on a long, low bench next to the open door. Tom-Tom noticed his position, and lifted the gun he had carried into the chamber.

“Don’t try to run,” he warned, “or I’ll drill you—maybe in the stomach. And you can lie there and die slowly. When you die there’ll be nobody to help Shanny yonder in her little hole in the wall.”

“I won’t run,” promised Gascon. And Tom-Tom switched on more power.

Sparks, a shuddering roar, a quickening of all parts of the machine. The shining hulk on the slab stirred and quivered, like a man troubled by dreams. Tom-Tom gave a brief barking laugh of triumph, brought the mechanism to a howling crescendo of sound and motion, then abruptly shut it down to a murmur.

“Friday! Friday!” he called.

Slowly the metal giant sat up in its bonds.

The bucket-head, with its vacant eyes now gleaming as yellow as Tom-Tom’s, turned in that direction. Then, with unthinkable swiftness, the big metal body heaved itself erect, ripping free of the clamps that had been fastened upon it. Up rose two monstrous hands, like baseball gloves of jointed iron. There was a clashing, heavy-footed charge.

Sitting still as death, Gascon again recalled to mind what Tom-Tom had said, what he had heard at medical school.

Tom-Tom gave a prolonged yell, and threw up the gun to fire. The explosions rattled and rolled in the narrow confinement of the room. Bullets spattered the armor-plated breast of the oncoming giant. One knocked away a gleaming eye. The towering thing did not falter in its dash. Tom-Tom tried to spring down too late. The big hands flashed out, and had him.

Gascon, now daring to move, dragged the bench across the doorway. From a corner he caught up a heavy wrought-iron socket lever, as long as a walking stick and nearly as thick as his wrist. All the while he watched, over his shoulder, a battle that was not all one-sided.

After his final effort to command the newly animated giant, Tom-Tom had not made a sound. He concentrated on freeing himself from the grip that had fastened upon him. Both his wooden hands clutched a single finger, strained against it. Gascon saw, almost as in a ridiculous dream, that immense finger bending backward, backward, and tearing from its socket. But the other fingers kept their hold. They laid Tom-Tom on the floor, a great slab of a foot pinned him there. The two metal hands began to pluck him to pieces, and to throw the pieces away.

First an arm in a plaid sleeve flew across the room—an arm ripped from Tom-Tom’s little sleeve, an arm that still writhed and wriggled, its fingers opening and closing. It fell among the wheels that still turned, jamming them. Sparks sprang up with a grating rattle. Then a flame of blueness. Gascon turned his back toward the doorway that he had blocked with the bench, to see the thing out.

With a wanton fury, the victorious ogre of metal had shredded Tom-Tom’s body, hurling the pieces in all directions. To one side, the machinery was putting forth more flame and more. The blaze licked up the wall. The giant straightened his body at last, holding in one paw the detached head of its victim. The jaws of Tom-Tom snapped and moved, as though he was trying to speak.

“Look this way!” roared Gascon at the top of his voice.

The creature heard him. Its head swiveled doorward. It stared with one gleaming eye and one empty black socket. Gascon brandished the socket lever over his head, as though in challenge, then turned and sprang over the bench into the dark corridor.

A jangling din as the thing rushed after him. Hands shot out to clutch. Its shins struck the bench violently, the feet lost their grip of the floor, and the clumsy structure plunged forward and down, with a noise like an automobile striking a stone wall. For a moment the huge head was just at Gascon’s knee.

He struck. The solder-fastened patch flew away under the impact of his clubbed lever-bar like a driven golf ball. The cranium yawned open, and he jabbed the bar in. Something squashed and yielded before his prodding—the delicate artificial brain. Then the struggling shape at his feet subsided. From one relaxing hand rolled something round—the head of Tom-Tom.

It still lived, for the eyes rolled up to glare at Gascon, the jaws snapped at his toe. He kicked the thing back through the door, into the growing flames. The fire was bright enough to show him the way back along the corridor. He did not know how Tom-Tom had arranged the panel to open and close, nor did he pause to find out. Heavy blows of the bar cleared him a way.

Out in the office, he fairly sprang to the desk, located the button on its top, and pressed it. A moment later, Shannon was staring out at him through her grating.

“Ben!” she gasped. “Are you all right? Tom-Tom—”

“He’s finished,” Gascon told her. “This whole business is finished.” With his lever he managed to rip the grating from its fastenings, and then dragged Shannon forth. She clung to him like a child awakened from a nightmare.

“Come, we’re getting out.”

In the second corridor he stooped, searched the pockets of the senseless triangle-faced one and secured the keys to the car outside. Then he shook the fellow back to semiconsciousness.

“This house is on fire!” Gascon shouted. “Get your pal upstairs on his feet, and get out of here.”

Leaving the fellow standing weakly, Gascon and Shannon got into the open and into the car. Driving along the street, they heard the clang of fire-engines, heading for the now angry fire.

Shannon said one thing: “Ben, how much can we tell the police?”

“It isn’t how much we can tell them,” replied Gascon weightily. “It’s how little.”

When Autumn returned, Ben Gascon was on the air again after all. His sponsors feared that his marriage to Shannon Cole might damage their popularity as co-stars, but radio fans showed quite the opposite reaction. Gascon introduced a fresh note in the form of a new dummy, which he named Jack Duffy, a greenhorn character with a husky voice instead of a shrill one and rural humor instead of cocktail-hour repartee.

Sometimes people asked what had become of Tom-Tom; but Gascon always managed to change the subject, and eventually Tom-Tom was forgotten.

The Devil’s Asteroid

It was not very large, as asteroids go, but about it clung a silvery mist of atmosphere. Deeper flashes through the mist betokened water, and green patches hinted of rich vegetation. The space-patroller circled the little world knowledgeably, like a wasp buzzing around an apple. In the control room, by the forward ports, the Martian skipper addressed his Terrestrial companion.

“I wissh you joy of yourr new home,” he purred. Like many Martians, he was braced upright on his lower tentacles by hoops and buckles around his bladdery body, so that he had roughly a human form, over which lay a strange loose armor of light plates. In the breathing hole of his petal-tufted skull was lodged an artificial voice-box that achieved words. “I rregrret—”

Fitzhugh Parr glowered back. He was tall, even for a man of Earth, and his long-jawed young face darkened with wrath. “Regret nothing,” he snapped. “You’re jolly glad to drop me on this little hell.”

“Hell?” repeated the Martian reproachfully. “But it iss a ssplendid miniaturre worrld—nineteen of yourr miless in diameterr, with arrtificial grravity centerr to hold airr and waterr; ssown, too, with Terresstrrial plantss. And companionss of yourr own rrace.”

“There’s a catch,” rejoined Parr. “Something you Martian swine think is a heap big joke. I can see that, captain.”

The tufted head wagged. “Underr trreaty between Marrs and Earrth, judgess of one planet cannot ssentence to death crriminalss frrom the otherr, not even forr murrderr—”

“It wasn’t for murder!” exploded Parr. “I struck in self-defense!”

“I cannot arrgue the point. Yourr victim wass a high official perrhapss inssolent, but you Earrth folk forrget how eassy ourr crraniumss crrack underr yourr blowss. Anyway, you do not die—you arre exiled. Prreparre to dissembarrk.”

Behind them three Martian space-hands, sprawling like squids near the control-board, made flutelike comments to each other. The tentacle of each twiddled an electro-automatic pistol.

“Rremove tunic and bootss,” directed the skipper. “You will not need them. Quickly, ssirr!”

Parr glared at the levelled weapons of the space-hands, then shucked his upper garment and kicked off his boots. He stood up straight and lean-muscled, in a pair of duck shorts. His fists clenched at his sides.

“Now we grround,” the skipper continued, and even as he spoke there came the shock of the landfall. The inner panel opened, then the outer hatch. Sunlight beat into the chamber. “Goodbye,” said the skipper formally. “You have thirrty ssecondss, Earrth time, to walk clearr of our blasstss beforre we take off. Marrch.”

Parr strode out upon dark, rich soil. He sensed behind him the silent quiver of Martian laughter, and felt a new ecstasy of hate for his late guards, their race, and the red planet that spawned them. Not until he heard the rumble and swish of the ship’s departure did he take note of the little world that was now his prison home.

At first view it wasn’t really bad. At second, it wasn’t really strange. The sky, by virtue of an Earth-type atmosphere, shone blue with wispy clouds, and around the small plain on which he stood sprouted clumps and thickets of green tropical trees. Heathery ferns, with white and yellow edges to their leaves, grew under his bare feet. The sun, hovering at zenith, gave a July warmth to the air. The narrow horizon was very near, of course, but the variety of thickets and the broken nature of the land beyond kept it from seeming too different from the skyline of Earth. Parr decided that he might learn to endure, even to enjoy. Meanwhile, what about the other Terrestrials exiled here? And, as Parr wondered, he heard their sudden, excited voices.

Threats and oaths rent the balmy air. Through the turmoil resounded solid blows. Parr broke into a run, shoved through some broad-leafed bushes, and found himself in the midst of the excitement.

A dozen men, with scraggly beards and skimpy rags of clothing, were setting upon an unclassifiable creature that snarled and fought back. It was erect and coarsely hairy—Parr saw that much before the enigma gave up the unequal fight and ran clumsily away into a mass of bright-flowered scrub. Execrations and a volley of sticks and stones speeded its flight.

Then the mob was aware of Parr. Every man—they were all male Terrestrials—turned toward him, with something like respect. One of them, tall and thin, spoke diffidently:

“You just arrived?”

“I was just booted out, ten minutes ago,” Parr informed him. “Why?”

“Because you’re our new chief,” responded the thin man, bowing. “The latest comer always commands here.”

Parr must have goggled, for the thin one smiled through tawny stubble. “The latest comer is always highest and wisest,” he elaborated. “He is healthiest. Best. The longer you stay on this asteroid, the lower you fall.”

Parr thought he was being joked with, and scowled. But his informant smiled the broader. “My name’s Sadau—here under sentence for theft of Martian government property.”

“I’m Fitzhugh Parr. They said I was a murderer. It’s a lie.”

One or two chuckled at that, and the one who called himself Sadau said: “We all feel unjustly condemned. Meet the others—Jeffords, Wain, Haldocott. …” Each man, as named, bowed to Parr. The final introduction was of a sallow, frowning lump of a fellow called Shanklin.

“I was boss until you came,” volunteered this last man. “Now you take over.” He waved toward a little cluster of grass huts, half hidden among ferny palms. “This is our capital city. You get the largest house—until somebody new shows up. Then you step down, like me.”

He spoke with ill grace. Parr did not reply at once, but studied these folk who were putting themselves under his rule. They would not have been handsome even if shaved and dressed properly. Indeed, two or three had the coarse, low-browed look of profound degenerates. Back into Parr’s mind came the words of Sadau: “The longer you stay … the lower you fall.”

“Gentlemen,” said Parr at last, “before I accept command or other office, give me information. Just now you were acting violently. You, Sadau, started explaining. Go ahead.”

Sadau shrugged a lean freckled shoulder, and with a jerk of his head directed his companions to retire toward the huts. They obeyed, with one or two backward glances. Left alone with Parr, Sadau looked up with a wise, friendly expression.

“I won’t waste time trying to be scientific or convincing. I’ll give you facts—we older exiles know them only too well. This asteroid seems a sort of Eden to you, I daresay.”

“I told the Martians that I knew there was a catch somewhere.”

“Your instinct’s sound. The catch is this: Living creatures—Terrestrials anyway—degenerate here. They go backward in evolution, become—” Sadau broke off a moment, for his lips had begun to quiver. “They become beasts,” he finished.

“What?” growled Parr. “You mean that men turn into apes?”

“Yes. And the apes turn into lower creatures. Those become lower creatures still.” Sadau’s eyes were earnest and doleful. “The process may run back and down to the worm, for all we can judge. We try not to think too much about it.”

“This is a joke of some kind,” protested Parr, but Sadau was not smiling.

“Martian joke, perhaps. The treaty keeps them from killing us—and this is their alternative punishment. It makes death trivial by comparison. … You don’t believe. It’s hard. But you see that some of us, oldest in point of exile, are sliding back into bestiality. And you saw us drive away, as our custom is, a man who had definitely become a beast.”

“That thing was a man?” prompted Parr, his spine chilling.

“It had been a man. As you wander here and there, you’ll come upon queer sights—sickening ones.”

Parr squinted at the huts, around the doors of which lounged the other men. “That looks like a permanent community, Sadau.”

“It is, but the population’s floating. I came here three months ago—Earth months—and the place was operating under the rules I outlined. Latest comer, necessarily the highest-grade human being, to be chief; those who degenerate beyond a certain point to be driven out; the rest to live peaceably together, helping each other.”

Parr only half heard him. “Evolution turned backward—it can’t be true. It’s against nature.”

“Martians war against nature,” replied Sadau pithily. “Mars is a dead world, and its people are devils. They’d be the logical explorers to find a place where such things can be, and to make use of it. Don’t believe me if you don’t want to. Time and life here will convince you.”

In the days that followed—the asteroid turned once in approximately twenty-two hours—Parr was driven to belief. Perhaps the slowness of the idea’s dawning kept him from some form of insanity.

Every man of the little group that called him chief was on the way to be a man no more. There were stooped backs among them, a forward hang to arms, a sprouting of coarse, lank hair. Foreheads fell away, noses flattened coarsely, eyes grew small and shifty. Sadau informed Parr that such evidences of degeneration meant a residence of a year or so on the exile asteroid.

“We’ll be driving one or two of them away pretty soon,” he observed.

“What then?” asked Parr. “What happens to the ones that are driven out?”

“Sometimes we notice them, peering through the brush, but mostly they haul out by themselves a little way from here—shaggy brutes, like our earliest fathers. There are lower types still. They stay completely clear of us.”

Parr asked the question that had haunted him since his first hour of exile: “Sadau, do you see any change in me?”

Sadau smiled and shook his head. “You won’t alter in the least for a month.”

That was reasonable. Man, Parr remembered, has been pretty much the same for the past ten thousand years. If a year brought out the beast in the afflicted exiles, then that year must count for a good hundred thousand years turned backward. Five years would be five hundred thousand of reverse evolution—in that time, one would be reduced to something definitely animal. Beyond that, one would drop into the category of tailed monkeys, of rodent crawlers—reptiles next, and then—

“I’ll kill myself first,” he thought, but even as he made the promise he knew he would not. Cowards took the suicide way out, the final yielding to unjust, cruel mastery by the Martians. Parr stiffened his shoulders, that had grown tanned and vigorous in the healthy air. He spoke grimly to Sadau:

“I don’t accept all this yet. It’s happened to others, but not to me so far. There’s a way of stopping this, and paying off those Martian swine. If it can be done—”

“I’m with you, Chief!” cried Sadau, and they shook hands.

Heartened, he made inquiries. The Martian space-patroller came every month or so, to drop a new exile. It always landed on the plain where Parr had first set foot to the asteroid. That gave him an idea, and he held conference in the early evening, with Sadau, Shanklin, and one or two others of the higher grade.

“We could capture that craft,” urged Parr. “There’s only a skipper and three Martians—”

“Yes, with pistols and ray throwers,” objected Shanklin. “Too big a risk.”

“What’s the alternative?” demanded Sadau. “You want to stay here and turn monkey, Shanklin? Chief,” he added to Parr, “I said once that I was on your side. I’ll follow wherever you lead.”

“Me, too,” threw in Jeffords, a sturdy man of middle age who had been sentenced for killing a Martian in a brawl.

“And me,” wound up Haldocott, a blond youth whose skin was burned darker than his hair and downy beard. “We four can pull it off without Shanklin.”

But Shanklin agreed, with something like good humor, to stand by the vote of the majority. The others of the community assented readily, for they were used to acting at the will of their wiser companions. And at the next arrival of the Martian patroller—an observer, posted by Parr in a treetop, reported its coming whole hours away—they made a quick disposal of forces around the rocket-scorched plain that did duty for a landing field. Parr consulted for a last moment with Sadau, Shanklin, Jeffords and Haldocott.

“We’ll lead rushes from different directions,” he said. “As the hatchway comes open, the patroller will stall for the moment—can’t take off until it’s airtight everywhere. I’ll give a yell for signal. Then everybody charge. Jam the tubes by smacking the soft metal collars at the nozzles—we can straighten them back when the ship’s ours. Out to your places now.”

“The first one at the hatch will probably be shot or rayed,” grumbled Shanklin.

“I’ll be first there,” Parr promised him. “Who wants to live forever, anyway? Posts, everybody. Here she comes in.”

Tense, quick-breathing moments thereafter as the craft descended and lodged. Then the hatchway opened. Parr, crouching in a clump of bushes with two followers, raised his voice in a battle yell, and rushed.

A figure had come forward to the open hatch, slender and topped with tawny curls. It paused and shrank back at the sudden apparition of Parr and his men leaping forward. Tentacles swarmed out, trying to push or pull the figure aside so as to close the hatch again. That took more seconds—then Parr had crossed the intervening space. Without even looking at the newcoming exile who had so providentially forestalled the closing of the hatch, he clutched a shoulder and heaved mightily. The Martian whose tentacles had reached from within came floundering out, dragged along—it was the skipper whose ironic acquaintance Parr had made in his own voyage out, all dressed in that loose-plate armor. Parr wrenched a pistol from a tentacle. Yelling again, he fired through the open hatchway. Two space-hands ducked out of sight.

“We’ve won!” yelled Parr, and for a moment he thought they had. But not all his followers had charged with his own bold immediacy.

Sadau on one side of the ship, Jeffords and Haldocott at the other, had run in close and were walloping manfully at the nozzles of the rocket tubes. The outer metal yielded under the blows, threatening to clog the throats of the blasts. Only at the rear was there no attack—Shanklin, and with him three or four of the lesser men, had hung back. The few moments’ delay there was enough to make all the difference.

Thinking and acting wisely, even without a leader, the Martian space-hands met the emergency. They had withdrawn from the open hatchway, but could reach the mechanism that closed it. Parr was too late to jump in after them. Then one of them fired the undamaged rear tubes.

Swish! Whang! The ship took off so abruptly that Parr barely dodged aside in time, dragging along with him the new Terrestrial whose shoulder he clutched, and also the surprised Martian skipper. The rocket blasts, dragging fiery fingers across the plain, struck down Haldocott and Jeffords, and bowled over two of the laggards with Shanklin’s belated contingent. Then it was away, moving jumpily with its half-wrecked side tubes, but nevertheless escaping.

Parr swore a great oath, that made the stranger gasp. And then Parr had time to see that this was a woman, and young. She was briefly dressed in blouse and shorts, her tawny hair was tumbled, her blue eyes wide. To her still clung the Martian skipper, and Parr covered him with the captured pistol. Next instant Shanklin, arriving at last, struck out with his club and shattered the flowerlike cranium inside the plated cap. The skipper fell dead on the spot.

“I wanted him for a prisoner!” growled Parr.

“What good would that do?” flung back Shanklin roughly. “The ship’s what we wanted. It’s gone. You bungled, Parr.”

Parr was about to reply with the obvious charge that Shanklin’s own hesitancy had done much to cause the failure, when Sadau spoke:

“This young lady—miss, are you an exile? Because,” and he spoke in the same fashion that he had once employed to Parr, “then you’re our new chief. The latest comer commands.”

“Why—why—” stammered the girl.

“Wait a minute,” interposed Parr again. “Let’s take stock of ourselves. Haldocott and Jeffords killed—and a couple of others—”

Shanklin barked at him. “You don’t give orders any more. We’ve got a new chief, and you’re just one of the rabble, like me.” He made a heavily gallant bow toward the latest arrival. “May I ask your name, lady?”

“I’m Varina Pemberton,” she said. “But what’s the meaning of all this?”

Shanklin and Sadau began to explain. The others gathered interestedly around. Parr felt suddenly left out, and stooped to look at the dead Martian. The body wore several useful things—a belt with ammunition and a knife-combination, shoes on the thickened ends of the tentacles, and that strange armor. As Parr moved to retrieve these, his companions called out to halt him.

“The new chief will decide about those things,” said Shanklin officiously. “Especially the gun. Can I have it?”

To avoid a crisis, Parr passed the weapon to the girl, who nodded thanks and slid it into her own waist-belt. Shanklin asked for, and received, the knife. Sadau was the only man slender enough to wear the shoes, and gratefully donned them. Parr looked once again at the armor, which he had drawn free of its dead owner.

“What’s that for?” asked Shanklin.

Parr made no answer, because he did not know. The armor was too loosely hung together for protection against weapons. It certainly was no space-overall. And it had nothing of the elegance that might make it a Martian uniform of office. Casting back, Parr remembered that the skipper had worn it at the time when he, Parr, was landed—but not during the voyage out. He shook his head over the mystery.

“Let that belong to you,” the girl Varina Pemberton was telling him. “It has plates of metal that may be turned to use. Perhaps—” She seemed to be on the verge of saying something important, but checked herself.

“If you’ll come with us,” Sadau told her respectfully, “we’ll show you where we live and where you will rule.”

They held council that night among the grass huts—the nine that were left after the unsuccessful attack on the patroller. Varina Pemberton, very pretty in her brief sports costume, sat on the stump that was chief’s place; but Shanklin did most of the talking.

“Nobody will argue about our life and prospects being good here,” he thundered, “but there’s no use in making things worse when they’re bad enough.” He shook a thick forefinger at Fitzhugh Parr, who wore the armor he had stripped from the dead Martian. “You were chief, and what you said goes. But you’re not chief now—you’re just the man who murdered four of us!”

“Mmm—yes,” growled one of the lower-fallen listeners, a furry-shouldered, buck-toothed clod named Wain. “That blast almost got me, right behind Haldocott.” His eyes, grown small, gleamed nastily at Parr. “We ought to condemn this man—”

“Please,” interposed Sadau, who alone remained friendly to Parr, “it’s for the chief to condemn.” He looked to Varina Pemberton, who shook her head slowly.

“I feel,” she ventured with her eyes on Parr, “that this ought to be left up to you as a voting body.”

Shanklin sprang to his feet. “Fair enough!” he bawled. “I call Parr guilty. All who think like me, say aye!”

“Aye!”

“Aye!”

“Aye!”

They were all agreeing except Sadau, who looked shrunken and sad and frightened. Shanklin smirked.

“All who think he should be killed as a murderer—”

“Hold on,” put in Varina Pemberton. “If I’m chief, I’ll draw the line there. Don’t kill him.”

Shanklin bowed toward her. “I was wrong to suggest that before a woman. Then he’s to be kicked out?”

There was a chorus of approving yells, and all save Sadau jumped up to look for sticks and stones. Parr laid his hand on the club he had borne in the skirmish that day.

“Now wait,” he said clearly and harshly, and the whole party faced him—Sadau wanly, the girl questioningly, the rest angrily.

“I’m to be kicked out,” Parr repeated. “I’ll accept that. I’ll go. But,” and the club lifted itself in his right hand, “I’m not going to be roughhoused. I’ve seen it happen here, and none of it for me.”

“Oh, no?” Shanklin had picked up a club of his own, and grinned fiercely.

“No. Let me go, and I leave without having to be whipped out of camp. Mob me, and I promise to die fighting, right here.” He stamped a foot on the ground. “I’ll crack a skull or two before I wink out. That’s a solemn statement of fact.”

“Let him go,” said Varina Pemberton again, this time with a ring of authority. “He wears that armor, and he’ll put up a fight. We can’t spare any more men.”

“Thank you,” Parr told her bleakly. He gave Shanklin a last long stare of challenge, then turned on his heel and walked away toward the thickets amid deep silence. Behind him the council fire made a dwindling hole in the blackness of night. It seemed to be his last hope, fading away.

He pushed in among thick, leafy stems. A voice hailed him:

“Hah!”

And a figure, blacker than the gloom, tramped close to him across a little grassy clearing.

“You! They drive you out?” a thick, unsure voice accosted him.

Parr hefted his club, wondering if this would be an enemy. “Yes. They drove me out. I’m exiled from among exiles.”

“Uh.” The other seemed perplexed over these words, as though they stated a situation too complicated. Parr’s eyes, growing used to the darkness, saw that this was a grotesque, shaggy form, one of the degenerate outcasts from the village. “Uh,” repeated his interrogator. “You come to us. Make one more in camp. Come.”

Among tall trees, thickly grown, lay a throng of sleepers. Parr’s companion led him there, and made an awkward gesture.

“You lie down. You sleep. Tomorrow—boss talk. Uh!”

So saying, the beast-man curled up at the root of a tree. Parr sat down with his back against another trunk, the club across his knees, but he did not sleep.

This, plainly enough, was the outcast horde. It clung together, the gregariousness of humanity not yet winnowed out by degeneration. It had a ruler, too—“Tomorrow boss talk.” Talk of what? In what fashion?

Thus Parr meditated during the long, moonless night. He also took time to examine once more his captured armor. Its metal plates, clamped upon a garment of leatheroid, covered his body and limbs, even the backs of his hands, as well as his neck and scalp. Yet, as he had decided before, it was no great protection against violence. As clothing it was superfluous on this tropical planetoid. What then?

He could not see, but he could feel. His fingers quested all over one plate, probing and tapping. The plate was hollow—in reality, two saucer-shaped plates with their concave faces together. They gave off a muffled clink of hollowness when he tapped them. When he shook the armor, there was something extra in the sound, and that impelled him to hold a plate close to his ear. He heard a soft, rhythmic whirr of machinery.

“There’s a vibration in this stuff,” he summed up in his mind. “What for? To protect against what?”

Then, suddenly, he had it.

The greatest menace of the whole tiny world was the force that reversed evolution—the vibration must be designed to neutralize that force!

“I’m immune!” cried Fitzhugh Parr aloud; and, in the early dawn that now crept into the grove, his sleeping companions began to wake and rise and gape at him.

He gaped back, with the shocked fascination that any intelligent person would feel at viewing such reconstructions of his ancestors. At almost the first glance he saw that the newest evolutionary thought was correct—these were simian, but not apes. Ape and man, as he had often heard, sprang from the same common forefather, low-browed, muzzle-faced, hairy. Such were these, in varying degrees of intensity. None wore clothes. Grinning mouths exhibited fanglike teeth, bare chests broadened powerfully, clumsy hands with short, ineffectual thumbs made foolish gestures. But the feet, for instance, were not like hands, they were flat pedestals with forward-projecting toes. The legs, though short, were powerful. Man’s father, decided Parr, must have had something of the bear about his appearance … and the most bearlike of the twenty or thirty beast-men heaved himself erect and came slouching across toward Parr.

This thing had once been a giant of a man, and remained a giant of an animal. None of the others present were nearly as large, nor were any of the men who had driven Parr forth. Six feet six towered this hair-thicketed ogre, with a chest like a drayhorse, and arms as thick as stovepipes. One hand—the thumb had trouble opposing the great cucumber fingers—flourished a club almost as long as Parr’s whole body.

“I—boss,” thundered this monster impressively. “Throw down stick.”

Parr had risen, his own club poised for defense. The giant’s free hand pointed to the weapon. “Throw down,” it repeated, with a growl as bearlike as the body.

“Not me,” said Parr, and ducked away from the tree-trunk against which he might be pinned. “What’s the idea? I didn’t do anything to you—”

“I—boss,” said his threatener again. “Nobody fight me.”

“True, true,” chorused the others sycophantically. “Ling, he boss—throw down club, you new man.”

Parr saw what they meant. With the other community, the newest and therefore most advanced individual ruled. In this more primitive society, the strongest held sway until a stronger displaced him. The giant called Ling was by no means the most human-seeming creature there, but he was plainly the ruler and plainly meant so to continue. Parr was no coward, but he was no fool. As the six-foot bludgeon whirled upward between him and the sky, he cast down his own stick in token of surrender.

“No argument, Ling,” he said sensibly.

There was laughter at that, and silly applause. Ling swung around and stripped bare his great pointed fangs in a snarl. Silence fell abruptly, and he faced Parr again. “You,” he said. “You got on—” And he stepped close, tapping the plates on Parr’s chest.

“It’s armor,” said Parr.

“Huh! Ah—ar—” The word was too much for the creature, whose brain and mouth alike had forgotten most language. “Well,” said Ling, “I want. I wear.”

He fumbled at the fastenings.

Parr jumped clear of him. He had accepted authority a moment ago, but this armor was his insurance against becoming a beast. “It’s mine,” he objected.

Solemnly Ling shook his great browless head, as big as a coal-scuttle and fringed with bristly beard. “Mine,” he said roughly. “I boss. You—”

He caught Parr by the arm and dragged him close. So quick and powerful was the clutch that it almost dislocated Parr’s shoulder. By sheer instinct, Parr struck with his free fist.

Square and solid on that coarse-bearded chin landed Parr’s knuckles, with their covering of armor plate. And Ling, confident to the point of innocence because of his strength and authority, had neither guarded nor prepared. His great head jerked back as though it would fly from his shoulders. And Parr, wrenching loose, followed up the advantage because a second’s hesitation would be his downfall.

He hit Ling on the lower end of the breastbone, where his belly would be softest. Above him he heard the beast-giant grunt in pain, and then Parr swung roundabout to score on the jaw again. Ling actually gave back, dropping his immense bludgeon. A body less firmly pedestalled upon powerful legs and scoop-shovel feet would have gone down. It took a moment for him to recover.

“Aaaah!” he roared. “I kill you!”

Parr had stooped and caught up his own discarded club. Now he threw it full at the distorted face of his enemy. Ling’s hands flashed up like a shortstop’s, snatched the stick in midair, and broke it in two like a carrot. Another roar, and Ling charged, head down and arms outflung for a pulverizing grapple.

Parr sprang sidewise. Ling blundered past. His stooping head crashed against a tree, his whole body bounded back from the impact, and down he went in a quivering, moaning heap. He did not get up.

Parr backed away, gazing at the others. They stood silent in a score of attitudes, like children playing at moving statues. Then:

“Huh!” cried one. “New boss!”

A chorus of cries and howls greeted this. They gathered around Parr with fawning faces. “You boss! You fight Ling—beat ’im. Huh, you boss!”

At the racket, Ling recovered a little, and managed to squirm into a sitting posture. “Yes,” he said, “you boss.”

With one hand holding his half-smashed skull, he lifted the other in salute to Parr.

It took time—several days—but Parr got over his first revulsion at the bestial traits of his new companions. After all, in shedding the wit and grace of man, they were recovering the honest simplicity of animals. For instance, Ling was not malicious about being displaced, as Shanklin had been. Too, there was much more real mutual helpfulness, if not so much talk about it. When one of the horde found a new crop of berries or roots or nuts, he set up a yell for his friends to come and share. A couple of oldsters, doddering and incompetent gargoyles, were fed and cared for by the younger beast-men. And all stood ready to obey Parr’s slightest word or gesture.

Thus, though it was a new thought to them, several went exploring with him to the north pole of their world. The journey was no more than fifteen miles, but took them across grassy, foodless plains which had never been worth negotiation. Parr chose Ling and another comparatively intelligent specimen who called himself Ruba. Izak, the mild-mannered one who had first met and guided Parr on the night of his banishment from the human village, also pleaded to go. Several others would have joined the party, but the deterioration of legs and feet made them poor walkers. The four went single file—Parr, then big Ling, then Ruba, then Izak. Each carried, on a vine sling, a leaf-package of fruit and a melon for quenching thirst. They also carried clubs.

The plain was well-grassed, as high as Ling’s knuckled knee. Occasionally small creatures hopped or scuttled away. The beast-men threw stones until Parr told them to stop—he could not help but wonder if those scurriers had once been men. The hot sun made him sweat under his plate-armor, but not for all the Solar System would he have laid it aside.

They paused for noonday lunch in a grove of ferny trees beyond the plain, then scaled some rough lava-like rocks. In the early afternoon they came to what must be the asteroid’s northern pole.

Like most of the asteroids, this was originally jagged and irregular. Martian engineers in fitting it artificially to support life, had roughed it into a sphere and pulverized quantities of the rock into soil. Here, at the apex, was a ring of rough naked hills enclosing a pit into which the sun could not look. Ling, catching up with Parr on the brow of the circular range, pointed with his great club.

“Look like mouth of world,” he hazarded. “Dark. Maybe world hungry—eat us.”

“Maybe,” agreed Parr. The pit, about a hundred yards across and full of shadow, looked forbidding enough to be a savage maw. Izak also came alongside.

“Mouth?” he repeated after Ling. “Mmm! Look down. Men in there.”

There was a movement, sure enough, and a flare of something—a torch of punky wood. Izak was right. Men were inside this polar depression.

“Come on,” said Parr at once, and began to scramble down the steep, gloomy inner slope. Ling grimaced, but followed lest his companions think him afraid. Ruba and Izak, who feared to be left behind, stayed close to his heels.

The light of the torch flared more brightly. Parr could make out figures in its glow—two of them. The torch itself was wedged in a crack of the rock, and beneath its flame the couple seemed to tug and wrench at something that gleamed darkly, like a great metal toadstool at the bottom of the depression. So engrossed were the workers that they did not notice Parr and his companions, and Parr, drawing near, had time to recognize both.

One was Sadau, who would have remained his friend. The other was Varina Pemberton. In the torchlight she looked browner and more vigorous than when he had seen her last.

“What are you doing?” he called to them.

Abruptly they both snapped erect and looked toward him. Sadau seized the torch and whirled it on high, shedding light. Varina Pemberton peered at the newcomers.

“Oh,” she said, “it’s you. Parr. Well, get out of here.”

Parr stood his ground, studying the toadstool-thing they had been laboring over. It was a wheel-like disk of metal, set upon an axle that sprouted from the floor of rock. By turning it, they could finish opening a great rock-faced panel near by. …

“Get out,” repeated the girl, with a hard edge on her voice.

Parr felt himself grow angry. “Take it easy,” he said. “Your crowd booted me out, and I’m not under your rule any more. Neither can this be said to be your country. We’ve as much right here as you.”

“Four of us,” added Ruba with threatening logic. “Two of you. Fight, uh?”

“Parr,” said Sadau, “do as Miss Pemberton tells you. Leave here.”

“And if I don’t?” temporized Parr, who felt the eagerness of his beast-men for some sort of a skirmish.

Varina Pemberton took something from her belt and pointed it. A brittle report resounded—whick! And an electro-automatic pellet exploded almost between Parr’s feet, digging a hole in the rock. He jumped back. So did his three comrades, from whose memories had not faded the knowledge of firearms.

“The next shot,” she warned, “will be a little higher and more carefully placed. Get out, and don’t come back.”

“They win,” said Parr. “Come on, boys.”

They retired to the upper combing of rock, with the sun at their backs. There Parr motioned them into hiding behind jagged boulders. Time passed, several hours of it. Finally they saw Sadau and Varina Pemberton depart on the other side of the hole.

“Good,” rumbled Ling. “We follow. Sneak up. Grab. Kill.”

“Not us,” Parr ruled. “No war against women, Ling. But we’ll go down where they were working, and see what it’s all about.”

They groped their way down again. At the bottom of the pit-valley they found the metal projection, so like a mighty steering wheel. Sadau’s torch lay there, extinguished, and Parr still carried a radium lighter in the pocket of his shabby shorts. He made a light, and looked.

The big panel or rock, that had been half-open, was closed. As for the wheel, it had been bent and jammed, by powerful blows with a rock. He could not budge it, nor could the mighty Ling, nor could all of them together.

“They were inside this asteroid,” decided Parr, half to himself. “Down where the Martians planted the artificial gravity-machinery. Having been there, they fixed things so nobody will follow them. Only blasting rays could open up a way, and those would probably wreck the mechanism and send air, water and exiles all flying into space. All this she did. Why?”

“Why what?” asked Izak, not comprehending.

“Yes, why what?” repeated Parr. “I can only guess, Izak, and none of my guesses have been worth much lately. Let’s go home, and keep an eye peeled on our neighbors.”

The Martians had come again—the same space-patroller, repaired, and twice as many hands and a new skipper. They carried no Terrestrial exile—for once their errand was different.

Four of them, harnessed into erect human posture, armed and armored, stood around the evening fire in the central clearing of the village now ruled by Varina Pemberton. The skipper was being insistent, but not particularly deadly.

“We rrecognize that fourr dead among you will ssettle forr one dead Marrtian,” he told the gathered exiles. “The morre sso ass you assurre me that the man rressponssible hass been drriven frrom among you. But we make one demand—the arrmorr taken frrom the body of the dead Marrtian.”

“I am sorry about that,” the chieftainess replied from her side. “We didn’t know that you valued it. If we get it back for you—”

“Ssuch action would rreflect favorrably upon you,” nodded the Martian skipper. “Get the arrmorr again, and we will rrefrrain frrom punitive meassurress.”

“Why do you want that armor so much?” inquired Shanklin boldly. He himself had never thought of it as worth much. He was more satisfied to have the knife, which he now hid behind him lest the Martians see and claim. But the skipper only shook his petalled skull.

“It iss no prroblem of yourrss,” he snubbed Shanklin. And, to Varina Pemberton: “What time sshall we grrant you? A day? Two dayss? … Come before the end of that time and rreporrt to me at the patrrol vessel.”

He turned and led his followers back toward the plain where the ship was parked.

Night had well fallen, and silence hung about the vessel. Only a rectangle of soft light showed the open hatchway. The Martian officer led the way thither, ducked his head, entered—

Powerful hairy hands caught and overpowered him. Before he could collect himself for resistance, other hands had disarmed him and were dragging him away. His three companions, narrowly escaping the same fate, fell back and drew their guns and ray throwers. A voice warned them sharply:

“Don’t fire, any of you. We’ve got your friends in here, and we’ve taken their electro-automatics. Give us the slightest reason, and we’ll wipe them out first—you second.”

“Who arre you?” shrilled one of the Martians, lowering his weapon.

“My name’s Fitzhugh Parr,” came back the grim reply. “You framed me into this exile—it’s going to prove the worst day’s work you Martian flower-faces ever did. Not a move, any of you! The ship’s mine, and I’m going to take off at dawn.”

The three discomfited hands tramped away again. Inside the control room, Parr spoke to his shaggy followers, who grinned and twinkled like so many gnomes doing mischief.

“They won’t dare rush us,” he said, “but two of you—Ling and Izak—stay at the door with those guns. Dead sure you can still use ’em? … You, Ruba, come here to the controls. You say you once flew spacecraft.”

Ruba’s broad, coarse hand ruffled the bushy hair that grew on his almost browless head. “Once,” he agreed dolefully. “Now I—many thing I don’t remember.” His face, flat-nosed and blubber-lipped, grew bleak and plaintive as he gazed upon instruments he once had mastered.

“You’ll remember,” Parr assured him vehemently. “I never flew anything but a short-shot pleasure cruiser, but I’m beginning to dope things out. We’ll help each other, Ruba. Don’t you want to get away from here, go home?”

“Home!” breathed Ruba, and the ears of the others—pointed, some of those ears, and all of them hairy—pricked up visibly at that word.

“Well, there you are,” Parr said encouragingly. “Sweat your brains, lad. We’ve got until dawn. Then away we go.”

“You will never manage,” slurred the skipper from the corner where the Martian captives, bound securely, sprawled under custody of a beast-man with a lever bar for a club. “Thesse animalss have not mental powerr—”

“Shut up, or I’ll let that guard tap you,” Parr warned him. “They had mental power enough to fool you all over the shop. Come on, Ruba. Isn’t this the rocket gauge? Please remember how it operates!”

The capture of the ship had been easy, so easy. The guard had been well kept only until the skipper and his party had gone out of sight toward the human village. Nobody ever expected trouble from beast-men, and the watch on board had not dreamed of a rush until they were down and secure. But this—the rationalization of intricate space-machinery—was by contrast a doleful obstacle. “Please remember,” Parr pleaded with Ruba again.

And so for hours. And at last, prodded and cajoled and bullied, the degenerated intelligence of Ruba had partially responded. His clumsy paws, once so skilful, coaxed the mechanism into life. The blasts emitted preliminary belches. The whole fabric of the ship quivered, like a sleeper slowly wakening.

“Can you get her nose up, Ruba?” Parr found himself able to inquire at last.

“Huh, boss,” spoke Ling from his watch at the door. “Come. I see white thing.”

Parr hurried across to look.

The white thing was a tattered shirt, held aloft on a stick. From the direction of the village came several figures, Martian and Terrestrial. Parr recognized the bearer of the flag of truce—it was Varina Pemberton. With her walked the three Martian hands whom he had warned off, their tentacles lifted to ask for parley, their weapons sheathed at their belts. Sadau was there, and Shanklin.

“Ready, guns,” Parr warned Ling and Izak. “Stand clear of us, out there!” he yelled. “We’re going to take off.”

“Fitzhugh Parr,” called back Varina Pemberton, “you must not.”

“Oh, must I not?” he taunted her. “Who’s so free with her orders? I’ve got a gun myself this time. Better keep your distance.”

The others stopped at the warning, but the girl came forward. “You wouldn’t shoot a woman,” she announced confidently. “Listen to me.”

Parr looked back to where Ruba was fumbling the ship into more definite action. “Go on and talk,” he bade her. “I give you one minute.”

“You’ve got to give up this foolish idea,” she said earnestly. “It can’t succeed—even if you take off.”

“No if about it. We’re doing wonders. Make your goodbyes short. I wish you joy of this asteroid, ma’am.”

“Suppose you do get away,” she conceded. “Suppose, though it’s a small, crowded ship, you reach Earth and land safely. What then?”

“I’ll blow the lid off this dirty Martian Joke,” he told her. “Exhibit these poor devils, to show what the Martians do to Terrestrials they convict. And then—”

“Yes, and then!” she cut in passionately. “Don’t you see, Parr? Relations between Mars and Earth are at breaking point now. They have been for long. The Martians are technically within their rights when they dump us here, but you’ll be a pirate, a thief, a fugitive from justice. You can cause a break, perhaps war. And for what?”

“For getting away, for giving freedom to my only friends on this asteroid,” said Parr.

“Freedom?” she repeated. “You think they can be free on Earth? Can they face their wives or mothers as they are now—no longer men?”

“Boss,” said Ling suddenly and brokenly, “she tell true. No. I won’t go home.”

It was like cold water, that sudden rush of ghastly truth upon Parr. The girl was right. His victory would be the saddest of defeats. He looked around him at the beast-men who had placed themselves under his control—what would happen to them on Earth? Prison? Asylum? Zoo? …

“Varina Pemberton,” he called, “I think you win.”

The hairy ones crowded around him, sensing a change in plan. He spoke quickly:

“It’s all off, boys. Get out, one at a time, and rush away for cover. Nobody will hurt you—and we’ll be no worse off than we were.” He raised his voice again: “If I clear out, will we be left alone?”

“You must give back that armor,” she told him. “The Martians insist.”

“It’s a deal.” He stripped the stuff from him and threw it across the floor to lie beside the bound prisoners. “I’m trusting you, Varina Pemberton!” he shouted. “We’re getting out.”

They departed at his orders, all of them. Ling and Izak went last, dropping the stolen guns they had held so unhandily. Parr waited for all of them to be gone, then he himself left the ship.

At once bullets began to whicker around him. He dodged behind the ship, then ran crookedly for cover. By great good luck, he was not hit. His beast-men hurried to him among the bushes.

“Huh, boss?” they asked anxiously. “Ship no good? What we do?”

He looked over his shoulder. Somewhere in the night enemies hunted for him. The beast-folk were beneath contempt, would be left alone. Only he had shown himself too dangerous to be allowed life.

“Goodbye, boys,” he said, with real regret. “I’m not much of a boss if I bring bullets among you. Get back home, and let me haul out by myself. I mean it,” he said sternly, as they hesitated. “On your way, and don’t get close to me again—death’s catching!”

They tramped away into the gloom, with querulous backward looks. Parr took a lonely trail in an opposite direction. After a moment he paused, tingling with suspense. Heavy feet were following him.

“Who’s coming?” he challenged, and ducked to avoid a possible shot. None came. The heavy tread came nearer.

“Boss!” It was Ling.

“I told you to go away,” reminded Parr gruffly.

“I not go,” Ling retorted. “You no make me.”

“Ling, you were boss before I came. Now that I’m gone from you—”

“You not gone from me. You my boss. Those others, they maybe pick new boss.”

“Ling, you fool!” Parr put out a hand in the night, and grabbed a mighty shaggy arm. “I’ll be hunted—maybe killed—”

“Huh!” grunted Ling. “They hunt us, maybe they get killed.” He turned and spat over his shoulder, in contempt for all marauding Martians and their vassal Earth folk. “You, me—we stay together, boss.”

“Come on, then,” said Parr. “Ling, you’re all right.”

“Good talk!” said Ling.

They went to the other side of the little spinning world, and there nobody bothered them. Time and space were relative, as once Einstein remarked to illustrate a rather different situation; anyway, the village under Varina Pemberton numbered only eight men—Parr and Ling could avoid that many easily on a world with nearly nine hundred square miles of brush, rock and gully.

In a grove among grapevines they built a shelter, and there dwelt for many weeks. Ling wore well as a sole friend and partner. Looking at the big, devoted fellow, Parr did not feel so revolted as at their first glimpse of each other. Ling had seemed so hairy, so misshapen, like a troll out of Gothic legends. But now … he was only big and burly, and not so hairy as Parr had once supposed. As for his face, all tusk and jaw and no brow, where had Parr gotten such an idea of it? Homely it was, brutal it wasn’t. …

“I get it,” mused Parr. “I’m beginning to degenerate. I’m falling into the beast-man class, closer to Ling’s type. Like can’t disgust like. Oh, well, why bother about what I can’t help?”

He felt resigned to his fate. But then he thought of another—Varina Pemberton, the girl who might have been a pleasant companion in happier, easier circumstances. She had banished him, threatened him, wheedled him out of victory. She, too, would be slipping back to the beast. Her body would warp, her skin grow hairy, her teeth lengthen and sharpen—Ugh! That, at least, revolted him.

“Look, boss,” said Ling, rising from where he lounged with a cluster of grapes in his big hand. “People coming—two of ’em.”

“Get your club,” commanded Parr, and caught up his own rugged length of tough torn-wood. “They’re men, not beast-men—they must be looking for trouble.”

“Couldn’t come to a better place to find it,” rejoined Ling, spitting between his palm and the half of his cudgel to tighten his grip. The two of them walked boldly into view.

“I see you, Sadau!” shouted Parr clearly, for there was no mistaking the gaunt, freckled figure in the lead. “Who’s that with you?”

The other man must be a new arrival. He was youngish and merry-faced as he drew closer, with black curly hair and a pointed beard. There was a mental-motive look to him, as if he were a high grade engineer or machinist. He wore a breech-clint of woven grasses, and looked expectantly at Parr.

“They aren’t armed,” pointed out Ling, and it was true. The pair carried sticks, but only as staffs, not clubs.

“Parr!” Sadau was shouting back. “Thank heaven I’ve found you—we need you badly.” He came close, and Parr hefted his club.

“No funny business,” he challenged, but Sadau gestured the challenge aside.

“I’m not here to fight. I say, you’re needed. Things have gone wrong, awfully. The others got to feeling that there was no reason to obey a woman chief, even though Miss Pemberton has many good impulses—”

“I agree to that,” nodded Parr, remembering the girl’s many strange behaviors. “I daresay she wasn’t much of a leader.”

Sadau did not argue the point. “Shanklin, as the previous newest man, grabbed back the chieftaincy,” he plunged ahead. “Those other fools backed him. When I tried to defend Miss Pemberton, they drove me out. I stumbled among the others—that crowd you used to capture the patroller—and got a line on where you were. I came for help.”

One phase had stuck in Parr’s mind. “You tried to defend that girl. They were going to kill her?”

“No. Shanklin, as chief and king, figures he needs a queen. She’s not bad looking. He’s going to marry her, unless—”

Parr snorted, and Sadau’s voice grew angry. “Curse it, man, I’m not casting you for a knight of the Table Round, or the valiant space-hero who arrives in the nick of time at the television drama! Simplify it, Parr. You’re the only man who ever had the enterprise to do anything actual here. You ought to be chief still, running things justly. And it isn’t justice for a girl to be married unofficially to someone she doesn’t like. Miss Pemberton despises Shanklin. Now, do you get my point, or are you afraid?”

It was Ling who made answer: “My boss isn’t afraid of anything. He’ll straighten that mess out.”

Parr glanced at the big fellow. “Thanks for making up my mind for me, Ling. Well, you two have talked me into something. Sadau, shake Ling’s big paw. And,” he now had time to view the stranger at close hand, “who’s this with you?”

The man with the black curls looked genially surprised. “You know me, boss. I’m Frank Rupert.”

Parr stared. “Never heard of you.”

“You’re joking. Why, I almost got that Martian patroller into space, when Miss Pemberton—”

Parr sprang at him and caught him by his shoulders. “You were Ruba—Rupert! It’s only that you didn’t talk plain before. What’s happened to you, man?”

Sadau hastily answered: “The degeneration force is obviated. Reversed. All those who were beast-men are coming back, some of the later arrivals completely normal again. Haven’t you noticed a change in this big husk?”

Parr turned and looked at Ling. So that was it! Day by day, the change had not been enough to impress him. As Ling had climbed back along his lost evolutionary trail, Parr had thought that he himself was slipping down. …

“Don’t stop and scratch your head over it, Parr,” Sadau scolded him. “It’ll take a lot of explaining, and we haven’t time. You said you’d help get Miss Pemberton out of her jam. Come on.”

It was like the television thrillers, after all, Parr reflected. But Sadau was right on one count—Parr didn’t quite fill the role of the space-hero. He had neither the close-clipped moustache nor the gleaming top boots. But he did have the regulation deep, unfathomable eyes and the murderous impulse.

It was just after noon. Shanklin, as chief-king, had also set up for a priest. In the center of the village clearing, he stood holding a sullen and pale Varina Pemberton by one wrist, while he recited what garblings of the marriage service he remembered. His subordinates were gathered to leer and applaud. They did not know of the rush until it was all over them.

Parr smote one on the side of the neck and spilled him in a squalling heap. Sadau, Ling and Rupert overwhelmed the rest of the audience, while Parr charged on into Shanklin. His impact interrupted the words “I take this woman” just after the appropriate syllable “wo.” As once before with Ling, Parr dusted Shanklin’s jaw with his fist, followed with a digging jab to the solar plexus, and swung again to the jaw. Shanklin tottered, reeled back, and Parr closed in again.

“I always knew I could lick you,” Parr taunted. “Come on and fight, bridegroom. I’ll raise a knot on your head the size of a wedding cake.”

Shanklin retreated another two paces, and from his girdle snatched the Martian knife. He opened its longest blade with a snap. Varina Pemberton screamed. Then, above the commotion of battle, sounded the flat smack of an electro-automatic. Shanklin swore murderously, dropping his knife. His knuckles were torn open by the grazing pellet.

And Parr, glancing in the direction whence the shot came, realized with savage disgust that the space-hero had come after all. There stood a gorgeous young spark in absolutely conventional space-hero costume, not forgetting the top-boots or the close-clipped moustache. Parr moved back, as if to allow this young demigod the center of the stage.

But Varina Pemberton was not playing the part of heroine. Instead of rushing in and embracing, she set her slim hands on her hips. She spoke, and her voice was acid: “It’s high time you came, Captain Worrall. I did my part of the job weeks ago.”

The handsome fellow in uniform chuckled. “We weren’t late, at least. We’ve been hiding here for some time—saw what this fellow I shot loose from the knife had in mind whole hours ago. But we also saw these others,” and he nodded toward Parr. “They sneaked up in such a businesslike manner, I hadn’t the heart to spoil their rescue.”

Other uniformed men—hands of the Terrestrial Space Fleet—were coming into view from among the boughs. They, too, were armed. Ling walked across to Parr, a struggling captive under each arm.

“What are these strangers up to, boss?” he demanded. “Say the word and I’ll wring that officer’s neck. I never liked officers, anyway.”

“Wait,” Parr bade him. Then, to the man called Captain Worrall: “Just what are you doing here?”

“This asteroid,” replied Worrall, “is now Terrestrial territory. We’re fortifying it against the Martians. War was declared three weeks ago, and we made rocket-tracks for this little crumb. It’s an ideal base for a flanking attack.”

Parr scowled. “You’re fortifying?” he repeated. “Well, you’d better shag out of here. There’s a power—not working just now, but—”

“No fear of that,” Varina Pemberton told him. She was smiling.

“I can explain best by starting at the start. Recently we got a report of what the Martians were doing out here. We realized that Earth must take care of her own, these poor devils who were being pushed back into animalism. Also, with war inevitable—”

“You aren’t starting at the start,” objected Parr. “Where do you fit into all this? You’re no soldier.”

“Oh, but she is,” Captain Worrall said, offering Parr a cigarette from a platinum case. “She’s a colonel of intelligence—high ranking. Wonderful job you’ve done, Colonel Pemberton.”

She took up the tale again: “If the reverse-evolution power could be destroyed, this artificially habitable rock in space would be a great prize for our navy to capture. So I took a big chance—got myself framed to a charge of Murder on Mars, and was the first woman ever sent here. I knew fairly accurately when war would break out, and figured I had months to do my work in. That captured armor gave me the clue.”

“All I knew was that it gave off a vibration,” nodded Parr.

“Exactly. Which meant that the evolution-reverse was vibratory, too. I confided in Sadau, and he and I pieced the rest of the riddle together. The vibrator would be inside, where nobody would venture for fear of jamming the gravity-core—but we ventured—”

“And shut it off!” cried Parr.

“More than that. We reversed it, started it again at top speed to cause a recovery from the degeneration process. Clever, these Martians—they fix it so you can shuttle to and fro in development. Already the higher beast-men are back to normal, like Rupert there, and the others will be all right, soon.”

“You had every right to chase me off at the end of a pistol,” said Parr. “I might have gummed the works badly.”

“You nearly did that anyway,” Varina Pemberton accused. “Fighting, raiding, stirring up the Martians who might have put a crimp in my plans any moment—but, being the type you are, you couldn’t do otherwise. I recognized that when I gave you the protective armor.”

He gazed at her. “Why didn’t you keep it for yourself?”

“No,” and she shook her tawny head. “I figured to win or lose very promptly. But you, armored against degeneration, might live after me and be an awful problem to the Martians. Remember, I didn’t make you give it back until I had done what I came to do.”

Worrall spoke again: “Colonel, these exiles must stay until all effects of the degeneration influence is gone. They’ll figure as civilians, with colonists’ rights. That means they must have a governor, to cooperate with the military garrison. Will that be you?”

Shanklin dared to speak: “I am chief—”

“Arrest that man,” the girl told two space-hands. “No, Captain. But I’m senior officer, and I’ll make an appointment. By far the best fitted person for the governorship is Fitzhugh Parr.”

The other exiles had pressed close to listen. Sadau, the diplomatic, at once set up a cheer. Ling added his own loyal bellow, and the others joined in. Parr’s ears burned with embarrassment.

“Have it your way,” he said to them all. “We’ll live here, get normal, and help all we can. But first, what have we to eat? We’ve got guests.”

“No, governor, you’re the guest of the garrison,” protested Captain Worrall. “Come aboard my ship yonder. I’ll lend you a uniform, and you’ll preside at the head of the table tonight.”

“Varina Pemberton,” Parr addressed the girl who had caused so much trouble and change on the little world of exile, “will you come and sit at my right hand there?”

“A pleasure,” she smiled, and put her arm through his.

Everybody cheered again, and both Parr and the girl blushed.

It All Came True in the Woods

When the Horror passing speech
Hunted us along,
Each laid hold on each, and each
Found the other strong.
In the teeth of things forbid
And reason overthrown,
Helen stood by me, she did,
Helen all alone.

Rudyard Kipling

Helen took long steps to keep up with her father. Her chubby face, solemn in its pointed blue hood, turned up to him. “What are these woods called, Daddy?” she asked for the fifth time.

“The Indians called them A-ma-soo-kit,” Clay said patiently, blowing out blue smoke on the brisk autumn air. “Can’t you remember, Helen? You’re six now, and you recited ‘Horatius’ for the people at the cabin last night.”

“ ‘Horatius’ is easy,” Helen explained, as her short legs in ski-pants made hoppy haste to stay beside her father. “A-ma-soo-kit,” and she achieved it at last, “is not. That’s foreign.” She was silent, catching her breath, and Clay slowed to a saunter.

No sense in wearing the child out, and the walk along this trail was too beautiful to hurry, anyway; the brush that fenced them in on either hand offered every fall tint that was richest and brightest—lemon, peach, orange, scarlet, royal purple. As for the trees of the wood, taller and more distant, they might have been a seafloor garden with their welters of warm red and gold clumped on their boughs.

“No, it isn’t foreign, Helen,” laughed Clay. “Why, the Indians were the first Americans—they lived here for ages before our people ever thought about the Mayflower.”

“Before George Washington?” That was Helen’s ultimate conception of antiquity.

“Ever so long before. They had a right to name these woods.”

“What does the name mean. Daddy?”

Clay drew on his pipe. It was a favorite of his, a big-bowled English briar. Quite a time would pass, he mused, before he’d be buying any more pipes in England, what with the war and all—Helen was tugging at his hand to hurry the answer. “Why, I’ve told you that, too,” he reminded. “A-ma-soo-kit—the Trees of Truth. Because the Indians believed that any words spoken here came true.”

“Oooo!” Helen was again intrigued. She liked outings of any kind, and had danced when her parents took the cabin on the edge of this forest reserve for fall weekends. Now, if the place had a story attached—“All words come true,” she repeated with relish. “You mean, like fairies and dwarfs?”

“Exactly,” nodded Clay with the utmost gravity. Imaginative himself, he encouraged when he could any romancing his little daughter might attempt. “Fairies and dwarfs.”

“Oooo!” squealed Helen again, and glanced around searchingly. “Daddy, there was a dwarf right there—with a long beard and a red cap—peeking out from under that bush.”

She pointed excitedly. Clay smiled down at her, and led the way around a bend of the trail. The shrubbery was thicker here, and its coloring even richer. Moss made the earth green under their boot-soles.

“It was something to see, then,” Clay remarked, still grave. He knew some parents, and despised them, who would call any child who claimed to see dwarfs a liar. But Clay remembered his own childhood, the vividness of his games and imaginings.

Helen put her hands in her jacket pockets, imitating her father. “Are there witches here too?” she pursued her inquiries.

“Mmmmm—no.” Her father would like to rule such thoughts out, ever since a night of awful dreams after Betty had heard some Halloween tales. “Whatever witches there were in this country got driven away by Cotton Mather, you know.”

“Is Cotton Mather here?” she asked at once.

“Cotton Mather is in heaven,” said Clay. “Let’s stop while Daddy fills his pipe.”

Waiting, Helen glanced up at the half-hazy sky, as though she expected to see the old Puritan divine look out at her, dwarf fashion. “Well,” she said, “are there giants in these woods?”

Tamping down the tobacco in the bowl, Clay held a match to it. He shrugged in defeat—what can you do with kids? They simply throve on stories of excitement and danger and terror. He and Mrs. Clay had tried to hold Helen down to gentle fantasies like Peter Rabbit, but Helen’s taste ran stubbornly to Red Riding Hood’s wolf and even grimmer gentry. It came to Clay that in keeping the stories mild he might be frustrating an instinct. That would be bad—what did J. G. Fraser have to say about such childhood tastes? Or Irvin S. Cobb? Or Freud? Clay decided not to deprive Helen further of giants. Bad dreams tonight would be on his own head.

“Oh, yes, indeed,” he nodded. “The Trees of Truth would be full of giants. Big ones.”

“Bigger than you?” suggested Helen, who considered her father to be of tremendous stature.

“Much bigger, darling. And bigger than Uncle Frank, or the football boys you saw last week. Twice—three or four times as big. Taller than those trees yonder.”

Helen glanced at the trees, and shivered. “How many eyes do they have?” she almost whispered.

“Only one eye apiece,” improvised Clay promptly, remembering the Cyclops who imprisoned Ulysses. “One eye in the middle of the forehead. But, on the other hand, they have each two or three rows of teeth—sometimes more, and as sharp as swords. And shaggy beards.”

She glanced over her shoulder at the trees, and grew pale.

“I’m afraid of them,” she said.

But Clay had been thinking hard and fast, to deal with just such a contingency. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “The giants can’t hurt us—not when Daddy smokes this magic pipe all the way from England.” He blew out a great cloud of blue vapor by way of punctuation. “Because giants are afraid of it.”

“Really truly?” And Helen squinted hopefully at the pipe.

“Oh, yes. Terribly afraid. They’d never dare come near enough to touch us.” Clay began to mix in fragments of half-forgotten Indian lore, learned a generation ago in Boy Scout camp. “You see, the old Indians used tobacco for a charm. Their medicine men smoked it to drive away bad things—spirits and witches and so on. Giants are bad things, just about the worst. They hate the smell of tobacco. Especially,” and he exhaled a bigger cloud, “when it’s in a magic pipe, like Daddy’s.”

Helen glanced at the trees once more, but not pallidly this time. Her chin was squared.

“Well, then, I won’t be afraid of those old giants over there,” she announced sturdily.

At her games again, thought Clay. “Good girl!” he applauded. “Let’s sit down here, on this nice soft rock, and I’ll tell you more things.”

He had meant to turn the conversation to the autumn colors of the leaves, discussing them in simple terms Helen’s six-year-old mind might digest. But, as she took a seat beside him, she had no such idea.

“What do giants wear. Daddy?” she continued on the subject which just now preoccupied her.

“They wear skins,” he smiled down at her. “Deerskins and bearskins, sewed together like patchwork, to make a piece big enough to cover them.”

Her eyes were still fixed on the middle distance beyond the brush. “What kind of shoes?”

“No shoes, of course. Their feet are too big for shoes, aren’t they now?”

“I suppose so,” agreed Helen seriously. “I can’t see their feet from here—What do giants eat?”

“Men,” said Clay impressively.

“Men who don’t have magic pipes?”

“Yes.” To comfort her, Clay blew smoke. “Nobody had better come among the giants without tobacco.”

“They look scared,” announced Helen, and stood up as if to get a better view of something. “Look at them. Daddy.”

“Yes, yes, you’re right,” nodded Clay, stooping to pick up a very brilliant maple leaf. “Now, take this to Mummy when we get back, dear. Say that it’s a souvenir of this walk in the woods.”

“You’re not looking, Daddy. Not looking at the giants.” Helen was pointing insistently.

To fall in with her humor, Clay lifted his head and looked.

There were three of them, and not more than thirty yards away, taller than the topmost branches of the gorgeous red-and-gold trees.

Clay could see them from the waist upward, above the thick trailside brush—lumpy, hairy, skin-clad, like the ugliest of colossal statutes come to life. Two had beards—one black, the other grizzled and blond—and the third wore long gun braids hanging like lengths of cable at either side of a gross, hairless face the width of a bureau.

So Helen had not been imagining giants, after all.

In the back of a brain that throbbed and whirled, Clay fenced off a tiny corner for what sensible thoughts he could summon. No time now, he told himself, to wonder how or why. The necessity was to get away—get Helen away, at least. Without rising from where he sat, he caught Helen’s shoulder and pressed her back and back, sliding her off the stone.

“Darling,” he said, wondering why his voice remained steady, “there are bushes near us. Crawl under them. Far under. If there are thorny branches, get under those. Don’t move or make a noise, until Daddy has made those—those things go away from here. When you can’t see or hear them any more, get up and run back along this trail we came. Get to the cabin. Once you start running, don’t stop—”

He heard the dry leaves rustle as she silently obeyed. She was doing her part. Now he must do his.

Springing up suddenly, as high into the air as he could, he flourished both arms over his head. At the top of his voice he yelled:

“Hi! Hi! Hi!”

From his gaping mouth the pipe dropped, bouncing on the mossy ground beside the rock. Clay turned and ran his fastest down trail.

At almost the same moment he heard a mighty crashing, as of elephants among the timber. He permitted himself one backward look. The three great towers of flesh had sprung through the brushy hedge and were lumbering after him. All three. None had paused to hunt for Helen.

He felt a thrill of elation. Thus the parent partridge saves its hidden young—by diverting danger and pursuit after itself. He flourished his arms and yelled again. Then he saved his breath for running.

No use.

Their legs were longer than his entire body. One of their strides made four of his. Behind, then above, he heard a furnacelike panting. A grip fastened upon him—fingers as long as his arms. He was lifted from the ground in mid-career. The air rang with a deep stormy growl—a concert of prodigious laughter.

After one convulsive struggle, like a chicken in the jaws of a fox, Clay made himself go slack. He might have a chance later, had best save his strength for that. If there was no chance, a doomed man should have dignity—The three gathered and exulted grossly over him, the two giants and the giantess. To them he was smaller than Helen would be to him like a doll or a baby. He saw at close hand their eyes—each had but the one, deep set in the middle of the low forehead—as large as tennis balls; their mouths like open satchels, all studded inside with rows of pointed sharky teeth; their hairiness, their patchwork skin garments, their bare feet like toe-fringed bolsters. Dangling in midair, Clay recognized his own handiwork. Among the A-ma-soo-kit, the Trees of Truth, any spoken word became fact. The idle improvisations of a father diverting his little one had taken shape, flesh, life.

The one who held him was the oldest, with a mat of buckskin beard turning gray. Some of his myriad teeth were broken. This captor grunted to the younger black-beard and the terrible woman-mountain with the braids. The dark giant drew from his girdle-thong a stone knife as long as a scythe, with which he began to whittle.

First he uprooted a cedar sapling, and pared away its branches with powerful slashing digs of his blade. Then he sharpened the tip, like a pencil. Beside the trail lay a fallen trunk of pine, dead and beginning to rot. Setting down his pole, the young giant caught this log in his huge hands and with a single humping of his muscles wrenched it in two lengthwise. Kneeling, he set the sharpened point of cedar upon the exposed inside of one slab, and began twirling the stake briskly between his palms.

Thus spun, the point drilled a hole. Wood meal crawled out. It smoked from the friction, glowed. The giantess, with a fistful of shredded bark, evoked a flame that greatened and put forth smudge—fire made by rubbing sticks. Fire for what?

Beneath big skillful hands the fuel quickly caught. The flames grew and climbed. The grizzled monster that held Clay nodded his big bushy head in approval. It was a cooking fire.

His huge captor lifted him. The cedar point turned toward his stomach. The other two giants watched with relish, and the tongue of the giantess, like a red banner, came into view to moisten her lips.

This, Clay thought with the corner of his brain kept sensible, was an end that nobody would ever believe. He would never be seen again. Helen, back at the cabin, would tell a story that would not make sense. Even if searchers found his bones, stripped and crushed—

“You let my Daddy alone!” commanded someone close at hand.

The voice was young, shrill and indignant. Clay bracing himself to feel the crushing impalement of the cedar stake, knew that voice, and in despair counted his sacrifice as useless—Helen hadn’t hidden, hadn’t escaped. She had followed his abhorrent captors, was coming among them.

“Let him alone,” she was repeating, “or I’ll—” There was deadly, confident menace in her little-girl voice.

The grizzled giant lowered both his hands, with the spit in one and Clay in the other.

His huge single eyes widened and protruded grossly. The firelight made it gleam like a very nasty jewel. The fulvid tangle of beard parted, the open mouth writhed over the rows of broken fangs.

Clay managed to turn his head as he hung in the prisoning grip.

He had never realized how small Helen was, how frail. She seemed barely as long as any one of the great bare feet among which she had planted herself. Her arms were set akimbo, her head flung back so that the hood drooped from it, her eyes glittered. So Clay had seen her often before when her young temper was up. Only one thing was really strange about Helen.

In a corner of her mouth, clamped tight between her six-year molars, rode the English briar pipe he had dropped. Above and around Helen’s ruffled hair whirled a wreath of tobacco smoke. Even as he saw all this, she puffed out a bigger, bluer cloud.

“Why did you—” Clay tried to begin, but no words came. He was done for, unable to move or speak. Helen looked, not at him, but at the giants.

“I guess I’ll show you!” she squealed at the three staring hulks, just as she might have defied the biggest and roughest boy in her school.

One giant, the black-bearded one that seemed youngest, was first to move. Very raptly he lifted one foot and set it down again, well behind the other. Then he retreated a second pace. A third. The giantess, who had crouched to blow upon the fire, also moved backward on all fours, rather like a tremendous and revolting crab. Helen favored these fugitives with no more than a flick of her bright eyes. She wheeled toward the grizzled one who still stood his ground, holding Clay like a trapped frog.

Rising on tiptoe, Helen hooked one hand in her father’s trouser-cuff. “You put him down,” she ordered terribly, “or I’ll blow some more smoke, and you’ll wish you had.”

She suited action to word.

Above Clay sounded a great hacking cry, as the giant choked and strangled. He felt himself released, falling heavily to the ground. The odor of burning tobacco smote his nostrils. He heard the heaviest of feet scrambling and stumbling away. He heard Helen laugh, in harsh triumph, as Deborah might have laughed over the fall of Sisera’s army.

“They’re gone. Daddy,” she said brightly. “You shouldn’t have dropped your pipe in the first place. But I remembered—giants hate tobacco. I came to save you.”

Mist swallowed Clay and he fainted gratefully.

When he awoke, Helen was sitting beside the great dying fire, quite unconcerned. “Did you have a nice sleep?” she asked.

He rose on his elbow. “How long was I like that?”

“Not very long. About five minutes, I guess.” She offered him his pipe. “It didn’t make me sick a bit.”

Clay got up, shakily. Helen took his hand, as though it represented to her the surest pledge of safety. They turned homeward on the trail. “Helen,” he said, “what has happened today? Before I—slept?”

“Oh, you mean about those giants? Why, just what you said.” She looked up at him with a little wonder that he should not be sure.

Then it had been true, among the Trees of Truth. She, too, had seen and known. “Helen, how were they driven away?”

“With the magic pipe. Daddy. You know. I smoked it.”

This as carefully and clearly as though she were the adult speaking to the child. “Why, Helen,” he said, “this isn’t a ma—”

Then he broke off. Better to be careful about talking away any protection. He asked another question. “You weren’t afraid?”

“Not with the magic pipe. You told me they hated it. And everything comes true in these woods—whether it’s about giants or pipes.”

Clay agreed in his heart that it was a thing not to be explained—only to tremble over his whole life long. Helen was more fortunate. Six years old in a world of wonders and importance, to her three hungry giants were no more wondrous or important than many another thing.

“Don’t tell Mummy about this, Helen,” he said. “We’ll have it for our secret.”

She smiled and nodded, pleased by the word “secret.” Clay felt better. That would help matters now. Some time when she was older, and mentioned the business as a childhood memory, he could get her to agree that it was a dream—grotesque, frightening, but only a dream.

“Daddy,” said the little girl, “are there squirrels here, too? Because I think I see one.”

The Half-Haunted

I went into a house, and it wasn’t a house.

A. A. Milne

For six months Judge Pursuivant had intended to visit that old dwelling with the strange history, but Judge Pursuivant often has trouble finding time to do what he most wants. The fall passed, the winter came. He spent Christmas, not very joyfully, helping the widow of a friend repossess some property at Salem. New Year’s Eve found him at Harrisonville, where de Graudin and Towbridge wanted his word on translating certain old Dutch documents better left untranslated. Heading west and south toward his home, he passed Scott’s Meadows. And, though it was nearly dark and snowy, he could not resist the opportunity to visit Criley’s Mill then and there.

A druggist on the little main street gave him directions. The judge drove up a steep ill-paved road, then between hills crowned with naked trees. Eventually he came to an old quarry road and followed it to here, across a rapid brown brook, a creaky bridge led to the place.

By the last rays of the sun, he decided he had either come the wrong way or come too late.

He had heard of a tall, gaunt building, the ruins of a mill house—a place two hundred years old, that looked two thousand. This was almost the opposite—quite new, of brown shingles, low and rambling, with a screened porch and wide windows. The place should have been cheerful, but it was not.

Pursuivant drove across, got out and knocked at the door. Snow began to shimmer down. Lights went on in the front room, and a man opened the door. He was small and slim, with a gray forelock and a lined, shrewd face, reminiscent of the late Will Rogers. He wore a smoking jacket and slippers.

“Yes?” he half challenged.

“Excuse me,” replied Pursuivant, hunching his massive shoulders, “but is this Criley’s Mill? The haunted house?”

“Haunted?” echoed the man on the threshold. “Why, I—I don’t know.”

There seemed to be only one thing to say. Pursuivant shook snowflakes from his tawny mustache and said it. “I’m sorry to have troubled you. I seem to have made a mistake.”

At once the other changed his manner “Oh, no, sir. No mistake. This was the place. You see, I built where Criley’s Mill was—just finished and moved in on Thanksgiving—look here, won’t you come in? I’m sorry if I was abrupt. Just nerves. I didn’t know who might be coming to my door—so far away from everything—”

His gaunt little hand caught at Pursuivant’s big one. “Come in, sir. Or—wait. It’s putting on to snow. I’ve got a double garage around back. Want to slide your car in with mine? Then we’ll have a drink. Maybe a bite to eat.”

He wanted Pursuivant to stay. The judge gazed at him with big blue eyes, deceptively innocent. Then he nodded and said, “Thanks. I’ll be very glad to stay.”

After stowing the car, he returned through the snow. The little man still waited at the door to usher him in. “What did you say your name was?”

The judge had not said, but he replied, “Pursuivant. Judge Keith Pursuivant. I’m interested in haunted houses.”

“And I’m Alvin Scrope—country editor, retired, bachelor.” They were in the front room now, a room designed to answer a man’s prayer for comfort. It had cushioned furniture, thick rugs, bright pictures, plenty of light, a shelf of books. But, as outside, the cheer was somehow lacking. “You’ll have to pardon me,” said Alvin Scrope. “My house boy left here New Year’s eve, and I’m running the place alone for a day or so.”

From a side table he lifted a bottle of scotch and a syphon. Mixing two highballs, he gave one to Pursuivant. “Snow’s coming down harder. You’d better plan to stay the night.”

Pursuivant laid aside overcoat and black hat. “You are very kind,” he said, wondering why he had been half-rebuffed at first, then almost wheedled into entering. Alvin Scrope dabbed at his forelock.

“Yes, sir,” he said, trying to sound hearty, “I built this right where the old mill stood. How d’you like it?”

The judge fitted his big body into an armchair, and sipped. “I don’t quite know yet. I’ve only come. How do you like it yourself, Mr. Scrope?”

Another dab at the forelock. “To tell the truth, I don’t know either.” He, too, drank before continuing. “Maybe because I’ve never had a place of my own before. And I’ve been used to working, always on the go with my paper—now I’m a little lost with all the slack time on my hands. You know how that is. But when I first saw the spot, with the ruined mill and all, stuck away here, I thought it was as nice a building site as I’d ever heard of.”

“I’ve been told a little about the mill and its legend,” ventured Pursuivant, rummaging a pocket for his pipe. At once his host began the tale, as Pursuivant had hoped:

“The place, I understand, was built before the War of Independence. It was owned and run by a man named Criley. He had a wife, a son and a daughter.”

“Mind if I take notes?” asked Pursuivant, producing notebook and pen. “Go on, Mr. Scrope.”

“Well, the war came. The miller and his son joined Washington’s army. The British took New York, and there was a long, hard scrap to see whether they’d stop there or take the rest of the country, too.”

Pursuivant nodded. He knew that dark, desperate phase of his nation’s history. After the first disaster to American arms, the fighting had taken on the somber complexion of raids, ambuscades, betrayals. Considerable savagery on both sides. Nathan Hale and John Andre—two fine gentlemen—hanged like felons. Thousands of other tragedies. All the New York area—including this part of New Jersey—stock full of grim deeds, giving rise to creepy tales.

Scrope went on:

“New York had quite a few Hessian soldiers stationed around—hired to fight the Americans, you know.”

Again Pursuivant nodded. His Virginian ancestor had followed Washington in the battle of Trenton. “The Hessians weren’t very fierce fighters,” he commented.

“There was an exception to that rule,” Scrope declared pithily. “Still taking notes, Judge?—I can’t tell you this particular Hessian’s name, but it comes down in the story how he looked. Big as you, I figure. Burly. He was a famous hunter back home in Germany. Maybe a criminal, joining the army to escape—Anyway, he could beat the Americans at their own game of hunt and shoot.”

“That’s hard to believe,” rejoined Pursuivant. “Some of Washington’s men were hard-set old Indian fighters.”

“This Hessian outdid the Indians. He’d strip naked—even in winter—and paint himself like a Mohawk and sally out to kill. He was a dead shot, and a devil with sword or hatchet or knife.” Scrope paused to bite the end off a cigar. “He could track or stalk anything, and he’d fight two soldiers at a time. Sometimes more. He raided farms and murdered civilians, even women and children. Quite a score he ran up.”

Scribbling in his book, the judge could see in his mind one of those fancy-portraits so often vivid—a naked colossus, streaked with red and black, a heavy-boned face, thick, pale brows over slitted eyes. A belt stuck full of weapons. Had the Hessian looked like that? Pursuivant filled his pipe and thrust it under his mustache. “Go on,” he prompted.

“The two women left here at the mill hated and feared that Hessian. They plotted against him. Pretended to be British sympathizers, and scraped an acquaintance.”

“That was nervy of them,” commented the judge. His mind’s eye showed him new pictures. Probably the daughter made the overture—buxom, rosy-cheeked on a chill afternoon, she managed to encounter the man of blood on a country lane. The Hessian would be a heavy-handed gallant. His broad, tough face grinned admiringly. The rural beauty, trying not to tremble, would venture a return smile, a curtsey.

“They invited him to dinner,” Scrope continued. “He put on his best uniform—”

Strange that Hessian butcher would look in full dress—white small-clothes and gaiters modelling his brawny legs, the red coat with white facings and shiny buttons cramping his barrel torso. How out of place the powdered hair, the tall grenadier cap! But Scrope was getting on to the climax:

“When he sat down at the table, one of the women—mother or daughter, the stories disagree—stuck a serving knife into his back. They got rid of the body somehow—walled it up or buried it in the cellar. But the spirit returned.”

“How many saw it?” demanded Pursuivant.

“Many. The mother died of fright, and the daughter of jumping from an attic window, before the year was out. The son committed suicide before he’d been long back from the war—nobody says anything about the father, I guess he was killed in some battle. Well, that disposed of the family. The mill went out of use. There’s lots of newer yarns. A girl from Scott’s Meadows yonder stayed one night ten years ago, on a dare. Next morning she was roaming around, too crazy to talk.”

“And you bought the place?”

“Yes. Tore down the old mill house, and rebuilt on its foundations. Shouldn’t that lay any ghosts, Judge Pursuivant?”

“Most rebuilders prefer to burn the haunted place entirely,” said the judge. “However, that depends on how much they believe in ghosts. I take it that you don’t laugh at these stories.”

Scrope almost bit his cigar in two. “Would you laugh,” he asked, “if two houseboys quit on you inside of six weeks? If something followed you all around your cellar, something cold and sneaky, that wasn’t ever there when you turned around? If you fidgeted all the time, like at a play by Ibsen or a story by Poe? It’s no laughing matter, Judge.”

Pursuivant leaned forward. “You imagine disturbing sights and sounds?”

“Right. Never quite see or hear them—just a whisper, a shadow in dim places, when I’m all alone here. I wish,” and Scrope grew somber, “that I belonged to some classical old church. A priest, with bell, book and candle, would be mighty comforting.”

“Just so,” agreed Pursuivant. “It so happens that I know an old formula of exorcism. I’m not a clergyman, but I offer it for what it’s worth, as charm or psychological clearance.”

Scrope frowned, then smiled. The subject was new to him. Pursuivant made haste to be logical: “I’m not trying to make an occult convert out of you, Mr. Scrope. But it seems that a symbol or ceremony might serve as rationalization—a psychological peg to hang your worries on and forget them entirely—”

“Right as a rabbit!” cried Scrope, almost explosively. “Go ahead. Judge. Do it.”

Pursuivant set down glass and pipe, and stood up. Scrope also rose from his chair. In so doing he moved backward and stood almost by the darkened door that led to the rear of the house. Pursuivant began solemnly:

“All ye evil spirits, I forbid you this man’s bed, his couch; I forbid you, in heaven’s name, his house and home; I forbid you, in the name of God, his blood and flesh, his body and soul. Let all evil return from him and his, unto you and yours, in the name of the Trinity.”

He finished, and Scrope’s face showed a sudden thankful relief—which went out like a light. Scrope’s thin body suddenly gyrated, reeled. His mouth opened, shouting:

“Let go! Let go!”

He staggered backward to the door, turned halfway and braced himself against the jamb. He seemed to struggle with something beyond. Pursuivant sprang toward him, and at that instant Scrope was walking shakily back toward the center of the room. His eyes were glassy, his lips slack, his face pale.

“Thought it had me,” he panted.

“What?” demanded Pursuivant, quickly pouring whiskey.

“Didn’t you see? That big thing with a naked arm—and no eyes—”

“Drink this. I saw nothing.”

Scrope drank obediently. Color returned a little. He spoke rapidly, as one who convinces himself of a hopeful fact: “My imagination ran away with me, didn’t it?”

“Did it?”

Pursuivant filled Scrope’s glass again. Plainly Scrope was trying to save his nerves by chatter. “Oh, it’s quite clear, Judge. I’ve keyed up my imagination to what seems like reality. I was sure some sort of boogey—but if you didn’t see it—”

“If I didn’t see it,” Pursuivant took up Scrope’s words, “there is still no proof that it doesn’t exist.”

Scrope looked blank, and Pursuivant continued, “I take nothing for granted. This looks like the beginning of one of my adventures.”

“But look here!” Scrope suddenly went a little wild in his speech. “You were reciting a spell against just that sort of thing. Why should—it—dare to tackle—”

“Desperation. To stave off defeat. Wait here.”

He went to the inner door and peered. There was a dim hallway to a kitchen, an open doorway for a bathroom at the left, and two closed doors to the right. He asked about them.

“Bedroom,” replied Scrope, steadying his voice. “Want a light?”

“No, thanks.” Pursuivant entered the hall.

It was like stepping into a fog—into the vapor, for instance, of many damp, filthy coats in a sealed closet. Pursuivant snorted, and walked quickly through to the kitchen, turning on a light. Breathing was comfortable there. The sweat dried on his brow and his tawny mustache.

“All clear?” Scrope was asking.

“So far.” The judge gazed around the clean white kitchen, with automatic refrigerator and electric range. It was the most reassuring room so far. He walked back into the hall, then into the rear bedroom.

“That’s my room,” Scrope informed him, from the parlor door.

Pursuivant waited only a moment in the chamber, which filled the rear quarter opposite the kitchen. Then into the hall yet again, to glance into the bathroom. It was a fight to throw off the smothering spiritual weight hanging in the dim atmosphere. Finally to the closed door of the front bedroom. “Who sleeps here?” he asked, hand on knob.

“You will, if you stay tonight,” Scrope replied, and the judge entered.

In the first instant he thought he had been struck—his knees wavered, his brain swam and darkened. The walls—weren’t they ruinous, flaking away?—whirled around him in the gloom. But he kept his feet and his head, groped for the light switch, turned it.

He had been wrong. The room was quite modern, cream-papered, and should be bright; but the light was as murky as though it shone through smoke. A neat single bed, a bureau, an armchair—how could that arrangement cause such a deep shadow in the far corner? Or was it a shadow?

The weight he had felt in the hall was doubled here, crushing him as a diver is crushed by sea-bottom pressures. The switch clicked, though Pursuivant had not touched it. The light went out abruptly.

Something pawed at him through the darkness. A hand—he saw it dimly, but not its arm. Was there an arm? Pursuivant jerked away, but refused to retreat. Now a face hung in the thick dusk—a head, anyway, for he made out the contour only, not the features. But it must have a mouth. For he felt a fanning of tepid breath, heard a mumble that became a word of sorts:

“Raus. …”

German. Get out!

Pursuivant stared at the hanging oval, trying to find eyes to fix with his own. Now another touch, at his shoulder. Light this time. Fluffy. Another voice, so soft as to be felt rather than heard:

“No … stay … you came to save. …”

The featureless head became more solid, and a suggestion of body was visible beneath—thick, as big as Pursuivant’s own body. Wide-planted columns that might be mist-moulded legs. Again: “Raus!”

Pursuivant backed from the room, leaving the door open. He was in the parlor again, wiping his face. He felt better.

Scrope, mixing more drinks, looked at him questioningly. “You felt it too, huh?”

“I felt something. For a moment I saw.” The judge paused to marshal his findings. “Who has ever slept in that front bedroom?”

“Nobody. The house-boy—before he left—had a lean-to off the kitchen. You’re inaugurating my guest room tonight, judge. Here, have a drink.”

They touched glasses and drank. Then they crossed the heavy-aired hall to the kitchen. Scrope quickly cooked a meal, simple but hearty—ham, eggs, home-fried potatoes, strong coffee. They ate at a white-topped table. Pursuivant acted as though fear had not come to him that night.

“I suggested that the Hessians weren’t good fighters,” he observed, holding out his cup, “but they were Germanic—and Germany has been the home of witches and devils. Read Faust, read Phantasmagoria, read the Brothers Grimm. And in a file of Old New York—out of print now—I found a story of how two Hessian soldiers bewitched a Manhattan farmer.”

“True story?”

“It’s in the reminiscences of George Rapaelje. That’s a respected name in old New York history. Rapaelje claims to have seen it happen. Yes, and other Hessians—settling in Pennsylvania and New Jersey—worked magic.”

“Of course. Look at that Headless Horseman yarn of Irving’s,” contributed Scrope. “Judge, you’ve got something. If that spell you recited—I wish you hadn’t, for it didn’t work.”

Pursuivant looked earnestly at Scrope. “I didn’t finish. It must be said three times, an hour apart.” He drew out a thick gold watch. “And an hour has passed, or nearly.”

Quite steadily, if not casually, he walked into the hall. Scrope came just behind. Again Pursuivant felt the baleful weight and closeness. Undaunted, he began to recite for the second time:

“All ye evil spirits, I forbid you this man’s bed, his couch; I forbid you, in heaven’s name, his house and home; I forbid—”

It had come heavily, noiselessly, out of the front bedroom. A hunchbacked hulk of it, that straightened and showed itself as tall and powerful as Pursuivant.

The judge knew amazement, complete but rational. Even in the half-light, he made out only a silhouette, roughly human, vague at the edges—clothed or naked, he could not say. As before, a faceless head lifted itself on broad shoulders. Only the fingers of the hand were distinct. They spread, advanced. Thus his eyes summed up, while he kept reciting the exorcism, down to its end:

“—all evil return from him and his unto you and yours, in the name of the Trinity.”

It blundered forward, clutching.

The doorway was no place to fight in, not even if the foe were normal. Pursuivant retreated, quickly and lightly for all his bearlike weight. Behind him, Scrope had run whimpering to the back door, tried to tear it open without unlocking.

“Come on!” Scrope was crying. “We’ll get out of here!”

“Wait!” called Pursuivant in reply. “Look!” And Scrope paused and turned back.

“The thing’s gone,” said Pursuivant. “It vanished before my eyes as I retreated.”

He clasped his big hands behind his back, scowling. Something was wrong here; absolutely unconventional—for there is a certain unconventionality about demons and their ways.

How often did the old books say that the best way to quell a specter is to face it dauntlessly? Yet here was the exact reverse. The foe had faded only when he and Scrope fled. He glared at the empty hall, as though to read there an answer to the enigma.

But the hall was not empty. In it was another pale suggestion of shape, slender this time. And the softer voice he had sensed in the bedroom:

“Again—again—”

It, too, vanished.

Scrope drew alongside of Pursuivant, peering. “Judge, were you and I seeing things? Both of us?”

Pursuivant actually grinned, and shook his tawny head. “No chance of that, Scrope. People who see things don’t see the same things at the same time.”

“Group-hypnotism,” began Scrope, as though the word might be a comfort, but again Pursuivant gestured a demur.

“I believe in many strange things, Scrope, but not in that. Don’t go back into the hall. Sit here, in the kitchen. I begin to understand—to guess, at least.”

They sought their chairs. Pursuivant faced the door.

“The old familiar situation, worn threadbare by writers of fantasy,” he pronounced. “The murdered one haunts the place of his destruction.” He stared hard into the hallway, wondering if he had really seen a stir of movement there. “Anyway, it’s here—spiteful and harmful, able to attack—”

“That’s right,” nodded Scrope, sighing. “He appeared to me, then you, then to both of us.”

“Which brings us to point number two. The spell is going to work.” Scrope glanced up in almost prayerful eagerness. “You’re sure?”

“Not quite sure of anything in life or death, but this thing’s desperate. It’s trying to fight us. I gather, from what you tell me, that it never manifested itself so strongly before—”

Scrope was nodding eagerly. “Sure. It’s been around here, a sort of edgy atmosphere that drove my houseboys away—but nothing like this. As you say, it’s playing the game for keeps now.”

“It’s in danger,” replied Pursuivant, his blue eyes remaining fixed on the hallway. “So are we. But it’s alone in its fight, and we have friends.”

“Friends?” echoed Scrope.

“I saw another shape, or near shape. Twice. It doesn’t threaten. It pleads. It wants us to go ahead and win.”

Scrope gazed at Pursuivant. “I think I saw it, too. But if it’s a ghost—”

“Don’t you realize that a ghost might want release? And others beside the Hessians found a tragic death here. Two women, didn’t you say—I heard a voice ask for the final repetition of my spell. Again, it said.”

“We‑ell—” began Scrope uncertainly.

“The spirits of those two women are here, too,” said Pursuivant confidently. “The evil of the place is too strong to let them escape, even though they’re dead.”

“Judge!” gasped Scrope, very pale. He swallowed twice, and continued:

“You realize something? If something happens to us—”

“Exactly,” agreed Pursuivant, very steadily. “We’d be caught, too. For all eternity. I realize it perfectly. That is why we must push this thing through to the end—and win.”

He rose once again and went to the door. Foot on the sill, he leaned ever so narrowly in. Then he drew quickly back, like a spectator from the cage of an angry beast.

“Still here,” he reported. “Ready for us. It, too, knows that the showdown’s at hand.”

Scrope studied the doorway, eyes and lips hard. “I’ve got a theory. It stays in that part of the house, the middle part. Might it live in the cellar?”

“Why?” asked Judge Pursuivant.

“Because the cellar—the old basement—lies only under the bathroom and the hall and that guestroom, with only a bit lapping under parts of the kitchen and—”

“By thunder, you have it!” interrupted Pursuivant excitedly.

While Scrope stared, the judge fished his pen from his vest pocket. He began to sketch, on the tabletop.

“See here,” he lectured as he drew. “Your house is sprawling—great big rooms, making a wide base, like this.” He outlined a square. “And the cellar is rather centrally located, so.” He marked in a smaller rectangle, which took a middle slice of the square.

“Yes. That’s about like it,” nodded Scrope. “What are you getting at?”

“Don’t you see, man?” cried Pursuivant, almost roughly. “That basement shows the limits of the old house—narrow and high, just as this new one is broad and low. The spirit haunted the old place. Your house takes in that original territory, and some new ground as well.”

He threw down the pen.

“You’re only half haunted, Scrope.”

Understanding dawned into the little man’s face. He sprang to his feet. He began a glad jabber:

“That changes everything. We’re safe. If we don’t go in there—”

“Oh, but we’re going in there.”

Scrope looked wide-eyed, scared. Pursuivant elaborated:

“The last recital of the spell will take place right in that thing’s den—right on his own dunghill, so to speak. We’ll destroy him forever, where he can’t seek refuge from us.”

Again an hour was passed. The two rose from their chairs in the kitchen.

“It’s time,” said Scrope, looking at his wrist watch. “Judge, must I come in there with you?”

“You must,” Pursuivant assured him. “Into that front bedroom. The creature must face his final exorcism.”

He walked to to the hall, and in. Scrope kept close behind, on feet that sounded amazingly heavy for so small a body. They stood together in the hall’s dimness.

It was no longer the hall, new and narrow and fresh-painted in light color. It was a corner of something else.

Despite the gloom, Pursuivant could see plainly that the walls had somehow fallen away. He stood as in a wide and ruinous apartment, with shattered windows extending almost to the high ceiling. The half-rotted floor boards were strewn with rubbish, like plaster fallen away from ancient laths. Wind—there was surely wind here, in the very center of Scrope’s snug home. Yes, wind, blowing through the cracks in this big wrecked place to which they had somehow been wafted. …

“Judge,” breathed Scrope, “I know. This is the old mill—it looked like this before they tore it down—”

“Quiet,” bade Pursuivant. He moved in the direction where he remembered the front bedroom’s door to be. It was before him now—he felt its knob under his hand though he could not see it. Hinges creaked. They could walk farther into the room that had been part of the razed mill.

Again things were changed to their eyes.

A sort of blue-green light, such as filters down to the bottom of deep water, showed them spacious floor, high ceiling, great windows—but no more in ruins. The room was suddenly fresh, solidly built, a room for living. Painted plaster, broad white sills and jambs, some furry pelts spread like rugs—and furniture. Even in the weird soft glimmer, Pursuivant knew valuable antiques when he saw them. Yonder table was such—dark, stout, gleaming. The chairs, too. The table was spread with white linen, set with silver and china. And somebody—something—was seated there, as if to eat.

The Hessian—of course. Or what had been the Hessian.

It faced them across the table. Now Pursuivant knew where the watery glow come from.

That semi-shape exuded it, like touchwood. He could dimly make out a clarification of outline and detail—a dress coat of ancient British style, powdered hair, elegance strangely out of place upon such a brute body. The most light came from around the head, which still did not have a face.

Pursuivant began to recite once more:

“All ye evil spirits, I forbid you this man’s bed, his couch—”

The blue light dimmed. The shape rose and came toward them.

“Scrope,” muttered Pursuivant, between phrases of his formula. “Lights—turn them on—”

He put himself where the approaching shape would find him. “I forbid you, in heaven’s name—” he continued.

Strong hands seized him, hands as cold as marsh ice. He had a sense of filth and ferocity being hurled at him. He fought back.

Judge Keith Pursuivant was big, strong and cunning, but here was his match. It worked those cold hands to his throat, striving to shut off his breath and the words he spoke. He heard it panting and snarling, like the unknown animals of which one dreams. His own fists struck for that featureless face, battering it backward upon its cloudy shoulders, but the thing wrestled closer and closer, trying to throttle him.

“The lights—won’t work!” Scrope was screaming. He struck a match, set it to a scrap of paper he whisked out of his pocket. This little torch he held aloft.

The rosy light dominated the blue, and Scrope saw plainly the thing that Pursuivant grappled. He screamed louder, and dropped the blazing paper. It floated sidewise, into some sort of a wall hanging. A stronger flame leaped up. Pursuivant caught the hard, chill wrists of his enemy and tore himself free.

“—unto you and yours, in the name of Trinity!” he finished.

Then he wheeled abruptly, seized and lifted Scrope, and hurried him away. They found themselves in the parlor, the room they had known before. Behind them flames gushed and roared, like a blast furnace.

Scrope, set on his feet again, seemed ready to faint. Pursuivant shook sense and steadiness back into him.

“Come on,” he ordered. “Keep moving. Outside. This place is burning like a wicker basket.”

They reached the outside, and Pursuivant let Alvin Scrope lean against a tree for support. He himself hurried to the double garage. He started and brought out first one, then the other of the cars, parking them at a point safe from any flying sparks or embers.

He returned to his companion. The flames now burst from the open parlor windows, licking at the clapboards and shingles outside. Snow fell but scantily, barely enough to make a hissing in the heat.

Scrope shook himself, like a dog coming out of water. He was getting command over his fear-crumbling spirit.

“Hadn’t we better get to a phone somewhere?” he suggested. “There’s a volunteer fire department in town—”

“No,” said Pursuivant. “No fire departments. Let that house burn to the ground.”

“To the ground?” Scrope’s face looked stronger in the red light. “Yes, of course. You’re exactly right. No more ghosts after fire. I can build again.”

“Build, and be at peace. Let it burn, I say. We’ll drive the cars to Scott’s Meadows, and stay at the little inn there. And tomorrow you can come and stay with me at my home until you catch hold of your affairs again.”

“Thanks. I will.”

They fell silent. In the darkness, no longer so chilly, came a rustle of passing. A semi-shape—two semi-shapes—glided swiftly by, like puffs of smoke from the house.

Thank you, Pursuivant felt gentle cries of joy, more in his heart than in his ears. Thank you—

They were gone.

Scrope, too, had been aware of that passing. “I guess,” he ventured, “that the spirits of those poor women are set free.”

From the heart of the red rage of flame that now possessed all the house came suddenly a sound—a shout, a roar, a scream—recognizeable as human and masculine.

Scrope faltered and swore. “That—was the Hessian?”

“It is what was the Hessian,” agreed Pursuivant, gazing at the fire.

Another peal of sound. Full of horror—full of agony.

“Why does he stay?” quavered Scrope. “Those others thanked us for setting them free—why does he hang on there until he’s burned clear loose from—” He broke off. “I know,” he said, gaining command of himself again.

Pursuivant turned toward him. “What, then?”

“The women were killers—yes. But they killed for a good purpose. They knew they’d find some kind of happiness now that they’re not held here. But,” and Scrope, too, faced the fire, “the other thing has nothing like that to expect. He hangs onto the burning den. Because, when he leaves, it’ll be for—for—”

“Something much worse,” finished Pursuivant for him.

Once again the suffering voice mounted up and shook the night. Then it died to a wail, a rattle, it died to nothing. It was silent.

The flames flapped like banners of victory. They seemed cleaner and more joyous.

Pursuivant and Scrope suddenly shook hands.

The Liers in Wait

Here lies our Sovereign Lord the King,
Whose word no man relies on,
Who never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.

Proffered Epitaph on Charles II
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
(1647–1680)

Yes, Jack Wilmot wrote so concerning me, and rallied me, saying these lines he would cut upon my monument; and now he is dead at thirty-three, while I live at fifty, none so merry a monarch as folks deem me. Jack’s verse makes me out a coxcomb, but he knew me not in my youth. He was but four, and sucking sugarplums, when his father and I were fugitives after Worcester. Judge from this story, if he rhymes the truth of me.

I think it was then, with the rain soaking my wretched borrowed clothes and the heavy tight plough-shoes rubbing my feet all to blisters, that I first knew consciously how misery may come to kings as to vagabonds. Egad, I was turned the second before I had well been the first. Trying to think of other things than my present sorry state among the dripping trees of Spring Coppice, I could but remember sorrier things still. Chiefly came to mind the Worcester fight, that had been rather a cutting down of my poor men like barley, and Cromwell’s Ironside troopers the reapers; How could so much ill luck befall—Lauderdale’s bold folly, that wasted our best men in a charge? The mazed silence of Leslie’s Scots horse, the first of their blood I ever heard of before or since who refused battle? I remembered too, as a sick dream, how I charged with a few faithful at a troop of Parliamentarian horse said to be Cromwell’s own guard; I had cut down a mailed rider with a pale face like the winter moon, and rode back dragging one of my own, wounded sore, across my saddle bow. He had died there, crying to me: “God save your most sacred Majesty!” And now I had need of God to save me.

“More things than Cromwell’s wit and might went into this disaster,” I told myself in the rain, nor knew how true I spoke.

After the battle, the retreat. Had it been only last night? Leslie’s horsemen, who had refused to follow me toward Cromwell, had dogged me so close in fleeing him I was at pains to scatter and so avoid them. Late we had paused, my gentlemen and I, at a manor of White-Ladies. There we agreed to divide and flee in disguise. With the help of two faithful yokels named Penderel I cut my long curls with a knife and crammed my big body into coarse garments—gray cloth breeches, a leathern doublet, a green jump-coat—while that my friends smeared my face and hands with chimney-soot. Then farewells, and I gave each gentleman a keepsake—a ribbon, a buckle, a watch, and so forward. I remembered, too, my image in a mirror, and it was most unkingly—a towering, swarthy young man, ill-clad, ill-faced. One of the staunch Penderals bade me name myself, and I chose to be called Will Jones, a wandering woodcutter.

Will Jones! ’Twas an easy name and comfortable. For the nonce I was happier with it than with Charles Stuart, England’s king and son of that other Charles who had died by Cromwell’s axe. I was heir to bitter sorrow and trouble and mystery, in my youth lost and hunted and friendless as any strong thief.

The rain was steady and weary. I tried to ask myself what I did here in Spring Coppice. It had been necessary to hide the day out, and travel by night; but whose thought was it to choose this dim, sorrowful wood? Richard Penderel had said that no rain fell elsewhere. Perhaps that was well, since Ironsides might forbear to seek me in such sorry bogs; but meanwhile I shivered and sighed, and wished myself a newt. The trees, what I could see, were broad oaks with some fir and larch, and the ground grew high with bracken reddened by September’s first chill.

Musing thus, I heard a right ill sound—horses’ hoofs. I threw myself half-downways among some larch scrub, peering out through the clumpy leaves. My right hand clutched the axe I carried as part of my masquerade. Beyond was a lane, and along it, one by one, rode enemy—a troop of Cromwell’s horse, hard fellows and ready-seeming, with breasts and caps of iron. They stared right and left searchingly. The bright, bitter eyes of their officer seemed to strike through my hiding like a pike-point. I clutched my axe the tighter, and swore on my soul that, if found, I would die fighting—a better death, after all, than my poor father’s.

But they rode past, and out of sight. I sat up, and wiped muck from my long nose. “I am free yet,” I told myself. “One day, please our Lord, I shall sit on the throne that is mine. Then shall I seek out these Ironsides and feed fat the gallows at Tyburn, the block at the Tower.”

For I was young and cruel then, as now I am old and mellow. Religion perplexed and irked me. I could not understand nor like Cromwell’s Praise-God men of war, whose faces were as sharp and merciless as, alas, their swords. “I’ll give them texts to quote,” I vowed. “I have heard their canting war-cries. ‘Smite and spare not!’ They shall learn how it is to be smitten and spared not.”

For the moment I felt as if vengeance were already mine, my house restored to power, my adversaries chained and delivered into my hand. Then I turned to cooler thoughts, and chiefly that I had best seek a hiding less handy to that trail through the trees.

The thought was like sudden memory, as if indeed I knew the Coppice and where best to go.

For I mind me how I rose from among the larches, turned on the heel of one pinching shoe, and struck through a belt of young spruce as though I were indeed a woodcutter seeking by familiar ways the door of mine own hut. So confidently did I stride that I blundered—or did I?—into a thorny vine that hung down from a long oak limb. It fastened upon my sleeve like urging fingers. “Nay, friend,” I said to it, trying to be gay, “hold me not here in the wet,” and I twitched away. That was one more matter about Spring Coppice that seemed strange and not overcanny—as also the rain, the gloom, my sudden desire to travel toward its heart. Yet, as you shall see here, these things were strange only in their basic cause. But I forego the tale.

“So cometh Will Jones to his proper home,” quoth I, axe on shoulder. Speaking thus merrily, I came upon another lane, but narrower than that on which the horsemen had ridden. This ran ankle-deep in mire, and I remember how the damp, soaking into my shoes, soothed those plaguey blisters. I followed the way for some score of paces, and meseemed that the rain was heaviest here, like a curtain before some hidden thing. Then I came into a cleared space, with no trees nor bush, nor even grass upon the bald earth. In its center, wreathed with rainy mists, a house.

I paused, just within shelter of the leaves. “What,” I wondered, “has my new magic of being a woodcutter conjured up a woodcutter’s shelter?”

But this house was no honest workman’s place, that much I saw with but half an eye. Conjured up it might well have been, and most foully. I gazed at it without savor, and saw that it was not large, but lean and high-looking by reason of the steep pitch of its roof. That roof’s thatch was so wet and foul that it seemed all of one drooping substance, like the cap of a dark toadstool. The walls, too, were damp, being of clay daub spread upon a framework of wattles. It had one door, and that a mighty thick heavy one, of a single dark plank that hung upon heavy rusty hinges. One window it had, too, through which gleamed some sort of light; but instead of glass the window was filled with something like thin-scraped rawhide, so that light could come through, but not the shape of things within. And so I knew not what was in that house, nor at the time had I any conscious lust to find out.

I say, no conscious lust. For it was unconsciously that I drifted idly forth from the screen of wet leaves, gained and moved along a little hard-packed path between bracken-clumps. That path led to the door, and I found myself standing before it; while through the skinned-over window, inches away, I heard noises.

Noises I call them, for at first I could not think they were voices. Several soft hummings or purrings came to my ears, from what source I knew not. Finally, though, actual words, high and raspy:

“We who keep the commandment love the law! Moloch, Lucifer, Bal-Tigh-Mor, Anector, Somiator, sleep ye not! Compel ye that the man approach!”

It had the sound of a prayer, and yet I recognized but one of the names called—Lucifer. Tutors, parsons, my late unhappy allies the Scots Covenentors, had used the name oft and fearfully. Prayer within that ugly lean house went up—or down, belike—to the fallen Son of the Morning. I stood against the door, pondering. My grandsire, King James, had believed and feared such folks’ pretense. My father, who was King Charles before me, was pleased to doubt and be merciful, pardoning many accused witches and sorcerers. As for me, my short life had held scant leisure to decide such a matter. While I waited in the fine misty rain on the threshold, the high voice spoke again:

“Drive him to us! Drive him to us! Drive him to us!”

Silence within, and you may be sure silence without. A new voice, younger and thinner, made itself heard: “Naught comes to us.”

“Respect the promises of our masters,” replied the first. “What says the book?”

And yet a new voice, this time soft and a woman’s: “Let the door be opened and the wayfarer be plucked in.”

I swear that I had not the least impulse to retreat, even to step aside. ’Twas as if all my life depended on knowing more. As I stood, ears aprick like any cat’s, the door creaked inward by three inches. An arm in a dark sleeve shot out, and fingers as lean and clutching as thorn-twigs fastened on the front of my jump-coat.

“I have him safe!” rasped the high voice that had prayed. A moment later I was drawn inside, before I could ask the reason.

There was one room to the house, and it stank of burning weeds. There were no chairs or other furniture, and no fireplace; but in the center of the tamped-clay floor burned an open fire, whose rank smoke climbed to a hole at the roof’s peak. Around this fire was drawn a circle in white chalk, and around the circle a star in red. Close outside the star were the three whose voices I had heard.

Mine eyes lighted first on she who held the book—young she was and dainty. She sat on the floor, her feet drawn under her full skirt of black stuff. Above a white collar of Dutch style, her face was round and at the same time fine and fair, with a short red mouth and blue eyes like the clean sea.

Her hair, under a white cap, was as yellow as corn. She held in her slim white hands a thick book, whose cover looked to be grown over with dark hair, like the hide of a Galloway bull.

Her eyes held mine for two trices, then I looked beyond her to another seated person. He was small enough to be a child, but the narrow bright eyes in his thin face were older than the oldest I had seen, and the hands clasped around his bony knees were rough and sinewy, with large sore-seeming joints. His hair was scanty, and eke his eyebrows. His neck showed swollen painfully.

It is odd that my last look was for him who had drawn me in. He was tall, almost as myself, and grizzled hair fell on the shoulders of his velvet doublet. One claw still clapped hold of me and his face, a foot from mine, was as dark and bloodless as earth. Its lips were loose, its quivering nose broken. The eyes, cold and wide as a frog’s, were as steady as gun-muzzles.

He kicked the door shut, and let me go. “Name yourself,” he rasped at me. “If you be not he whom we seek—”

“I am Will Jones, a poor woodcutter,” I told him.

“Mmmm,” murmured the wench with the book. “Belike the youngest of seven sons—sent forth by a cruel step-dame to seek fortune in the world. So runs the fairy tale, and we want none such. Your true name, sirrah.”

I told her roundly that she was insolent, but she only smiled. And I never saw a fairer than she, not in all the courts of Europe—not even sweet Nell Gwyn. After many years I can see her eyes, a little slanting and a little hungry. Even when I was so young, women feared me, but this one did not.

“His word shall not need,” spoke the thin young-old fellow by the fire. “Am I not here to make him prove himself?” He lifted his face so that the fire brightened it, and I saw hot red blotches thereon.

“True,” agreed the grizzled man. “Sirrah, whether you be Will Jones the woodman or Charles Stuart the king, have you no mercy on poor Diccon yonder? If ’twould ease his ail, would you not touch him?”

That was a sneer, but I looked closer at the thin fellow called Diccon, and made sure that he was indeed sick and sorry. His face grew full of hope, turning up to me. I stepped closer to him.

“Why, with all my heart, if ’twill serve,” I replied.

“ ’Ware the star and circle, step not within the star and circle,” cautioned the wench, but I came not near those marks. Standing beside and above Diccon, I felt his brow, and felt that it was fevered. “A hot humor is in your blood, friend,” I said to him, and touched the swelling on his neck.

But had there been a swelling there? I touched it, but ’twas suddenly gone, like a furtive mouse under my finger. Diccon’s neck looked lean and healthy. His face smiled, and from it had fled the red blotches. He gave a cry and sprang to his feet.

“ ’Tis past, ’tis past!” he howled. “I am whole again!”

But the eyes of his comrades were for me.

“Only a king could have done so,” quote the older man. “Young sir, I do take you truly for Charles Stuart. At your touch Diccon was healed of the king’s evil.”

I folded my arms, as if I must keep my hands from doing more strangeness. I had heard, too, of that old legend of the Stuarts, without deeming myself concerned. Yet, here it had befallen. Diccon had suffered from the king’s evil, which learned doctors call scrofula. My touch had driven it from his thin body. He danced and quivered with the joy of health. But his fellows looked at me as though I had betrayed myself by sin.

“It is indeed the king,” said the girl, also rising to her feet.

“No,” I made shift to say. “I am but poor Will Jones,” and I wondered where I had let fall my axe. “Will Jones, a woodcutter.”

“Yours to command, Will Jones,” mocked the grizzled man. “My name is Valois Pembru, erst a schoolmaster. My daughter Regan,” and he flourished one of his talons at the wench. “Diccon, our kinsman and servitor, you know already, well enough to heal him. For our profession, we are—are—”

He seemed to have said too much, and his daughter came to his rescue. “We are liers in wait,” she said.

“True, liers in wait,” repeated Pembru, glad of the words. “Quiet we bide our time, against what good things comes our way. As yourself, Will Jones. Would you sit in sooth upon the throne of England? For that question we brought you hither.”

I did not like his lofty air, like a man cozening puppies. “I came myself, of mine own good will,” I told him. “It rains outside.”

“True,” muttered Diccon, his eyes on me. “All over Spring Coppice falls the rain, and not elsewhere. Not one, but eight charms in yonder book can bring rain—’twas to drive your honor to us, that you might heal—”

“Silence,” barked Valois Pembru at him. And to me: “Young sir, we read and prayed and burnt,” and he glanced at the dark-orange flames of the fire. “In that way we guided your footsteps to the Coppice, and the rain then made you see this shelter. ’Twas all planned, even before Noll Cromwell scotched you at Worcester—”

“Worcester!” I roared at him so loudly that he stepped back. “What know you of Worcester fight?”

He recovered, and said in his erst lofty fashion: “Worcester was our doing, too. We gave the victory to Noll Cromwell. At a price—from the book.”

He pointed to the hairy tome in the hands of Regan, his daughter. “The flames showed us your pictured hosts and his, and what befell. You might have stood against him, even prevailed, but for the horsemen who would not right.”

I remembered that bitter amazement over how Leslie’s Scots had bode like statues. “You dare say you wrought that?”

Pembru nodded at Mistress Regan, who turned pages. “I will read it without the words of power,” quoth she. “Thus: ‘In meekness I begin my work. Stop rider! Stop footman! Three black flowers bloom, and under them ye must stand still as long as I will, not through me but through the name of—’ ”

She broke off, staring at me with her slant blue eyes. I remembered all the tales of my grandfather James, who had fought and written against witchcraft. “Well, then, you have given the victory to Cromwell. You will give me to him also?”

Two of the three laughed—Diccon was still too mazed with his new health—and Pembru shook his grizzled head. “Not so, woodcutter. Cromwell asked not the favor from us—’twas one of his men, who paid well. We swore that old Noll should prevail from the moment of battle. But,” and his eyes were like gimlets in mine, “we swore by the oaths set us—the names Cromwell’s men worship, not the names we worship. We will keep the promise as long as we will, and no longer.”

“When it pleases us we make,” contributed Regan. “When it pleases us we break.”

Now ’tis true that Cromwell perished on third September, 1658, seven year to the day from Worcester fight. But I half-believed Pembru even as he spoke, and so would you have done. He seemed to be what he called himself—a lier in wait, a bider for prey, myself or others. The rank smoke of the fire made my head throb, and I was weary of being played with. “Let be,” I said. “I am no mouse to be played with, you gibbed cats. What is your will?”

“Ah,” sighed Pembru silkily, as though he had waited for me to ask, “what but that our sovereign should find his fortune again, scatter the Ironsides of the Parliament in another battle and come to his throne at Whitehall?”

“It can be done,” Regan assured me. “Shall I find the words in the book, that when spoken will gather and make resolute your scattered, running friends?”

I put up a hand. “Read nothing. Tell me rather what you would gain thereby, since you seem to be governed by gains alone.”

“Charles Second shall reign,” breathed Pembru. “Wisely and well, with thoughtful distinction. He will thank his good councillor the Earl—no, the Duke—of Pembru. He will be served well by Sir Diccon, his squire of the body.”

“Served well, I swear,” promised Diccon, with no mockery to his words.

“And,” cooed Regan, “are there not ladies of the court? Will it not be said that Lady Regan Pembru is fairest and—most pleasing to the king’s grace?”

Then they were all silent, waiting for me to speak. God pardon me my many sins! But among them has not been silence when words are needed. I laughed fiercely.

“You are three saucy lackeys, ripe to be flogged at the cart’s tail,” I told them. “By tricks you learned of my ill fortune, and seek to fatten thereon.” I turned toward the door. “I sicken in your company, and I leave. Let him hinder me who dare.”

“Diccon!” called Pembru, and moved as if to cross my path. Diccon obediently ranged alongside. I stepped up to them.

“If you dread me not as your ruler, dread me as a big man and a strong,” I said. “Step from my way, or I will smash your shallow skulls together.”

Then it was Regan, standing across the door.

“Would the king strike a woman?” she challenged. “Wait for two words to be spoken. Suppose we have the powers we claim?”

“Your talk is empty, without proof,” I replied. “No, mistress, bar me not. I am going.”

“Proof you shall have,” she assured me hastily. “Diccon, stir the fire.”

He did so. Watching, I saw that in sooth he was but a lad—his disease, now banished by my touch, had put a false seeming of age upon him. Flames leaped up, and upon them Pembru cast a handful of herbs whose sort I did not know. The color of the fire changed as I gazed, white, then rosy red, then blue, then again white. The wench Regan was babbling words from the hair-bound book; but, though I had learned most tongues in my youth, I could not guess what language she read.

“Ah, now,” said Pembru. “Look, your gracious majesty. Have you wondered of your beaten followers?”

In the deep of the fire, like a picture that forebore burning and moved with life, I saw tiny figures—horsemen in a huddled knot riding in dejected wise. Though it was as if they rode at a distance, I fancied that I recognized young Straike—a cornet of Leslie’s. I scowled, and the vision vanished.

“You have prepared puppets, or a shadow-show,” I accused. “I am no country hodge to be tricked thus.”

“Ask of the fire what it will mirror to you,” bade Pembru, and I looked on him with disdain.

“What of Noll Cromwell?” I demanded, and on the trice he was there. I had seen the fellow once, years agone. He looked more gray and bloated and fierce now, but it was he—Cromwell, the king rebel, in back and breast of steel with buff sleeves. He stood with wide-planted feet and a hand on his sword. I took it that he was on a porch or platform, about to speak to a throng dimly seen.

“You knew that I would call for Cromwell,” I charged Pembru, and the second image, too, winked out.

He smiled, as if my stubbornness was what he loved best on earth. “Who else, then? Name one I cannot have prepared for.”

“Wilmot,” I said, and quick anon I saw him. Poor nobleman! He was not young enough to tramp the byways in masquerade, like me. He rode a horse, and that a sorry one, with his pale face cast down. He mourned, perhaps for me. I felt like smiling at this image of my friend, and like weeping, too.

“Others? Your gentlemen?” suggested Pembru, and without my naming they sprang into view one after another, each in a breath’s space. Their faces flashed among the shreds of flame—Buckingham, elegant and furtive; Lauderdale, drinking from a leather cup; Colonel Carlis, whom we called “Careless,” though he was never that; the brothers Penderel, by a fireside with an old dame who may have been their mother; suddenly, as a finish to the show, Cromwell again, seen near with a bible in his hand.

The fire died, like a blown candle. The room was dim and gray, with a whisp of smoke across the hide-spread window.

“Well, sire? You believe?” said Pembru. He smiled now, and I saw teeth as lean and white as a hunting dog’s.

“Faith, only a fool would refuse to believe,” I said in all honesty.

He stepped near. “Then you accept us?” he questioned hoarsely. On my other hand tiptoed the fair lass Regan.

“Charles!” she whispered. “Charles, my comely king!” and pushed herself close against me, like a cat seeking caresses.

“Your choice is wise,” Pembroke said on. “Spells bemused and scattered your army—spells will bring it back afresh. You shall triumph, and salt England with the bones of the rebels. Noll Cromwell shall swing from a gallows, that all like rogues may take warning. And you, brought by our powers to your proper throne—”

“Hold,” I said, and they looked upon me silently.

“I said only that I believe in your sorcery,” I told them, “but I will have none of it.”

You would have thought those words plain and round enough. But my three neighbors in that ill house stared mutely, as if I spoke strangely and foolishly. Finally: “Oh, brave and gay! Let me perish else!” quoth Pembru, and laughed.

My temper went, and with it my bemusement. “Perish you shall, dog, for your saucy ways,” I promised. “What, you stare and grin? Am I your sovereign lord, or am I a penny show? I have humored you too long. Goodbye.”

I made a step to leave, and Pembru slid across my path. His daughter Regan was opening the book and reciting hurriedly, but I minded her not a penny. Instead, I smote Pembru with my fist, hard and fair in the middle of his mocking face. And down he went, full-sprawl, rosy blood fountaining over mouth and chin.

“Cross me again,” quoth I, “and I’ll drive you into your native dirt like a tether-peg.” With that, I stepped across his body where it quivered like a wounded snake, and put forth my hand to open the door.

There was no door. Not anywhere in the room.

I turned back, the while Regan finished reading and closed the book upon her slim finger.

“You see, Charles Stuart,” she smiled, “you must bide here in despite of yourself.”

“Sir, sir,” pleaded Diccon, half-crouching like a cricket, “will you not mend your opinion of us?”

“I will mend naught,” I said, “save the lack of a door.” And I gave the wall a kick that shook the stout wattlings and brought down flakes of clay. My blistered foot quivered with pain, but another kick made some of the poles spring from their fastenings. In a moment I would open a way outward, would go forth.

Regan shouted new words from the book. I remember a few, like uncouth names—Sator, Arepos, Janna. I have heard since that these are powerful matters with the Gnostics. In the midst of her outcry, I thought smoke drifted before me—smoke that stank like dead flesh, and thickened into globes and curves, as if it would make a form. Two long streamers of it drifted out like snakes, to touch or seize me, I gave back, and Regan stood at my side.

“Would you choose those arms,” asked she, “and not these?” She held out her own, fair and round and white. “Charles, I charmed away the door. I charmed that spirit to hold you. I will still do you good in despite of your will—you shall reign in England, and I—and I—”

Weariness was drowning me. I felt like a child, drowsy and drooping. “And you?” I said.

“You shall tell me,” she whispered. “Charles.”

She shimmered in my sight, and bells sang as if to signal her victory. I swear it was not I who spoke then stupidly—cunsult Jack Wilmot’s doggerel to see if I am wont to be stupid. But the voice came from my mouth: “I shall be king in Whitehall.”

She prompted me softly: “I shall be duchess, and next friend—”

“Duchess and next friend,” I repeated.

“Of the king’s self!” she finished, and I opened my mouth to say that, too. Valois Pembru, recovering from my buffet, sat up and listened.

But—

“Stop!” roared Diccon.

We all looked—Regan and I and Valois Pembru. Diccon rose from where he crouched. In his slim, strong hands was the foul hairy book that Regan had laid aside. His finger marked a place on the open page.

“The spells are mine, and I undo what they have wrought!” he thundered in his great new voice. “Stop and silence! Look upon me, ye sorcerers and arch-sorcerers! You who attack Charles Stuart, let that witchcraft recede from him into your marrow and bone, in this instant and hour—”

He read more, but I could not hear for the horrid cries of Pembru and his daughter.

The rawhide at the window split, like a drumhead made too hot. And cold air rushed in. The fire that had vanished leaped up, its flames bright red and natural now. Its flames scaled the roof-peak, caught there. Smoke, rank and foul, crammed the place. Through it rang more screams, and I heard Regan, pantingly:

“Hands—from—my—throat—!”

Whatever had seized her, it was not Diccon, for he was at my side, hand on my sleeve.

“Come, sire! This way!”

Whither the door had gone, thither it now came back. We found it open before us, scrambled through and into the open.

The hut burnt behind us like a hayrick, and I heard no more cries therefrom. “Pembru!” I cried. “Regan! Are they slain?”

“Slain or no, it does not signify,” replied Diccon. “Their ill magic retorted upon them. They are gone with it from earth—forever.” He hurled the hairy book into the midst of the flame. “Now, away.”

We left the clearing, and walked the lane. There was no more rainfall, no more mist. Warm light came through the leaves as through clear green water.

“Sire,” said Diccon, “I part from you. God bless your kind and gracious majesty! Bring you safe to your own place, and your people to their proper senses.”

He caught my hand and kissed it, and would have knelt. But I held him on his feet.

“Diccon,” I said, “I took you for one of those liers in wait. But you have been my friend this day, and I stand in your debt as long as I live.”

“No, sire, no. Your touch drove from me the pain of the king’s evil, which had smitten me since childhood, and which those God-forgotten could not heal with all their charms. And, too, you refused witch-help against Cromwell.”

I met his round, true eye. “Sooth to say, Cromwell and I make war on each other,” I replied, “but—”

“But ’tis human war,” he said for me. “Each in his way hates hell. ’Twas bravely done, sire. Remember that Cromwell’s course is run in seven years. Be content until then. Now—Godspeed!”

He turned suddenly and made off amid the leafage. I walked on alone, toward where the brothers Penderel would rejoin me with news of where next we would seek safety.

Many things churned in my silly head, things that have not sorted themselves in all the years since; but this came to the top of the churn like fair butter.

The war in England was sad and sorry and bloody, as all wars. Each party called the other Godforsaken, devilish. Each was wrong. We were but human folk, doing what we thought well, and doing it ill. Worse than any human foe was sorcery and appeal to the devil’s host.

I promise myself then, and have not since departed from it, that when I ruled, no honest religion would be driven out. All and any such, I said in my heart, was so good that it bettered the worship of evil. Beyond that, I wished only for peace and security, and the chance to take off my blistering shoes.

“Lord,” I prayed, “if thou art pleased to restore me to the throne of my ancestors, grant me a heart constant in the exercise and protection of true worship. Never may I seek the oppression of those who, out of tenderness of their consciences, are not free to conform to outward and indifferent ceremonies.”

And now judge between me and Jack Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. There is at least one promise I have kept, and at least one wise deed I have done. Put that on my grave.

Venus Enslaved

Black velvet infinity all around, punctured and patterned with the many-hued jewels of space—comforting, somehow, because they made the same constellation patterns you used to see on Earth. There was the Dipper, there Scorpio, there Orion. But the twinkle was shut off, as though every star had turned cold and silently watchful toward your impudent invasion of emptiness.

So big was the universe that the little recess which did duty for control-room, observation-point and living-cabin seemed even smaller than it was; which was very small indeed. Planter forgot the dizzy lightness of head and body, here beyond gravity, and turned his wondering eyes outward from where he lay strapped in his spring-jointed hammock, toward the firmament, and decided that there was nothing in all his past life that he would change if he could.

“Check blast-tempo,” came the voice of Disbro just beyond his head, a high, harsh, commanding voice. “Check lubrication-loss and check sun-direction. Then brace yourself. We may land quicker than we thought.”

Planter leaned toward the instrument panel that covered most of the bulkhead to the right of his hammock. The pale glow from the dials highlighted his face, young, bony, intent. “Blast-tempo adequate,” he called back to Disbro. “Lubrication-loss about seven point two. Three point nine six degrees off sunward. Air loss nil.”

“Who asked for air loss?” snubbed Disbro from his hammock forward. He was leaner than Planter, taller, older. Even in his insulated coveralls, bulking against whatever temperature or pressure danger might be threatened by the outer space, he was of a dangerous elegance of figure and attitude. His face, framed in tight, cushioned helmet, was so narrow that it seemed compressed sidewise—dark eyes crowded together with only a disdainful blade of nose between them, a mouth short but strong, a chin like the pointed toe of a stylish boot, a cropped black mustache. Back on lost Earth, Disbro had frightened men and fascinated women. His cunning crime-administration had been almost too neat for the police, but not quite; or he would not have been here, with his life barely held in his elegant fingertips.

“Venus plumb center ahead,” he told Planter. “Have a look.”

That last as if he were granting a favor. Planter twisted in the hammock. He saw the taut-slung cocoon that would be Disbro’s netted body, the control board like a bigger, more complex typewriter where Disbro could reach and strike key-combinations to steer, speed or otherwise maneuver the ship.

Beyond, a great round port, at its middle a disk the size of a tabletop. Against the black, airless sky, most of that disk looked as blue as the thinnest of milk. One smooth edge was brightened to cream—the sunward limb of Venus. But even the dimmer expanse showed fluffy and gently rippling, a swaddling of opaque cloud.

“That,” said Disbro, “is our little gray home in the west.”

“I wonder what’s underneath the clouds,” mused Planter, for the millionth time.

“All those science-pots, sitting home on the seats of their expensive striped pants, wonder that,” snarled Disbro. “That’s why they sent eight rockets before us, smack into the cloud. That’s why, with eight silences out of a possible eight, they rigged this ninth. That’s why, when nobody was fool enough to volunteer, they dug up three convicts who were all neatly earmarked to be killed anyway, and gave them a bang at the job.”

Three convicts—Planter, Disbro, and Max. Planter had forgotten Max, as everyone was apt to, including Max himself. For Max had been a sturdy athlete, a coming heavyweight champion, until too many gaily-accepted blows had done something to his mind. Doctors said some concussion unbalanced him, but not far enough so that he didn’t know right and wrong apart when he killed his manager for cheating on certain gate receipts. And so, prison and a sentence to the chair with the reprieve that came by recommendation of the Rocket Foundation on March 30, 2082. Now Max was in the compartment aft, keeping the levers kicking that ran the rocket engines. Show Max how to do a thing and he’d keep right on doing it until you pulled him away, or until he dropped.

What would Max’s last name be, wondered Planter. He studied the face of Venus. He sang to himself, softly:

“Oh, thou sublime sweet evening star. …”

Softly, but not too softly for Disbro’s excellent ears. Disbro chuckled.

“You know opera, Planter? Pretty fancy for an ex-con.”

“I know that piece,” said Planter shortly. “Wolfram’s hymn to Venus, from Tannhauser.”

It had started him thinking again. Gwen had played it so often on her violin. Played it and sung it. Those were the days he hadn’t known she was married, down in her red-and-gold apartment in the Artists Quarter. He’d been sculpting her—she’d had the second best figure he ever saw. Then he found out about her husband, for the husband burst in upon them. The husband had tried to kill Planter, but Planter had killed the husband. And Gwen had sworn his life away.

“Check elapsed time,” Disbro bade him.

“Fifty-eight days nine hours and fifty-four minutes point seven,” rejoined Planter at once.

“Prompt, aren’t you? We’ll be on Venus before the sixty-fourth day.” Planter saw Disbro shift over in his hammock. “I’m going to shave. Then eat.”

Disbro turned a stud in the wall. His electric razor began to hum. Planter opened a locker-valve and brought forth his own rations—a package of concentrated solid, compounded of chocolate, meat extract, several vitamin agents. It would sustain him for hours, but was anything but a fill to his hunger. He chewed it slowly to make it last longer, and sipped from a snipe-nosed container of water, slightly effervescent and acidulated. A few drops escaped between snout and lip, and swam lazily in the gravityless air of the cabin, like shiny little bubbles.

“Planter,” said Disbro, suddenly pleasant, “we’re going to fool ’em.”

He shut off his razor. Planter took another nibble. “Yes, Disbro?”

“We’ll land at the north pole.”

Planter shook his head. “We can’t. This rocket is set at midpoint on the Venusian disk.”

“We can. I’ve tinkered with the controls. A break for us, no break for the Foundationeers at home. They’re watching us through telescopes. What they want is our crash on Venus, with a great upflare of the exploding fuel. Then they’ll know that we landed, and can shake hands all ’round on a ‘successful advancement.’ But we’re curving away, then in. I’ve fixed that. We’ll not blow off and make any signal; but we’ll live.”

“North pole,” mused Planter, pensively.

“No spin to Venus up there. We’ll land solidly. We’ll land where it’s coolest, and none too cool. Her equator must be two degrees hotter than Satan’s reception hall. The pole may be endurable.”

“What then?” asked Planter.

“We’ll live, I say. Don’t you want to live?”

Planter hadn’t thought about it lately. But suddenly he knew that he did want to live. His was a family of considerable longevity. His grandfather had attained the age of one hundred and seven, and had claimed to remember the end of the Second World War.

“Six days to study it over,” Disbro was saying. “Then we’ll have a try. If we land alive, we’ll laugh. If we die trying, we’ll have nothing to worry about. Float up here, will you? Take over. I’m going to have a little sleep.”

Through choking steam, white and ever-swirling, drove the silvery cigar that was the ninth rocket ship to attempt to voyage across space. From its snout blossomed sudden flame, blue and red and blue again—rocket counterblasts that were designed to act as brakes. They worked, somewhat. The speed cut from bullet-rate to falling-rate. From falling-rate to flying-rate. Then, of a sudden, partial clarity around it. Within an upper envelope of blinding vapors, Venus had a thinner atmosphere, partially transparent. Below showed a surface of fluffy greens, all sorts of greens—lettuce, apple, olive, emerald, spinach, sea greens. Vegetation, plainly, and lots of it. The ship, steadying in its plunge like a skilled diver, nosed across toward a wet, slate-dark patch that must be open ground. From the stern, where rocket tubes had ceased blazing, broke out a massive expanse of fabric—a parachute. Another and another. Down floated the craft, thudding, at last, upon its resting place.

Planter felt a cramping pain. He realized that to feel pain one must be alive. Then his head throbbed—it hung head downward. Gravity was back. He groped for his hammock fastenings, loosened them, and lowered himself to a standing position beneath, on the round port that had been forward. Disbro hung in his hammock, motionless but moaning faintly.

Planter hurriedly freed him and laid him flat on his back. He fumbled a locker open, brought out a water-pot. A little spurt between Disbro’s short, scornful lips brought him back to consciousness.

“We made it,” was Disbro’s first comment, full of triumph and savagery. “Help me up. Thanks. Whoooh! We seem to have socked in somewhere, nose first.”

He was right. No sign of light or open air showed through the forward port, nor the side ports from which Planter had been wont to study the reaches of space. Disbro looked up. The after bulkhead, now their ceiling, had a hatchway. “Hoist me,” he said to Planter, who made a stirrup of his hands and obliged. The slightly lesser gravitational pull of Venus made Disbro more active than on Earth. He caught Planter’s hammock, got his foot on a side-bracket for steadiness, and climbed up to the hatch. A tug at the clamps opened it, and he wriggled through.

“Wake up, you big buffalo,” Planter heard him snarling. Max was evidently unconscious up there. Planter, without a helper to lift him, made shift by climbing Disbro’s hammock, then his own, to gain the compartment above.

“He’d have died if he had an ounce of brains,” commented Disbro, pointing. Max lay crumpled against the bulkhead, close to the great bank of levers he had been working. In his hands were grasped broken pieces of network from his hammock.

“He was out of the lashings when we landed,” Disbro went on. “We were about to hit, and he grabbed hold. Must have passed out. But the big lump’s single-minded—abnormally so. He hung on without knowing, and the breaking of those strands kept him from crashing full force.”

Planter knelt and pulled Max straight. Max was tremendous, a burly troll in his coveralls. His shoulders were almost a yard wide, his hands like oversize gloves. His big face, with its broad jaw, heavy dark brows and ruddy cheeks, might have been handsome, was not the nose smashed in by a blow taken in some old ring battle.

“Don’t waste water,” cautioned Disbro as Planter hunted for the food-locker. “I’ll bring him out of it.” He knelt and slapped the inert face sharply.

Max’s mouth opened, showing a gap where his front teeth had been beaten out. He gave a grumbling yell, then sprang erect so suddenly that Disbro, starting away, almost fell through the hatchway. Max saw Planter, scowled and snorted, then fell into a boxing stance. He inched forward, his mighty fists fiddling hypnotically.

“Time!” yelled Planter at once. “This isn’t a fight, Max! We’ve landed—safe and alive—on Venus!”

Max’s eyes widened a little. He grinned loosely, and pulled off his helmet. His skull was thatched with bushy, black hair. “Uhh,” he said, in a deep, chiding tone. “I forgot. Uhhh.”

“Forgot!” echoed Disbro scornfully. “He sounds as if he had the ability to remember.”

Planter studied the ports in this compartment. They, too, were obscured by wet-looking grail soil. The ship must be well buried in the crust of Venus. What if it was completely submerged, a tomb for them? He glanced upward to another hatchway, one that would lead past the rocket engines.

“Don’t go up,” Max cautioned him throatily. “Hot up there.”

“Brilliant,” was Disbro’s ill-humored rejoinder. “Max actually knows that the engines will be hot.”

Planter clapped Max on the big shoulder. “It’ll be all right,” he reassured the giant. “Get me a wrench, will you? That long-shanked one for tightening tube-housings will do.”

He scrambled up along the levers, which made a ladder of sorts. The hatch to the engines had to be loosened with the wrench. Beyond, as Max had sagely warned him, it was stiflingly hot. He avoided gleaming, sweltering tubes and housings, scrambling to where a four-foot circle of nuts showed in the bulkheading. This would be the plate that closed the central stern, among the rear rocket-jets. He began to loosen one.

“Stop that, you fool!” It was Disbro, who had climbed after him and was watching. “Who knows about this lower atmosphere of Venus?”

“I’m going to find out about it,” replied Planter, a little roughly, for he did not like Disbro’s manner. He gave the nut another turn.

“Wait, wait,” cautioned Disbro. He climbed all the way into view, holding up a glass flask with a neck attachment of gauges and pipings. “I got a sample, through the lock-panel—plenty of air-bubbles were carried down with us. Let me work it out before you do anything heroic.”

Disbro was right. He was usually right, about technologies. Planter mopped his brow on the sleeve of his coverall, and waited.

“Yes,” Disbro was commenting. “Oxygen—nice article of that, and plenty. Nitrogen, too. Just like Earth. Quite a bit of carbon dioxide. It’ll be from all that vegetation. Certified breathable. Go on and unship that plate.”

Planter did so. He loosed the last net, and pushed against the plate. It stirred easily—the after part of the ship would still be in the open. Disbro, climbing after him, caught his elbow.

“I go out first,” he announced. “They marked me down as senior of the expedition. One side.”

Planter stared quizzically, and once again did as Disbro told him. The lean man thrust up the plate like a trapdoor, and crept out.

“At last!” he yelled back. “Men on Venus! Come on, Planter!”

Planter called back to Max, who was bringing up a bundle of articles Disbro had chosen for the venture outside—two repeating rifles, two pistols, several tools, and tins of food, coils of rope. Planter helped him with the load, and they got outside with it.

Disbro had slid down the step bulge of the hull. He clung to a grab-iron, his feet just above the gray muck into which they had plunged. He stared up.

“First man to set foot on Venus,” he was saying. “Who was second of you two?”

“We didn’t stop to bother,” Planter replied. “What now?”

He stared around, to answer his own question. Venus was dull, like a very cloudy day at home. The air was moist, but fresh, and little wreaths and veils of mist kept one from seeing far. But he made out that they had found lodgment in a sterile-looking clearing with a muddy floor that might or might not sustain a man’s weight. All around was a crowded wall of vegetation—towering high above the range of his vision into upper fog, tight grown as a hedge, and vigorously fat of twig and leaf. Planter, no botanist, yet was aware at once of strangeness beyond his power to describe. He knew that specimens should be gathered and preserved to take home.

To take home? Home to Earth? But the ship was almost buried in this mud. He remembered Disbro’s dry comment—“Our little gray home in the west.” They were on Venus. Undoubtedly to stay.

Max, beside him, gave a sort of gurgling bellow of surprise and fear.

“Uhhh! Something’s got Mr. Disbro!”

For once, Max was being articulate. For once, Disbro was being silent.

Glancing down, Planter saw the slender, elegant figure writhed close against the metal hull, clutching with both hands the grab-iron. Disbro stared groundwards, and what could be seen of his face was as white as a wood-boring grub. One of his legs was drawn up, knee bracing upon the plates, the other stretched out grotesquely, as if to point a toe at something in the muck.

It took a second staring study to realize that a whiplike strand of something that gleamed and tightened was snapped around Disbro’s ankle.

“Rope, Max,” snapped Planter. He made a quick hitch around a rocket-tube, and lowered himself in a rush. His free hand grasped a heavy automatic pistol. He paused in his descent just above Disbro, studying the black, shiny tether.

It protruded from the semi-glutinous mud, which stirred and quivered around the protrusion. A sense was there of rigid grasp and slowly contracting pressure. It was squeezing the captured ankle, it was shortening itself to pull Disbro down. Disbro said nothing because he had caught his breath for an effort at wrenching free. But he could not do that. His strong, lean fingers were beginning to slip on the grab iron. He turned horror-widened eyes toward Planter.

“Hang on,” muttered Planter, and aimed his pistol. No sure shot, he nevertheless was close to his target. He fired a .50 caliber slug, another and another. Two of them hit the tail, tentacle or proboscis.

At once it let go of Disbro, gesticulating wildly. Blood sprang forth on its shiny integument—Venusian blood was red, mused Planter, even as Venusian herbage was green. Disbro gave a choking gurgle that might have been thanks, relief or effort. A moment later he was swarming up Planter’s rope like a monkey.

But Planter did not follow. The appendage he had wounded was drawing out of sight, like a worm into its hole; but two more just like it had fastened upon his foot and knee.

He lost his grip and fell into the mud. It was like a dip into thick gravy. The stuff lapped and closed over his head, and he let go of the pistol to try to swim. A couple of laborious strokes brought him back to the surface, gasping and blowing away thick lumps from nose and mouth. A moment later two more tentacles were groping and seizing at his shoulder and waist. Four bonds now tightened upon him, like lariats.

Planter seemed to be thinking in two compartments. One set of thoughts dictated his floundering, desperate struggle. The other considered the situation with a curiosity dispassionate and almost mild. The creature that snared him was just what he might have expected—something on the octopus order. How many science fiction stories had dealt with such monsters on strange worlds? The creepy writhings of tentacles appealed to fantasy writers—the neat, simple, active structure of the brute was logical to the great mechanic who devised Nature. The thing had him, in any case, if he could not kick or struggle or cut free.

Cut free! That was it. He had a knife, in the side pocket of his coveralls.

He dug for it, almost dropped it from his muddy fingers, then yanked open the biggest blade. He slashed at the nearest tentacle, the one around his waist. It parted like a cane-stalk before a machete. The other arms quivered and slackened, plainly shocked by pain. Planter rolled out of their grip, started to swim away anywhere.

He looked over his shoulder and saw his enemy as it humped itself partially into view.

Not such an octopus, after all.

The dispassionate part of Planter’s brain called the thing an animated tall tree. The slender tentacles sprouted from a thicker trunk, that could curve and writhe and wallow, but not so readily. It was of a rubbery gray-brown, and at the upper end, nested among the tentacle-roots, was what must be its mouth. That mouth opened and shut in almost wistful hunger. Planter swam furiously. He wanted to reach and climb the stern of the rocket ship, but the thing knew his wish, and moved to head him off. He kicked and fought his way toward the far mass of leaves that bordered this mud-pit.

From among those leaves glowed for an instant a sort of splinter of yellow light. A small object sang over Planter’s helmeted head like a bee, and struck behind him with a little chock. It must have found lodgment against the hall-tree thing, which paused in its pursuit to flop and spatter the mud with its tentacles. Planter blessed the diversion, whatever it was, and strove nearer to the shore.

The forest was alive, he suddenly decided. Out of its misty tangle a great leafy branch swung knowingly toward him. He clutched at it, brought away a fat, moist handful of strange-shaped leaves. His other hand made good its hold on the branch itself, and with the last of his strength he dragged himself to where roots hummocked above the mud.

Then he saw where the branch had come from. A slim, active figure stood among the stems, pressing with both hands upon the base of the branch to make it move into the open. As Planter scrambled to safety, the figure relaxed its helpful shoving, and the branch moved back toward the perpendicular.

Planter gazed in utter lost unbelief at this stranger.

It was a woman, young, fair, fine-limbed. She wore the briefest of garments, belted around with strange weapons, and her feet were shod in cross-gartered buskins. Upon her tumble of golden curls rode a metal helmet that reminded him of Grecian antiquity. Her bare arms, round but strong, cradled something with a stock and butt of a musket, but with a short, tight-strung bow at its muzzle—surely the pattern of a medieval crossbow.

Her face was of a flawless pink-and-white beauty, just now stamped with utter disdain. Its short, rosy mouth opened, and formed words.

Words that Planter understood!

“You fool,” said the girl with the crossbow. “You scurvy fool.”

Disbro, barely able to stir for shock and weariness, climbed only a few hand’s breadths out of danger before he must stop and wheeze for breath. At last he could make himself heard:

“Max! You pighead, help me!”

“Uhh,” came the grunt of assent from above, as the big fellow slid down in turn. He slipped a thick arm around Disbro, hoisting the tall, slender body as if it were a bundle of old clothes, and slid it across a shoulder like the jut of a crag. Then Max scaled the rope once again, to the safe top of the nosed-over rocket ship.

Disbro found his own feet, and shakily wiped his clear-cut face, still pale from exertion and terror. “That was close.”

“Say,” ventured Max, “Mr. Planter, he’s gone.”

Disbro looked around. The mud expanse around them was stirred up as if by boiling struggles, but there was no sign of Planter or the thing with the tentacles.

“That thing got him,” decided Disbro, but Max shook his heavy head.

“Huh-uh,” he demurred. “No. The girl, she got him.”

“Girl?” echoed Disbro, and scowled.

“What girl?”

Max pointed with a finger like the haft of a hammer. “She was in the trees. Got him.”

Disbro peered at the trees, then at Max. His scowl deepened. “What are you drivelling about?”

“The girl,” said Max.

Disbro snorted and skinned his teeth in scorn.

“How,” he demanded of the misty skies, “do I get mixed up with minus quantities like this? A girl, the man says! Here on Venus!”

“A girl,” repeated Max firmly.

Disbro wheeled upon him.

“Come off of that!” he commanded sharply. “Planter’s gone. Dead. You’re all I have to associate with. You’ll act sane, whether you are or not.”

Max’s big, pained eyes faltered before the glittering accusation of Disbro’s gaze. “All right,” he conceded.

“There wasn’t any girl there, you idiot!”

Max nodded. “I saw—”

“Shut up!” Disbro cut him off. “No girl, I said!”

“No girl,” repeated Max obediently.

Rain began to fall, fat drops the size of marbles.

“Back inside,” commanded Disbro. “There’ll be lots of this kind of weather. We’ll have something to eat, then study another way to reach the trees yonder.”

“No girl,” said Max. “But I saw.”

The rain that drove Disbro and Max back into their shelter filtered through layers of leafage, beginning to wash the mud from Planter’s clothing. He stared again at his rescuer.

“I seem to have understood what you said,” he managed at last.

“Isn’t so strange, that?” she flung back, in words somehow run together. “E’en though you’re mad enow to sport with yonder muck-worm,” and her wide, bright blue eyes flicked toward the danger he had lately avoided, “you’ll have the tongue of mankind. Art no man?”

“Man enough, young woman,” rejoined Planter, a little nettled. “I suppose it’s like the fantasies—we can read each other’s minds, or something.”

“Something,” she echoed, as if humoring a child.

“And I owe you thanks for saving my life.”

“Oh, ’twas no great matter.” She shouldered the crossbow. “Come, for the Skygors will be about our heels.”

She picked her way rapidly among the steam, with the surest and cleverest of feet. Women on Earth were never so graceful or sure, decided Planter, hurrying after. He was aware that he did not step on the muddy surface of Venus, but upon a matted over-floor, of roots, fallen stems, ground-vines, sometimes great sturdy leaves like lily-pads grown to the size of double mattresses. “Wait, young lady,” he called, “who are the Skygors, you mentioned and why should they be after us?”

She halted again, swung and studied him with more of that disdainful curiosity. “ ’Tis a gruel-brained idiot,” she decided, as if to herself. “For that they cast him out. Methought ’twas strange that a man should flee, of himself, from sure shelter and victual.”

It was raining harder. The great roof of vegetation only partially broke that downpour. It sluiced away the coating of mud from Planter, and soaked his stout garments through. He felt miserable in the dampness, but his girl guide throve, if anything, in the drops that struck and rolled down her bare arms and shoulders.

He saw, too, that she followed something of a trail among the stalks and stems. It was barely wider than his own stalwart shoulders could pass, and wound crazily here and there; but one must stick to it, for to right and left the jungle grew thicker than a basket. He called out again.

“Miss! Young lady!”

She turned, as before. “What now?”

“This path—what is it? Did you make it? Tell me things.” He made a gesture of appeal, for she was putting on that look of contempt once more. “You see, I’m no more than an hour old on this planet—”

“Od so! Your brain is younger than that. Leave me, I have no time for idiots.”

Abruptly she stiffened, widened her eyes, lifted a finger to her red lips for silence. The two of them stood close together in the misty rain, their ears sharpened. Planter heard what she had heard—a rustling, crunching approach, along some other angle of the jungle path.

The girl wrenched apart two sappy lengths of vine, and with a jerk of her head bade Planter slip through into the great thicket. He did so, and she followed. Turning, her lithe body close against his, she brought her crossbow to the ready.

“Danger?” whispered Planter, and she nodded bleakly.

The approach was coming near. Planter judged that whatever threatened them was two-legged, weighty, and great-lunged—many yards off, it wheezed like a faulty engine. His companion’s ears were better than his, or more experienced. She gauged the nearness of the stranger, and the crossbow went to her shoulder like a rifle. Planter saw that it operated on a spring trigger that would trip a latch and release the string. The bow, violently recovering from its bending, would force the missile along a groove in the top of the stock. All parts—stock, bow, and string—were of some massive dark metal, apparently treated with grease to save it from the constant dampness. The missile itself was not an arrow, but seemed the size and shape of a silvery fountain pen. Planter burned to ask questions about it; but the enemy was in sight by now, something of mottled green and black that shouldered upright along the way between the thickets.

Planter felt his companion’s body grow tense against his shoulder. Her finger touched the trigger lightly. The metal string twanged, and with a waspy hum the missile leaped toward its target. At the same time, a little burst of flame showed from it, bright yellow. Chock! the shot went home, as that other shot against the thing called a muck-worm.

Down floundered the green-spotted form. At once the girl was out of hiding, and stooping above her quarry.

Planter, following, peered with wonder and caution. He saw a body larger than himself, and grotesquely of the same build. A dumpy torso on massive back-bent legs like a cricket’s; wide flapper feet, a round, low head with a monstrous slash of mouth, big eyes now filming with death, no nose at all—the creature was very like a nightmare frog. But this frog wore garments, of linked and plaited metal wire and rubbery-looking fabric. It had a silver belt, with pouches and holsters. These pouches and holsters the girl was now plundering.

“Quick,” she snapped at Planter over her rosy shoulder. “Take the spoil. He will have friends, and they must not find us.”

Her tone was still reminiscent of Disbro speaking to Max. Planter’s ravenous curiosity was at last completely overridden. “Young lady,” he said flatly. “I’m not prepared to endure any more—”

She suddenly screamed, not like a warrior but like any girl who is mortally frightened.

Planter had the time to realize that she saw something just beyond him. He pivoted and set himself as another of the froggy beings charged.

“More Skygors!” he heard a cry behind him, and he knew that it was Skygors he faced.

Planter was a boxer of sorts, strong if not brilliant, and his unthinking reflex was to plant his feet, bend his knees, and crouch for attack or defense. That reflex shortened his height by several inches, and saved his life. The Skygors that rushed him had pointed a pistol-form weapon, from which came yellow flame as from the crossbow. A silvery object meant to scatter his brains only sang above his head with millimeters to spare. Before the pistol-like weapon could aim and spit again, Planter had charged in.

It was all he could do, but it was enough. He jabbed viciously with his left fist, followed with his right to the abdomen. The left knuckles slashed soft flesh about the wide mouth, his right hand almost broke on a hard belt-buckle. Both blows were staggering to the wheezing adversary, who dropped its pistol and yelled with a voice like a steam whistle. It made words, each of them almost deafening to Planter. To silence it more than anything else, Planter drove in closer still and lifted an uppercut as though it were a shovelful of gravel.

It found the point where a Terrestrial man would have a chin. Down floundered the clumsy body, and Planter, with no thought of referees or rules, set his heavy boot on the face and bashed it in. He stepped across the subsiding form, in time to encounter another.

This one got great flappy hands upon him. Their grip was knowing, powerful, wicked. The Skygor plucked him close, its mouth grinned into a gape. It had teeth, it was going to bite.

He was held by the shoulders, and doubted if he could break away. Instead of trying, he put his own hands to the thing’s elbows, drew his right knee tight to his chest and planted a toe in a metal-clad midriff. Then, even as the open paw sought to seize his face, he threw himself backward. Landing flat on his shoulder blades, he drew down with his hands and hoisted with his feet.

His opponent somersaulted in air, and fell with a heavy squashing thump upon the root-tangled floor of the trail. In a flash, Planter was up. He jumped with both feet. Bones broke under the impact. A second Skygor was down—dead or dying—

“Aside!” the girl was calling, and he obeyed, flattening against a cross-weaving of vine stems. She was risen upon one knee, crossbow to shoulder. It twanged, flashed, and once again its successful charge sounded its chock. Planter glanced down the trail in time to see a fourth and last Skygor drop down.

He found that he was gasping for air, and trembling as though the danger were still to come instead of past. The girl rose, came to him, and touched his arm. She smiled, her eyes shone. Gone was the contempt, the superiority. She only admired, completely and frankly.

“Sink me, you’re a fighter,” she said. “Ecod! I saw only the flight of fists, and a Skygor went down, and another! You saved my life—and we have four Skygors to strip, with none to boom about where we went from here. Your name, friend?”

“Planter,” he said. “David Planter.”

“David Planter,” she repeated. Her A was very broad, so that she made the name almost “Dyvid.” Again she smiled. “A king’s name, is’t not? I am called Mara. Come, help me take what is valuable from this carrion.”

Planter’s heart warmed to her. “Thanks for your kind words,” he smiled back. “But I did what any man would do.”

“All men are slaves,” she surprised him by saying. “You will amaze the other girl-warriors, when I bring you to the Nest.”

Disbro, standing on the glass port-pane that was now floor for the control-room, labored and cursed at his keyboard. He pressed one, two, an octave. The nosed-over ship stirred, but did not rise.

“Max!” bawled Disbro to the upper hatch. “Pressure!”

“Giving you all there is,” Max informed him timidly.

Disbro turned from his controls, shrugging in disgust.

“Those bow-tubes are jammed or displaced,” he cursed. “We can’t clear off till we get her up and clean them—and we can’t get her up and clean them until they work. Huhh!”

Max’s big, diffident face framed itself in the hatchway, registering a small hope.

“We’re floating,” he volunteered. “Close to those trees and things.”

Disbro showed interest. “Then we’ll get our feet on solid ground, or nearly solid. That tentacle-thing won’t be sloshing around.” He beckoned. “Come down.”

Max obeyed. From a locker Disbro took a pressure squirt of waterproofing liquid. He sprayed Max’s clothes, then his own. “That’ll shed rain,” he said. “Buckle on a pistol, if you’re smart enough to use one. And give me two.”

Once more the hammocks in the lower chamber, and the levers in the higher, gave them a ladder-way up. Disbro, emerging first into the damp, warm mist, saw at once that they had visitors.

The ship, as Max said, floated close to the mat of growth that fringed the muddy pool. Here the jungle consisted of meaty stems, straight, thick and close-set, with tangled fermiform foliage. A little above mud-level, gnarled roots wove into a firm footing, and upon it, pressing from the thickets toward the ship, were huge biped creatures in gleaming metal harness.

These had chopped down spongy trunks and branches, on which to venture over the mud-surface as on rafts. Coming near the ship, they had passed cables of grease-clotted metal wire around it, mooring it fast to thicker trunks. As Disbro stared down, several of them began to converse in tones that rang and boomed like great gongs. Half-deafened, Disbro still could perceive that their voices had inflection and sense. Harness, concerted action, tools, a language—here was a master race, comparable to Terrestrial humanity.

One of them turned a bulging black eye upward, and saw Disbro. Its flat face split across, and a mouth like an open Gladstone bag shouted its discovery. One green paw, webbed but prehensile, snatched a weapon from a metal-linked waist belt, and aimed it at the Terrestrial.

But Disbro, too, was quick on the draw. His gang-rule on Earth had necessitated shooting skill as well as leadership. His own automatic sprang into his hand. “No, you don’t!” he snapped, and shot the weapon out of the Venusian’s flipper.

It screamed in a voice that vibrated the steamy air, and its companions started and shrank back in startled wonder. Disbro drew a second pistol, leveling it at them.

“I’ll shoot the first one that moves,” he promised, as if they could understand; and understand they did. Up went shaky flipper-hands.

“No! No!” they boomed in thunderous humility. “Don’t! Don’t!”

He had not the time to wonder that they spoke words he knew. He swung his weapons in swift arcs, covering them all. Max, behind, had sense enough to level the long barrel of a repeating rifle. “Please!” roared a Venusian who seemed to be a leader. “We do naught to you!”

“Better not,” cautioned Disbro loftily. “We’re more profitable as friends than as enemies.”

“Friends!” agreed the leader. “Friends!”

“If you try any funny business—” went on Disbro. “Well, watch!”

He snapped his right-hand gun up and fired. The bullet snipped away a leaf the size of an opened umbrella. As the great green blob drifted down, Disbro fired again and again, until, ripped to rags, the leaf fell limply among the Venusians. They moaned, like awestruck fog horns.

“Understand?” taunted Disbro. “Savvy? I could kill you all as easy as look at you.”

“Friends!” promised the leader again.

“Max,” muttered Disbro, “these birds quit very easily without a fight. But keep me covered from up here.”

Planter’s rope still dangled along the hull. Disbro slid down, coming to his feet on the raft-heap below. The Venusians gave back in wary confusion. Disbro allowed himself to smile upward.

“See what an ape you are, Max?” he chuckled. “You got a look at one of these, and thought it was a girl! You’re not much of a picker, Max.”

To the Venusian chief he said: “I think I’ll muscle in on your territory.”

Mara, the crossbow-girl, brought Planter to the place she called the Nest.

It was hollowed out in the thickest part of the towering jungle, as a rabbit’s form is hollowed among tall grasses. The floor was of plaited and pressed withes, supported on stumps and roots of many tall growths. Rounding upward and outward from this were walls, also of wooden poles and twigs, woven into the growing tangle. The roof was similarly made, but strengthened and waterproofed with earth, dried and baked by some sort of intense heat.

The space thus blocked off was shaped like the rough inside of a hollow pumpkin, and in size was comparable to the auditorium of a large theater. Within it were set up smaller huts and bowers. There were common cooking-fires, in ovens of stone and mud-brick, and a great common light suspended from the ceiling by a long heavy chain. This was a metal lamp, fed by oily sap from some sort of tree.

Finding the Nest was difficult. Mara had picked a careful way through mazes of thick vegetation, paying special attention to the rearranging of leaves and branches behind them. Sagely she explained that the Skygors, when hunting her kind, were thus completely lost. Even at the very doorstep of the Nest, the tangled vines, branches and leaf-sprays obscured any hint of such a place at hand.

The dwellers in the Nest were all women.

They came cautiously forward, twenty or so, as Mara ushered Planter inside. They were active specimens, dressed scantily and attractively, like Mara. Most of them were young, several comely. All were fair of skin and hair, a logical condition in the cloudy air of Venus. They wore daggers, hatchets, ammunition pouches. Even at home, they all carried crossbows.

“What does this man here?” demanded a lean, harsh-faced woman of middle age. “Is he not content with servitude?”

Mara shook her head. “He’s like none we know. He fights more fiercely than we—Ecod, shouldst have seen him! Barehanded, he o’ercame two Skygors. I slew two more. Look at our trove!”

She opened a parcel of great leaves, and showed dozens of the silver pens that were ammunition for both the Skygor pistols and the human crossbows. Planter also showed what he had brought from the battlefield—several belts, numerous harness fastenings, and two of the guns. These latter made the crossbow-girls nervous.

“We stand by these,” Mara said, tapping her crossbow.

Planter fiddled with a pistol. Its mechanism was strange but understandable, and he flattered himself that he could learn to use it. As for the pen-missiles, they seemed to contain a charge that burned violently on exposure to air. The trigger-mechanism, whether of pistol or crossbow, punctured it, set it afire, and the vehemence of combustion not only propelled it but destroyed the target completely.

The older woman, whose name was Mantha, nodded her head over a decision.

“Let the man have the dag,” she granted, with an air of authority. “If he fights as Mara says, he may be of aid. Yet he is unlike those we know, in hue and aspect.”

True enough, Planter was dark of complexion, with black curls and ruddy tan jaws. He spoke to Mantha, respectfully, for the others called her “Mother” and treated her as a commander.

“I’m not of your people,” he said. “I come from another planet. Earth.”

“Earth?” she repeated. “You come from there? Why, so do we all.”

Down a trail went a patrol of Skygors. Among them, not much under them in size, tramped Max. His broad shoulders bore a great burden of supplies from the ship. At the head of the procession, next to the chief, walked Disbro.

As someone else was saying to Planter at almost the same moment, the chief Skygor boomed to Disbro: “You are not like men we know.”

“Naturally not,” agreed Disbro. “Your race is more like a bunch of freak reptiles.”

“Not my race,” demurred the chief Skygor. “Men. Slaves.”

Disbro understood only part, and took exception to that. “I’m no slave of yours,” he warned.

“No. Equal. We have long needed equal men, to kill off the wild girls.”

“You see, Mr. Disbro?” chimed in Max from behind.

David Planter was embarrassed.

Inside the Nest, he sat on a crude chair opposite Mantha, the Mother. The overhead light burned dim, and damp-banishing fires in the ovens mingled red glows. Planter asked questions, but was distracted by the crossbow-girls, who watched him with round eyes, whispering and giggling. Mara, near by, scowled at the noisemakers.

“This Venus world has much that’s unknown,” Mantha said. “Here in the north can we dwell. Not many days off the steam is thick, the heat horrid, the jungle dreadful. None go there and return.”

“Mother, if you are called that, enlighten me,” begged Planter. “You say you come from Earth.”

“Our fathers came. Lifetimes agone.”

Planter’s good-looking face showed his amazement. Interworld flight was new, he had thought. But some unknown expedition might have tried it, succeeded, and then never returned to report.

“ ’Twas for fear of black Cromwell,” Mantha enlarged.

“Cromwell!” echoed Planter. “The Puritan leader who fought and wiped out the English Cavaliers?”

Mantha seized on one word. “Cavaliers. Yes. Our lives were forfeit. We flew hither.”

It explained everything—human beings in a world never meant for anything but amphibians, their fair complexions, their quaint but understandable speech, the crossbows that would be familiar weapons to Shakespeare, Drake or Captain John Smith. Yes, it explained everything, except how pre-machine age Britishers could succeed on a voyage where eight spaceships before Planter’s had failed.

“How did you fly?” demanded Planter, amazed.

Mantha shook her graying locks. “Nay, I know not. ’Twas long ago, and all records are held in the Skygor fastness.”

“They stole from you?”

“After our fathers made landfall, there was war,” Mantha said, her voice bitter. “The Skygors were many, and would have slain all, but thought to hold slaves. And as slaves our fathers dwelt and died, and their children after them.”

“But you aren’t slaves,” protested Planter.

“ ’Tis Skygor fashion to keep all men, and such women as are hale enow for toil. Others who seem weak they cast forth to die, like us!”

“Who did not die,” chimed in Mara, plucking her bowstring. “We found fruits, meat, shelter, and joined. Now we slay Skygors for their metals and shot. Lately they slay weaklings, lest they join us.”

Planter whistled. This was a harsh proof of human tenacity. The Skygors discarding unprofitable servants and finding them a menace. “None of you are weaklings,” he said.

“Freedom brings health,” replied Mantha sententiously. “Yet they are many more than we, well fortified, and have a strange spell to whelm those who attack.” She grimaced in distaste. “We but lurk and linger, fighting when we must and fleeing when we may. As the last of us dies—”

Things began to happen.

A tall, robust girl, very handsome, had been hitching her woven chair close to Planter. With a pert boldness she touched his hand.

“I’ve seen no man since I was driven forth, a child,” she informed him. “I like you. I am Sala.”

Mara rose from her own seat, swore a rather Elizabethan oath, and slapped Sala’s face resoundingly.

Sala, too, sprang up. Larger than Mara, she clutched her assailant’s shoulders and tripped her over a neatly extended foot. Mara spun sidewise in falling, broke Sala’s hold, came to her feet with a drawn dagger.

This happened silently and swiftly, with none of the screaming and fumbling that marks the rare battles between Terrestrial women. Planter stared, half aghast and half admiring. Another girl whispered behind him: “Let them fight, send them ill days! Look at me, I am not ugly.”

Perhaps to flee this new admirer, Planter threw himself between the two fighters. As Mara attempted to stab Sala, Planter caught her weapon wrist and wrenched the knife from her. Meanwhile, Sala snatched up a crossbow. Leaving Mara, Planter struck the thing out of aiming line just in time. The pen-missile tore through the baskety wall of the Nest, and Planter gained possession of the crossbow, not without trouble.

“Are you girls fighting over me?” he demanded.

“Egad, what else?” challenged Mantha, who had also sprung forward. “Art a man of height and presence. For any man these my manless girls would contend.”

“Aye, would we,” agreed one of the bevy, with frightening candor.

“He’s mine,” snapped Mara, holding her own crossbow at the ready. “Step forth who will, and I speak true.”

“I’m nobody’s,” exploded Planter. “Anyway, I’m going—I’ve two friends near here that I’ve got to find, and soon!”

“More men!” ejaculated Sala, forgetting her anger.

“Fighters, with weapons,” said Planter, ignoring her. “They’ll help you smoke out these Skygors and set free your kinsmen.”

Happy cries greeted his words.

“I’ll guide you home, David Planter,” offered Mara, and Mantha gestured approval.

Mara and Planter left the Nest by a new jungle trail. Mara explained that these tunnels were made by great floundering beasts, and served as runways for smaller land life. The girl trod the green, fog-filled labyrinths with assurance. Within minutes they reached the pool where Disbro had landed the ship.

At the edge floated the limp, dead thing that Mara had killed to save Planter. Small flutterers, like gross-winged flies but as large as gulls, swarmed to dig out morsels. Mara called the creature a krau, the flying scavengers ghrols. “Skygor words, for ugly beasts,” she commented. “Neither is good for food.”

Planter picked his way from root to root toward the ship. “Disbro!” he called. “Max!”

There was no answer. He scrambled up and inside, then out again. “Something’s happened,” he said gravely.

Mara studied the massed logs that made a rough raft. “Skygor work. And eke the rope of wires about your ship.”

“They’ve been captured by Skygors? For slaves?” Planter had climbed down again. His hand sought the Skygor pistol at his belt, his face was tense and pale. “I’ll get them back. Where’s this swamp-city you mention?”

She pointed. “Not far. But the way is perilous. The trails throng with Skygors, and there is the spell.”

“That sounds like some old superstition,” snorted Planter. “I’m not afraid of Skygors. I killed two today.”

“Aye,” she smiled. “They are not great fighters in these parts. But there are more than two at the city … come along.”

“You can go back to the Nest.”

She smiled more broadly. “How else will you find the way, my David? For you are my David.”

“Don’t start that again,” he bade her, more roughly than he felt. “Lead the way.”

Mara took a nearby jungle trail. After some time, she paused and studied the matted footing. “Tracks,” she pronounced. “Certain Skygors, and two pairs of feet shod like yours.”

Planter looked at the muddled marks thus diagnosed by the skilled trail-eye of Mara. “My friends and their captors?”

“Aye, that. They went this way. Come.”

She slipped aside through the close-set stems. Planter did likewise. Mara slung her crossbow behind her, and climbed a trunk as a beetle scales a flower-stalk. “ ’Tis safer from Skygors up here,” she told him over her shoulder “Follow me carefully.”

Planter did so, with difficulty. He was a vigorous climber, and the lesser gravity of Venus made him more agile. But Mara, some forty feet overhead, swung through the crisscross of limbs and vines like a squirrel. “Wait!” he called, striving to catch up.

She paused, finger to lips. As he came near, she said softly: “Not so loud! We come close. Feel you the spell?”

Hanging quietly, Planter did feel it.

Uneasiness came, chilling his back despite the steamy warmth. His hair stirred on his head, his teeth gritted, and he could not reason himself out of the mood. Mara moved ahead, and he followed. Growing accustomed to the climbing, he made progress. But the uncomfortable sense of peril grew rather than diminished.

Once in their strange journey Mara paused, and from a belt-pouch produced food. It consisted of fire-dried fruits, strange to Planter but tasty and substantial; also two meat-dumplings, made by wrapping a nut-flavored dough around morsels of flesh. For drink she plucked long spear-like leaves from a vine, and Planter found them full of pungent juice. While they munched, he heard boomings in the distance, which Mara identified as Skygor speech.

“We are almost there,” she whispered. “Look well.”

She rose, and again they took up the journey. After a time she paused again, and pointed.

Just beyond them the branches thinned out over a great open space in the jungle. Under a far-flung canopy of white vapors lay the swamp-city of the Skygors.

Planter, gazing in wonder at the strange city, thought of old Venice, or of a beaver colony in a diked pond. Before and beneath him was a quiet greeny-clear body of water. Around its rim grew shrubs, bushes and huge reeds, their roots clasping the great facing of white rock which apparently paved the banks and bottom of the pool. In the water itself, poking above the surface in little pointed clusters and plainly visible where they extended beneath, were the houses of the Skygors.

They were of some kind of soil or clay that had been processed to a concrete hardness, and were tinted in various colors. Some of the smaller dwellings were roughly spherical, and crowned with cone-shaped roofs. Others, larger, protruded well above the water in cylindrical form. Here and there travel-ways connected the clustered groups.

But it was beneath the surface that the town was complex and great. It seemed to lie tier above tier, closely built and grouped, with here and there protruding arms or wings of building, like coral budded from the main mass. In those depths swam myriads of Skygors, plainly at home under water. More of them, at the window-holes of the upper towers or paddling on the surface, boomed and roared to each other in their deafening language. From on high, Planter saw them as smaller and less to be dreaded. They might have been slight fantasy things, water-elves or super-intelligent frogs.

“Look you, David Planter,” prompted Mara, at his elbow.

From a tunnel-like hole in the jungle, a group of Skygors emerged. Among them were two human figures, clad like Planter in loose overalls and helmets.

“Your friends?” Mara questioned.

“Right,” snapped Planter grimly. He drew the pistol-weapon and glared.

Disbro and Max, the latter stooping under a great bale of goods from the ship, had paused on the brink of the water. A Skygor was thundering to them, in words of English which Planter, across the water, found hard to catch. Other Skygors motioned at the pool, and one or two jumped in and struck out for nearby buildings.

“They want your friends to dive,” Mara informed him. “See, the slim one shakes his head.”

Planter rested the pistol on his forearm, and sighted on the Skygor who harangued Disbro. Meanwhile, other Skygors were bringing up what appeared to be a small, inflated boat, that operated with a paddle-wheel arrangement behind.

Mara saw what Planter was doing. “No!” she gasped. “Don’t, David!”

“I’m going to,” he told her.

“We’ll be next!”

“Nonsense! Those flapper-footed devils can’t climb! They’re too heavy, too clumsy!”

She caught at his weapon wrist, but he had fired.

The Skygor weapon was a wondrous one. Even an indifferent shot like Planter could not miss with it. The Skygor beside Disbro seemed to burst into flame around his flat, bushel-mouthed face, and then he collapsed and lay still. His companions swarmed to his side, rending the air with their horrid yells.

Planter chuckled, and Mara moaned. The man moved forward among the branches, to a place where he could be seen.

“Hai, Disbro!” he trumpeted, as loudly as any Skygor. “Max! It’s David Planter! Run while you have the chance, I’ll pick those toads off!”

But neither of his friends offered to escape. They only stood and gazed at him.

“You idiots!” blazed Planter, and then saw that two of the Skygors on the inflated boat were aiming weapons at him. He sent a silver pen at their craft, and it melted abruptly as its air escaped from the puncture. A third shot took one of the Skygors splashing in the water. “Run, you two!” Planter bade his companions once more.

He felt a grip on his ankle, and glanced down. Mara had crouched low, was trying to pull him back from view. As soon as she had his eye, she let him go, and thrust both fingers into her ears in some sort of a sign he did not comprehend.

Understanding dawned suddenly, and too late.

The mist trembled and swirled at a sudden outburst of sound louder than even a Skygor chorus. Planter dropped his weapon, began to lift his hands to his ears in imitation of Mara. But he could not!

The noise possessed him, as a rush of electric current might course through a body, paralyzing and agonizing it. He swayed and floundered among the branches. His hair bristled, his ears rang, his blood coursed, every fiber of him vibrated. Yet something about it was vaguely familiar, as though it was something he had experienced, or a magnification of such a something.

Yes, of course … the uneasiness that Mara called the “spell.” Some device made a noise-vibration, normally sub-audible but unpleasant enough to warn aliens away. In a time like this, when attack came, it could be intensified to the point of striking the enemy stupid.

Meanwhile, he was falling, through branches and leafage, to splash clumsily into the water of the pool. Abruptly the noise ceased. The Skygors were around him, their flipper-hands fastening upon him, and he was too wrung out, too grateful for silence, to resist.

He may have fainted. Later on, he could not be sure. But his next clear memory was of lying in one of the inflated paddle-boats, in which sat Skygors with weapons. There also sat Disbro, watching him intently.

“Disbro!” muttered Planter. “They got you, too?”

“No, they didn’t get me, too,” mimicked Disbro. “I’m in the racket with them, understand?”

Planter sat up, and two Skygors half-drew their weapons to warn him. “I thought you were captured,” he mumbled.

“Not me. I do things neatly. Showed I could be an enemy, but would rather be a friend. You butted in, killing two of them. Someone says you got two others earlier today. They’re holding you a prisoner, and probably you’ll be killed.”

Planter studied Disbro. “Easy does it,” he said softly. “Better not act as if you know me. You might get mixed up in—”

“No chance!” snarled Disbro. “I told them that you were an enemy of mine. I’m not mixed up in anything.”

Planter subsided. Plainly Disbro was able to take care of himself. Plainly Planter must do the same, with no help from anyone. He wondered about Mara, with a sudden chilled pang. The brave girl had guided him here, despite her knowledge that Skygor country was dangerous. She had done it to please him, because she liked him. He wondered what had happened to her.

He lounged under the Skygor guns, thinking of Mara. In his mind he saw the light of her steady blue eyes, felt the touch of her slim, strong hand. His heart quickened.

“Hang it,” he told himself, “you aren’t in love with her. She’s a savage, and you only met her a few hours ago! You’re only worried because you feel responsibility.”

But he knew he lied.

The boat brought them to an entrance-hole at water-level, in a large cylindrical structure. Disbro swaggered inside, with his new friends. A guard prodded Planter with his pistol-barrel to follow. As Planter obeyed, he saw behind him another boat, in which rode Max with all the baggage he had been carrying. Skygors sat with Max, plainly on good terms. Max saw Planter, too, and his face twitched and scowled as in an effort to rationalize.

Inside, he found himself in a large bare room with dry, roughcast walls. Disbro waited there, with a Skygor whose elaborate chain-mail suggested that he was an officer.

“Disbro,” boomed this individual cordially, “You say this is your enemy? What shall be done to him?”

“I leave that to you, Phra,” answered Disbro, with the grand manner of bestowing gifts. “You have your own ways of handling such problems. I am content.”

Another Skygor approached, and the officer discussed the case in deafening Skygor language. Then, facing Planter, he resumed English:

“Your life is forfeit, but you look strong. Perhaps you can prove yourself worth keeping. Join the slaves.”

He struck his webbed hands together. A human man ran in.

Like Mara and the other crossbow-girls, this man was blond, but the resemblance ended there. He wore loose, brief garments of elastic fabric, no weapons, and his face was mild and servile. Phra pointed to Planter.

“Below with him! Put him to the spring mill!”

The slave beckoned, and led Planter away, studying him curiously.

Planter spoke at once: “You have many friends here, in slavery? Perhaps I can get you out of this.”

“Out of this!” The echo was horrified. “To starve in the jungle? Marry, sir, art mad or sick to say such a thing! Come, down these stairs.”

Planter obeyed his new companion. They went down a dim, stone stairway, lighted with green bulbs. From below came sounds of mechanical action.

“What’s your name?” Planter asked the slave.

“Glanfil. And you?”

“David Planter. How many slaves are there here? Human slaves?”

“Two hundred, belike. Half as many as the Skygors.”

That was a new thought to Planter. On Earth, races were numbered in the millions—here, by the scores. Of course, this might not be the only Skygor city. Mara had mentioned the difficulty of exploring any distance from this habitable pole. For a moment he felt the thirst for knowledge. Wasn’t this world as large as his own planet? Might it not have continents, oceans, mountain ranges, whole genera of strange species, perhaps other civilizations and climates? Then he remembered. He was a slave. And a booming voice drove the memory home.

“Below, men,” thundered a Skygor guard. “You are not fed and lodged to be idle.”

“Pardon,” mumbled Glanfil, and quickened his descent. Planter followed, beating down a rage of battle at the rough shouting of the guard.

The underwater levels were not flooded, though the walls were gloomily damp. Planter found himself in a great rambling chamber, bordered and cumbered with machines, at which men toiled. Glanfil was presenting him to a Skygor, who made notes with a crayon-like instrument on a board. “New?” he questioned in his ear-dulling roar. “Whence came he? Never stop to answer—show him how to work your machine.”

Glanfil led him to a cylindrical appliance against a wall. It had a multitude of levers and push-buttons, and lights shone in its glassed forefront. Most of these were green, but one turned red as they approached. Glanfil pushed a button and turned a lever. The light switched to green again.

“The red means a faulty rhythm somewhere in the light system,” explained Glanfil. “Fix it by manipulating the buttons and levers near the red lights—yes, so. It takes not skill, but wary watching.”

Planter took over. He found time to observe the rest of the slave-teemed basement.

Some operated a treadmill, others wound at keys or turned cranks. The machines were strange but not mysterious. He judged that they pumped, elevated, and modelled. Glanfil answered his questions:

“ ’Tis the Skygor method. We supply power by our labors. Springs, levers, such things, are worked.”

“Springs and levers?” repeated Planter. “Is this a clockwork town? Why not fuel? Steam?”

Glanfil shook his head. “We men make small fires, but the Skygors not. Their nature is moist, they want such things not. As you say, clockwork is the use of this place.”

“If you refuse to do this slave work, what then?”

Glanfil shrugged, and shuddered. “If the sin is not too great, you go to a level below this. Men drag upon a capstan, to wind the mightiest of springs for town works.”

“Like rowing in a galley!” Planter summed up wrathfully. “But if the sin is pretty sinful?”

A Skygor overseer came close, saw that Planter had learned the simple machine, and called Glanfil to some other task. Planter worked until such time as a raucous voice bade another shift take over. Marshalled with twenty or more slaves, he was led away to a musty vault, one side of which was lined with cell-like sleeping quarters. Here was a brick oven—perhaps those in the Nest were designed from it—over which two sturdy women toiled at cookery. As the slaves entered, these women quickly passed out stone plates and metal spoons. Into these were poured generous portions of hot, appetizing stew.

“They feed you well, these Skygors,” commented Planter to Glanfil as he finished his plateful.

“ ’Tis their fashion. They seek to make us happy.”

Planter went to the kettles for another helping of stew, and ate more slowly. “I’d rather eat in freedom,” he commented, half to himself.

“Freedom?” echoed Glanfil, as if scornful. “We hear of what freedom can be. Scant commons, rough beds, danger and damp. Better to toil honestly and fare well.”

“Aye,” said a bigger slave, with a spade beard of reddish tinge. “Did not the Skygors help our first fathers, stranger, as now they help you?”

“I’ve heard otherwise,” Planter rejoined. “It seems there was a fight—the men were licked—the survivors made captive and put to work. That’s what happened to me.”

“Best be silent,” murmured Glanfil, bending close. “That talk makes few friends.”

Planter changed the subject, asking various questions about Venus. His companions eyed him strangely as he displayed his ignorance, but made cheerful answer.

The noise that had overwhelmed him was a vibrating metal instrument, they said. Their description made it sound like an organ of sorts. As he had surmised, it was always in some sort of operation, and could be turned on full force if need be. The Skygors, with senses meant to endure great noises, were not hurt by such a din, but human ears would be tortured if not quickly closed. “Our labors give the instrument power,” informed Glanfil, rather proudly.

Planter thought over his experiences of the day. “The Skygors have many human devices,” he ventured.

“Aye, that,” agreed the big bearded one. “In the first days, our fathers brought many articles, which the Skygors developed and used.”

“There’s what I’m driving at!” Planter broke in, forgetting Glanfil’s council to be cautious. “They not only enslaved you, they took your ideas and improved themselves. I’ll wager they were savages to begin with! And you’re actually grateful for the chance to crawl at their big, webbed feet!”

“This world belongs to the Skygors,” spoke up one of the women as she washed dishes. “Without them we would be shelterless and foodless, like the weaklings they drove forth.”

Planter refrained to tell what he knew of the crossbow-girls. Plainly he was up against an attitude of content from which it would be hard to free his new companions—harder than to free them from guards and prison walls.

He slept that night in a hammock-like bed, and next day worked at the machine. His toil was long, but not sapping, and food was good. Once a Skygor came to take his clothing, shoes and possessions, giving him a sleeveless shirt and shorts instead. Otherwise he was not bothered by the masters of the city. For days—perhaps ten—he followed this routine, masking his feeling of revolt.

Then came a Skygor messenger to lead him away along underwater corridors to someone who had sent. At the end of the journey he entered an office. There sat the person he least expected to see.

Disbro.

“You rat,” Planter began, but Disbro waved the insult aside.

“Don’t be a bigger ape than usual,” he sniffed. “I’ve been able to do you a favor.”

“You didn’t do me much of a one when I was captured,” reminded Planter.

“How could I?” argued Disbro, in the charming fashion he could sometimes achieve. “I was only on probation. If I’d tried to help you then, we’d both be dead, instead of both on top of this Turkish Bath world. Sit down.” They took stools on opposite sides of a heavy, wooden table. “Planter, how would you like to help me run Venus?”

“You’re going to get away from these Skygors?”

Again Disbro waved the words away. “Why should I? I’ll run them, too. Look, we landed safely, didn’t we? Observations on Earth will show that, won’t they?”

“Right,” agreed Planter, mystified. “There’ll be more ships coming, to look for us and maybe set up a colony.”

“That’s it. We’ll ambush those ships.”

“Ambush?” repeated Planter sharply. “Losing your mind, Disbro?”

“No. I’m only thinking for all of us. Ships will come, I say. Loaded with supplies, valuables all sorts of things. We can overwhelm them as they land. Some of their crews will join us—the others can be rubbed out. And the law can’t touch us, Planter! Not for a minute!”

“What are you driving at?” Planter demanded.

“I’m the law,” said Disbro, tapping his chest. “Just now I string with the Skygors. Later I may knock ’em off. But anyway, I’m the commander of the first expedition to land on Venus. I have a right to take possession, in my own name.” He got up, his voice rising clear and proud. “Possession, like Columbus! Not of a continent—of a whole world!”

Planter, leaning forward on his stool, clutched the edge of the table so strongly that his knuckles whitened.

“And what,” he asked slowly and quietly, “do you want me to do?”

“I’m coming to that,” said Disbro, smiling with superior craftiness. “You’re going to help me solidify these loud-mouthed Skygors.”

“They hold me for a slave,” reminded Planter harshly, for he did not like the life as well as Glanfil and the others who toiled among the clockwork. But Disbro brushed the complaint aside.

“That’s because they don’t know what I know. Your lady friends, I mean.”

Planter glanced up sharply. Disbro chuckled.

“I talk a lot with these Skygors. Not bad fellows, if you muffle your ears. Anyway, they tell me about a herd of wild girls that bushwacks them constantly, and which they hope I’ll find and destroy. Lately some of those girls have been scouting around, yelling for something. The Skygors haven’t the best of English, and don’t know what the words mean. But I do. Those girls are calling your name. David Planter.”

Mara had come back for him, then. She braved the terrors of the Skygor fortress, trying to get him back. Planter felt warmth around his heart. He faced Disbro and shook his head.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “You must be getting drunk with your Skygor friends.”

“They don’t have any kind of liquor, only some sort of sniff-powder I wouldn’t touch. And you’re a cheerful liar, Planter. You know all about those girls, and you’re probably good friends with them. Don’t be a fool, I’m offering you a slice of my empire!”

“Empire!” echoed Planter, honestly scornful. “You really think you’ll go through with this idea of grabbing Venus for yourself?”

“I know all the angles. Back on Earth I was boss of quite an organization.”

“And ended up in jail, buying your way out by gambling your life on this voyage!” Planter rushed those words into speech, but made them clear, biting and passionate. “You’re a case for brain doctors, not jail wardens. I don’t know why I listen to you.”

“I know why,” hurled back Disbro. “Because I’m already quite a pet among these Skygors. I can kill you or save you. Meanwhile, we’re changing the subject. I want you to lead me to these wild girls, and after we’re solid with them, a bunch of Skygors will come—”

“Nothing doing!”

“In other words, you now admit that there is such a group! And you’ll take orders, Planter. I’m still chief of the expedition.”

Planter shook his head. “I can give you arguments on that. You’ve betrayed the trust of the Foundation back home. That lets you out. You don’t have authority over me.”

He rose abruptly. “Send me back to the basement, Disbro.”

Disbro, too, jumped up. He held something in his hand. It was a gun, not a Skygor curiosity but a Terrestrial-made automatic.

“You don’t get off that easy, Planter. I need you badly. And you need your insides badly. Knuckle down, before I blow them out!”

Planter smiled, broadly and rather sunnily. Suddenly he lifted a toe. He kicked over the table against and upon Disbro. Down went the elegant, lean figure, and a bullet sang over Planter’s head as he dived in to grapple and fight.

Disbro, the lighter of the two, was wondrously agile. Almost before he struck the concrete floor, he was wriggling clear of the table. Planter’s weight threw him flat again, but he struck savage, choppy blows with the pistol he still held. Half-dazed, Planter could not get a tight grip, and Disbro got away and up. Planter, shaking the mist from his battered head, staggered after him, caught his weapon wrist and wrung the gun away. It clanged down at their feet.

“All right, Planter, if you want it that way,” muttered Disbro savagely, and took a long stride backward. He got time to fall on guard like the accomplished boxer he was.

Planter sprang after him. Disbro met him with a neat left jab, followed it with a hook that bobbed Planter’s head back, and easily slid away from a powerful but clumsy return. When Planter faced him again, he stood out of danger, smiling and lifting a little on his toes.

“How do you like it?” he laughed. “Didn’t know I was a fancy Dan, eh?”

Planter charged again. Disbro slipped right and left tries at his jaw, returned a smart peg to Planter’s belly, and then let the bigger man blunder past and fetch up against a wall. Planter was forced to lean there a nauseous moment, and Disbro hooked him hard under the ear. A moment later, Planter was crouching and backing away, sheltering his bruised head with crossed arms. He heard Disbro laugh again. “This is fun,” pronounced Disbro. “I’ve been taught by professionals, Planter. Good ones, not washouts like poor Max.”

Planter clinched at last, but Disbro’s wiry body spun loose. The two faced each other, and Planter felt some of his strength and wit come back.

He realized that he was being beaten. He must change tactics. He remembered what he could of fist-science, and abruptly crouched. Again he advanced, but not in a rush. Inch by inch he shuffled in, head sunk between his shoulders, hands lifted to strike or defend.

“You look like a turtle,” mocked Disbro, and tried with a left. It glanced off of Planter’s forehead, and Planter sidled to his left, away from Disbro’s more dangerous right. Bobbing and weaving lower still, he baffled more efforts to sting him. A moment later, Disbro was backing, and Planter had him in a corner, close in.

He struck, not for Disbro’s adroit head, but for his body. His left found the pit of the stomach, just within the apex of the shallow, inverted V where ribs slope down from breastbone. Disbro grunted in pain, and Planter put all his shoulders behind a short, heavy peg under the heart. Again to the belly, twice—thrice—he felt Disbro sag. A hook glanced from Planter’s jowl, but it was weak and shaky. Disbro managed to slip out of the corner, but Planter was now the stronger and surer. Across the room he followed his enemy, playing ever for the body—kidneys, abdomen, heart. Disbro was hanging on, his breath came in choking grunts. Planter struggled loose, and sank one clean, hard right uppercut.

Disbro spun off of his feet, fell across the overturned table, and lay moaning and gasping.

“Had enough?” Planter challenged.

Disbro was crawling on the floor, trying to grab the pistol. Planter sprang in, stamped on Disbro’s knuckles. Disbro had only the strength and breath for one scream, and collapsed.

Abruptly Skygors entered, Skygors with hard eyes and leveled weapons. “What,” demanded one, “is this?”

Disbro, helped to his shaky feet, pointed to Planter. “He—he—refused,” he managed to wheeze out.

Disbro nodded, and Planter felt a sudden rush of joy. They would drive him forth, as they used to drive forth unprofitable female slaves. And he would find the Nest again, and Mara.

He was being herded along a passage, upstairs. The Skygors who guarded him kept their weapons close against his ribs. “No escape,” they promised him balefully.

He wondered at that, but only a little. Now they had brought him out upon an open, railed bridge between two buildings. Below was water, above the thick Venusian mist. “Jump,” a Skygor bade him.

“I need no second chance,” Planter replied, breezily, and dived in.

He still wore the scanty costume of a slave, and it allowed him to strike out easily for the edge of the pool. Behind him the Skygors were discussing him, but in their own guttural tongue which he could not understand. As he swam, he studied the city beneath the water.

He meant to come back and assail that city some time, and there must be worthwhile secrets to note. For instance, he was now aware that this pool was artificial—he made out the sluices and gates of a large dam. To one side was a spacious submarine chamber that must be the clockwork-jammed cellar where his erstwhile companions, the slaves, worked.

But something else was under water, something that moved darkly, but had arms and legs, though it was as vast as an elephant. It was approaching him swiftly, knowingly.

Now he knew why he had been told, with such a voice of doom, to jump into the water.

Planter’s blood was still up because of that brisk battle with Disbro. He was young, strong, in gilt-edge condition. His new impulse was to keep on fighting, against the thing which had the size, the intention, and apparently the appetite, to engulf him.

The huge swimmer was a Skygor, of tremendous size. Logic in the back of Planter’s head bade him not to be amazed; on this damp, fecund world, monsters of such sort were not too unthinkable. As it broke surface, he heard a hubbub like many steam sirens. The smaller Skygors, on housetops and bridges, were all chanting some sort of ear-bursting litany, waving their flippers in unison. Plainly they worshiped this giant of their race. He, Planter, was a gift—a sacrifice.

He swam speedily, but his pursuer was speedier still. With ponderous overhand strokes it overhauled him. An arm as long as his body, with a flipper-hand like a tremendous scoop shovel, extended to clutch at him. A mouth like an open trunk gaped, large enough to gulp him bodily.

Only one thing to do. He did it—dived at once, turning under water and darting below and in an opposite direction from the great swimmer. By pure, happy chance, his kicking feet struck the soft cushion of its mighty belly, and he heard the thrumming gasp of the wind he knocked out of it. Coming up beyond, he swam desperately toward a nearby building. If he could climb up, away, from this huge, hungry being.

“No, not here!” That was a Skygor, poking its ugly smirking face from a window-hole. He tried to seize the sill to draw himself out of the water, and it lifted a dagger to slash at his knuckles.

But then it gasped, wriggled. The paw opened, the knife fell. Planter managed to catch it as it struck the water. A moment later he saw what had happened—big human hands were fastened on the slimy throat from behind. The Skygor, struggling, was pulled back out of sight. In its place showed the flat, simple features of Max.

“Huhh!” gurgled Max. “You in trouble, Mr. Planter?”

He put out a hand to help. At the same moment a monstrous flipper struck at Planter, driving him deep under water.

He filled his lungs with air at the last moment, spun and tried to kick away. His enemy had its hooked claws in his clothing and was drawing him toward the dark cavern of its mouth. Planter struck with the knife he had snatched, and buried the blade in the slimy-green lower lip of the creature. It let go, and a cloud of blood—red as the blood of Earth’s creatures—suddenly obscured the water, so that Planter could attempt another escape.

He reached the top once again. The giant held itself half out of the water, big and grotesque as some barbaric sculpture, one webbed hand held against its wounded mouth. As Planter came into view, its big, bitter eyes caught sight of him. Dropping its hand, it howled at him. All the Skygors at their watch-points echoed that howl and began to repeat their uncouth litany once again. The monster pursued as before.

But from his watch-window, Max threw his burly pugilist’s body.

Coarsely built Max might have been. Stupid he undoubtedly was. Cowardly and clumsy he was not. As he flung himself into space, he shifted so that his feet were down. He drove them hard between the shoulders of the huge Skygor demon, and the impact of his flying weight drove it under water.

“Get out of here!” yelled Max at Planter. “Get out!”

He had time for no more, for he, too, submerged. Planter clasped his knife in his teeth, and turned in the water. He could not desert that plucky rescuer.

Righting itself, the big Skygor grimaced under the troubled, gory surface. It was having trouble—more trouble than ever before in its freakish, idle, overstuffed life as deity and champion of the community. Two alien dwarfs, of a species it had looked on hitherto as only enticing meat, were viciously attacking and wounding it. Hunger was overlaid by a stern lust for vengeance.

It spied one of the enemy very close, swimming away. Max was not as much at home in the water as Planter, and he could not dodge its grasping talons. Treading water, the thing hoisted him clear, as a child might lift a kitten. Its other paw struck him, with openwebbed palm, hard as a mule’s kick.

Max went limp. Once again that awful mouth opened to its full extent.

“No, you don’t!” cried Planter, battling his way close. For a second time he drove with the knife, sheathing it to the hilt in a slate-colored chest, close to one armpit.

A fountain of blood sprang forth, drenching his face and weapon hand. He dragged strongly downward, felt his weapon point grating on bone, then coming free. That was a terrible wound, but not a disabling one. In a frenzy of pain and rage, the Skygor giant threw Max far away into the water, and whirled to look for its other tormentor.

But Planter had dived yet again. The fresh blood obscured his passage as before. He came up, panted for air, and seized the limp wrist of Max. As he kicked away for shore, he heard the whine and splat of a missile.

The Skygors were shooting at him.

He bobbed under, bringing Max with him. As he fought through the water, he felt his friend quiver and beat with his hands. He felt fierce joy. Max was alive, he too, would escape. He had to come up.

“Duck down, Planter,” Max told him at once. “They’re going to give us another volley.”

His voice was suddenly intelligent, his words sensible and articulate. Planter took the advice, swam forward again.

“Shore’s that way,” said Max, when they came up. “Can you make it? Give me your hand.”

The ex-pugilist was climbing over a tangle of roots, to solid ground at last. Planter made shift to follow him.

“What—happened—” Planter barely whispered.

Max laughed, very cheerfully. “What a wallop that sea-elephant has! I guess it knocked my senses back into me. Another belt dizzied me back on Earth. So it’s logical that—”

Yes, logical. … Max was no longer a dim, stupid child in a big man’s body.

Planter felt himself weakening. He had fought himself out. Even as he turned toward the jungle, he stumbled and fell, rolled over on his back.

He could see the whole surface of the water-city. Skygors were coming in throngs to recapture him, crowded aboard their inflated boats, or swimming. For ahead of them, something like an awful goblin was scrambling out—the mighty freak he and Max had dodged up to now. It stood erect on powerful, awkward legs, its eyes probing here and there to pick up the trail of its prey.

Planter tried to tell Max to run, but his strength and breath were spent. He could only lie and watch. Max had torn up a kind of sapling, whirled it aloft like a club. The tottering colossus approached them, heavily and grimly. It grinned relentlessly, its bloody muzzle opened and slavered.

Out of the jungle moved another figure. A smaller Skygor? No—Mara!

She sprang across the prostrate form of Planter. He managed to rise to an elbow, just as she planted herself in the way of the oncoming destruction. It loomed high above her, paws lifted to seize and crush her. But she had lifted her crossbow.

Pale fire flashed. The string hummed. At a scant five feet of distance she slammed a pen-missile full into the thing’s immense chest.

It staggered back from her, its face gone into a terrible oversize mask of awful pain. Those great legs, like dark, gnarled stumps, bowed and bent. It fell uncouthly, supported itself on spread hands. Planter could see the hole Mara had burned in it, a great red raw pit the size of a bushel basket. Then it was down, motionless. Dead.

Max had helped Planter up. “Can you run?” he was demanding.

“No! No!” Mara interposed, hurrying back to them. “Not run! Fight!”

“Fight?” Planter echoed, rather idiotically.

“Fight the Skygors! See, your friends have come!”

Through the jungle to the water’s edge pressed other human figures, in Terrestrial overalls and helmets.

A slim, square-faced man in the neatest of overall costumes had grabbed Planter’s elbow. It was beginning to rain again. Thunder sounded, like Skygors grumbling high in the mist. “Quick!” said the square-faced man. “You’re Planter, aren’t you? And that other man—but where’s Disbro.”

Planter pointed toward the water-city. “Who are you?” he demanded, as if they had all day.

“Dr. Hommerson. Commanding this new expedition. Ten of us in the big new ship started when they reported you landing safely. We cracked up, not far from where your ship bogged down. This girl found us, said—”

“Whatever she said was true!” cut in Planter. “Quick, defend yourself against those Skygors.”

“They’ll defend themselves against us,” rejoined Dr. Hommerson bleakly. “If they’re smart, and if they’re lucky.”

His companions had formed a sort of skirmish line among the thickest stems at the water’s edge. With a variety of weapons—force-rifles, machine guns, one or two portable grenade throwers—they had opened on the Skygors.

The amphibian dwellers in the water-city had started to chase Planter and Max, but the destruction of their giant kinsman had daunted and immobilized them. Now they had something else to shake their courage, which was never too great. Well-aimed shots were picking them off, in the boats, in the water, on the housetops and bridges.

“Don’t show yourselves more than is necessary!” Dr. Hommerson was barking. “If they know there’s only a handful of us, they might—” He unlimbered a patent pistol, one with a long barrel, a magazine of fourteen rounds in the stock, and a wooden holster that could fit into a slot and form a makeshift butt like that of a rifle. Lifting this to his shoulder, he began to shoot at such of the Skygors as still showed themselves.

Mara had rushed to Planter’s side. “They’re retreating!” she cried. “The spell—remember the spell!”

True enough, he’d forgotten. That wild, unmanning storm of noise that defended Skygor country, that had knocked him into their webbed fingers as a captive and slave, might begin at any moment. Even now the Skygors were retiring inside their buildings, but with a certain purposeful orderliness. As Planter watched, Max ran up to his other side.

“She’s telling the truth. I know all about that thing they sound off,” he said breathlessly in his new, knowing voice. “When I was with Disbro—working for him—I had a look at it.”

“Stop your ears,” Mara was bidding. “Quick! A rag from your garment will do!”

She ripped away part of Planter’s shirt, tore the piece in two, and thrust wads into his ears with her forefinger. Max was plugging his own ears. Then the sound began.

When it began, nobody could say. Suddenly, it was there, filling space with itself as though it were a crushing solid thing.

Planter, even with his ears partially muffled, almost collapsed. His body vibrated as before in every fiber, only not unendurably. He saw Max reel, but stay on his feet. Dr. Hommerson’s men, a moment ago almost in the victor’s position, were down, floundering in half-crazy agony. Planter understood, in that rear compartment of his mind that was always diagnosing strange things, even in the moment of worst danger.

The Skygors were ill-cultured, poor of spirit, prospered chiefly by ideas stolen from the human beings they enslaved. But they understood sound waves, could use them roughly as an electrician might use electric vibrations. There were all the tales he had heard, of a chord on the organ that shattered window panes, of certain orators who could employ voice-frequencies to spellbind and impassion their audiences. This was something like that, only more so.

Then he saw that Mara, who had thought of saving his ears, was down at his feet.

“Mara!” he cried, though nobody could have heard him. He knelt, ripping away more rags of his shirt. He crammed them furiously into her ears. She stirred, got to her knees. She, too, could endure it now, and she smiled at him, drawnly.

“I knew you would come back,” her lips formed words. “David Planter—my David Planter—”

Then she was up, crossbow at the ready.

Because back came the Skygors, a wave of them in boats and as swimmers. Sure of their victory through sound, they were going to mop up the attackers.

Max had a rifle. He lifted it, but on inspiration Planter leaped at him and gestured for him to hold fire. From beside one of the fallen Terrestrials he caught a grenade thrower. It was a simple amplification of an ordinary rifle. Upon the muzzle fitted a metal device like a bottomless bottle, the neck clamping tight to the barrel. Into the spread body of the bottle could be slid a cylindrical grenade, the size and shape of a condensed-milk tin. The grenade was pierced with a hole, and the gun, if fired, would send its bullet through that hole, while the gases of the exploding powder operated to hurl the grenade far and forcefully and accurately.

Planter had never used one, but he had seen them used. A quick check showed him that the rifle’s magazine was full. From the belt of the fallen man he twitched a grenade, slipped it into place. He knelt, placed the rifle butt on the soggy mass of rotting vegetation that made up the shoreside jungle floor. By guess, he slanted his weapon about forty-five degrees forward. The foremost press of Skygors approached.

Bang! At Planter’s trigger-touch, the grenade rose upward. For a moment the three conscious watchers could see it, outlined against the upper mists at the hesitating apex of its flight. Then it fell, too far to demoralize the first ranks of Skygors, but smashing two inflated boats in its explosion and tossing several slimy-green forms like chips through the air. Planter slid in another grenade, worked the rifle-bolt, and raised the weapon to his shoulder.

It spoke again, louder even than the din of the noisemaker Mara called the “spell.” This time it struck water among the leading Skygors, and exploded on contact. Three or four sank abruptly, several more thrashed the water into pinky-red foam in the pain of bad wounds, the rest wavered.

Now Max opened fire with his rifle, and Mara with her crossbow. Both scored hits, and the Skygors gave back. Something was going wrong, they were realizing. The destroying sound was not paralyzing their enemy. Meanwhile, it was best to take cover. Some ducked under the water, others fell back toward the buildings.

“Dynamite ’em!” cried Planter, forgetting that he could not be heard. Stooping, he stripped away the whole beltful of grenades from its helpless owner. He whirled it around his head as though he were throwing a hammer on an athletic field, and sent it flying out over the water. The shock of its fall into the depths set it off—all grenades at once. Skygors came bounding to the top, twitching feebly. The explosion had destroyed them, as fish are destroyed by the shock of detonating dynamite in nearby waters.

Then the paralyzing noise stopped.

Hommerson was the first man up. He was dazed and groggy, but fight was the first impulse that woke in him. Mara, Max and Planter dragged others to their feet, shook and shouted their senses back into them.

“They’re retreating!” Planter yelled. “Let’s counterattack!”

Close in to shore drifted one of the abandoned boats. Max had run into the water, dragging it closer. The Terrestrials tumbled aboard, and one of them got the paddle-wheel running. Planter, at the bow directing fire at any Skygors who showed their heads, saw that Mara had not come along. He worried a moment, then worried no more. She was shouting in the jungle, and other voices—feminine voices—answered her. More of the crossbow-girls were coming to help.

The boat made a landing at the building where Planter had first been dragged to slavery. It was not made for defense, and the invaders split into small parties, ranging the corridors and outer bridges. Planter, hurrying downstairs, heard the spat of the Skygor pen-missiles, with the replying crackle of gunfire. After a while, Mara and other girls began to shout and chatter. They had also found a boat and had come over.

On the floor, above the basement where the slaves worked, he came face to face with a Skygor, who lifted his arms appealingly, in the surrender gesture that must be universal among all creatures who have arms. “I want no fight,” begged this one. “You are master.”

“Then come downstairs,” snapped Planter. He clattered down, among the slaves. “Stop work!” he bawled, almost as loudly as a Skygor, and the men, bred to obey big voices, did so.

“Outside!” was Planter’s next command. One or two moved to obey, others hung back.

“Outside,” the surrendered Skygor echoed Planter, and they came obediently. Planter hurried them to their quarters, then slammed the door to the big workshop.

“That closes down your power plants,” he commented to the Skygor. “Now, quick! Which way to the controls of the dam?”

“Dam?” the Skygor repeated stupidly.

Planter caught the green shoulders and shook the creature roughly. It was larger than he, but cowered. “I will show,” it yielded, and led him away. In a nearby corridor were huge handles, three of them, like pivoted clinker-bars. Planter seized one, pulled it down. He heard waters roaring. He pulled another.

“You will drain the pool,” protested the Skygor.

“I want to drain the pool,” Planter said.

“Then—” The Skygor caught the third lever and pulled it down.

Planter hurried upstairs again. His prisoner kept at his heels.

“Why did you help me?” he asked it.

“Because you conquer,” was the booming reply. “The conquered must obey.”

“I think you believe that stuff, like the slaves,” Planter sniffed.

“Of course, I believe,” responded the Skygor.

From the upper levels came Hommerson’s voice:

“Planter! These frog-folk are giving up! They haven’t any fight left in them!”

But Planter paused, on a landing. He looked into a small office, where two human figures stood close together.

One was Max. The other was Disbro. Max had Disbro by the throat, not shaking or wrestling him. Only squeezing.

“Max!” called Planter. “Why—”

“Why not?” countered Max plausibly. “Planter, I think maybe you were the thickheaded one. You always tried to get along with Disbro, as if he was honest. I was a crazy-house case, but from the first I knew he was wrong. It took the return of sense to understand that the only thing to do was this.”

He let go, and Disbro fell on the floor like an empty suit of clothes.

Max brushed his hands together, as if to clear them of dust.

“I wonder how long I’ve wanted to do that,” he said. “Let’s go up and watch the final mop-up.”

Out of the mud pool where once a snake-armed krau had pursued Planter, the combined strength of many arms was hoisting the bogged ship. Cables had been woven through pulley-blocks at the tops of the biggest and strongest poolside stems. Free men of Venus, once slaves, hauled on these cables in brief, concerted rhythms. Here and there in the rope-gangs toiled a Skygor, accepting defeat and companionship with the same mild grace. Women—free women—laughed and encouraged, and now and again threw themselves into the tugging labor that was a game, Max oversaw everything.

Near by, machete had hewn a little clearing. Here a waterproof tent over a beehive framework sheltered Planter and Dr. Hommerson. They watched as the ship, its bow-rockets toiling to help the tugging cables, finally stirred out of its bed.

Hommerson smiled. “Time to hold a sort of recapitulation, isn’t it? As in old-fashioned mystery yarns, when the case is solved and the danger done away with? Of course, it all happened suddenly, but we can say this much:

“The Skygor mistake was that of every softened master setup. They had a half-rigged defense against mild dangers, and never looked for real trouble. They beat that Seventeenth Century space-expedition simply because Terrestrials of that day hadn’t the proper weapons. Otherwise, man might have been ruling here for four hundred years and more.”

“The Skygors did have one tremendous device,” observed Planter. “That super-siren that deadens you by sound waves.”

Hommerson laughed. “And which providentially did what all clockwork mechanisms are apt to do—ran down. It’s dismantled now, anyway. We’re a fuel-engine civilization, and the Skygors will have to wonder and admire a while before they steal our new tricks.”

Planter fingered another trophy of the battle, a great brassbound log book, old and yellowed, but still readable. “This answers more riddles,” he put in. “The record of those ancient fugitives from Cromwell. Who’d have thought that their times could produce a successful flight from planet to planet?”

“It was a great century,” reminded Hommerson. “Don’t forget that they also invented the microscope, the balloon, the principle of maneuverable armies. Their century began with Francis Bacon and ended with Sir Isaac Newton. That rocket fuel, which the Skygors only half understood and used for ammunition—”

“Doctor!” broke in Planter. “Do you remember the old Puritan tales of witches, flying on what seemed like broomsticks?”

“And Cyrano de Bergerac, in France about 1640, writing a tale of a rocket to the moon? We simply forgot that they had something then. The real complete knowledge flew here to Venus, and waited for our age to develop it again from the beginning.”

It was so. Planter pondered awhile, and while he pondered one of the expedition came in to make a report.

“We can send back three in this ship when it’s set,” he said to Hommerson. “Who are you taking, sir?”

“These two who survived the earlier flight, Planter and his big, tough friend. The rest of you can wait and develop a landing field.”

Planter spoke: “Did you see the girl called Mara out there?”

“She was watching us,” said the man. “Finally she went into the jungle.”

“With no message for me?”

“No message for anybody.”

“Dr. Hommerson,” said Planter, “pick someone else instead of me. Here I stay.”

Hommerson looked up sharply. “Until the next ship comes?”

“Here I stay,” repeated Planter. “From now on.”

He sought a certain jungle trail, one he had traversed before. “Mara!” he called down it.

She was not hard to catch up with, for she was not walking fast. As he came alongside, she looked at him with eyes too bright to be dry.

“You came to bid goodbye,” she suggested.

He shook his head. The mist seemed less than ever before on Venus. “No. Never goodbye.”

“Isn’t the ship leaving?”

“Leaving, all right. But not with me in it. This is home now.”

She looked down at her sandalled feet, and one hand played with the dagger in her belt. “Methought you would be glad to regain Earth.”

“Earth? Other people gained it long ago.” He pulled her hand away from the dagger-hilt. “Stop fiddling with that stabbing-iron, there’s no fighting to be done just now.

“You said I was yours,” he told her furiously. “You said it just as if you’d won me in a game of some sort.”

“And you brushed it aside without answering me. You had none of it.”

“Hang it, Mara, a man decides those things! And I’ve been deciding them. You’re the bravest creature I ever knew—the most graceful—the most honest. You did love me once. Have you stopped?”

“I have not stopped,” she said. “But why have you waited to say these words?”

“I haven’t had time, and I’m going to have little time for a while, what with organization and building and food-hunting and colonizing. But—”

Her mouth, close at hand, was too delectable. He kissed her fiercely. She jumped away, startled, then uttered a little breathless laugh.

“That likes me well,” she told him. “Let us do it again.”

Coven

… They pledge themselves to frequent the midnight assemblies. These conventicles or covens were bands or companies of witches, composed of men and women, apparently under the discipline of an officer. …

History of Witchcraft and Demonology, Montague Summers

I

The Cursed Damozel

Wasn’t Shiloh supposed to be named after an angel or a devil? Angels and devils were both there, sorting the two armies through for who should live and who die, who go to heaven and who go to hell. We Southerners won the first day and part of the second, even after they’d killed General Albert Sidney Johnston. When I say he was about as great as General Lee, I expect to be believed. When we fell back, Bedford Forrest sent some of us to save a field piece that Bragg’s artillery left behind. But the Yankees got there fustest with the mostest men. They carried off the gun, and two or three of us Tennessee cavalry with it.

They were bivouacking on the field—sundown, April 7, 1862. I was marched far back. Passing a headquarters, I saw a fateful little man with a big cigar—General Grant. With him was a taller, red-whiskered man, who was crying. Someone said he was Sherman, but Sherman never seemed to me like a man who would cry over any sorrow, his own or another’s.

This introduction is jumbled. So was my mind at the time. I must have looked forlorn, a skinny gray-clad trooper plundered of saber, carbine and horse. One of the big blue cavalrymen who escorted the prisoners, leaned down from his saddle and rubbed the heel of his hand on my feebly fuzzy cheek.

“Little Johnny Reb’s growing some nice black whiskers to surprise his sweetheart,” he said, laughing.

“I haven’t got a sweetheart,” I snapped, trying to sound like a big soldier. But he laughed the louder.

“Hear that, boys?” he hailed the others of the escort. “This little feller never had a sweetheart.” They mingled their cackles with his, and I wished I’d not spoken. They repeated my words again and again, tagging on sneers and merriments. I frowned, and tried not to cry. This was at dusk, the saddest time of day. We’d been marched back for miles, to some sort of reserve concentration in a tiny town.

“We’ve robbed the cradle for sure,” the big blue cavalryman was saying to friends he met. “This little shaver—no sweetheart, he says!”

A new gale of laughter from towering captors all around me. It hushed suddenly at a stern voice:

“Bring that prisoner to me.”

He rolled out from between two sheds, as heavily and smoothly as a gun-limber.

He was a short, thick man in a dragoon jacket and one of those little peaked Yankee caps. There was just enough light to show me his big beard and the sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve.

“Bring him along,” he ordered again. “March the others to the stockade.” A moment later, he and I stood alone in the gloom. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“High Private Cole Wickett,” I replied. A prisoner could say that much. If he asked about my regiment, or the conditions of the army—But he didn’t. His next question was: “How old are you?”

“Fifteen next birthday.” Again no reason to lie, though I’d told the recruiting sergeant eighteen.

“Fourteen years, and some months,” the big man figured it out. “Come with me.”

He put a hand the size of a hayfork on my shoulder, and steered me into a back yard full of soldiers playing cards by firelight. He paused, and scolded them for gambling. Any sergeant in Forrest’s command who had tried that would have been hooted at, maybe struck at—we Confederates respected God and General Johnston and Bedford Forrest, and scorned everyone else. But these men put away the cards and said, “Yes sir,” as if he had been an officer. He marched me on into the house beyond the yard, and sat me in a chair in what had been the kitchen.

There he left me. I could hear him talking to someone in the next room. There was a window through which I might have climbed. But it was dark, and I was tired, hungry, sick, and not yet fifteen. I couldn’t have fought my way back through Grant, Sherman and the rest of the Yankees. I waited where I was until the sergeant opened the door and said, “Come in here, Wickett.”

The front room was lighted by one candle, stuck in its own grease on a table. There sat a tall, gray officer with a chaplain’s cross for insignia. He was eating supper—bread, bacon and coffee. My eyes must have been wolfish, for he asked if I’d have some. I took enough to make a sandwich, and thanked him kindly. Then the chaplain said, “My boy, is it true what Sergeant Jaeger heard? That you’re only a child, and never had a sweetheart?”

I stuck my chin out and stood up straight. The Yankees must be worse than all our Southern editors and speechmakers claimed, if even a preacher among them made jokes about such things. “Sir,” I said, keeping my voice deep in my chest, “it’s none of your business.”

“But it is my business,” he replied solemnly, “and the business of many people. Upon your answer, Cole, depends an effort to help some folk out of awful trouble—northern and southern both—and to right a terrible wrong. Now will you reply?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I returned, “but I never even thought much about girls. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing’s wrong with it,” answered the big sergeant named Jaeger. “You should be proud to say that thing, Wickett, if it’s really true.”

“Sergeant,” I sputtered, “I’m a southern gentleman. If you and I were alone, with horses and sabers, I’d teach you to respect my word.”

His face grew as dark as his beard, and he said, “Respect your elders and betters, youngster. So says the Bible.”

“The catechism, not the Bible, Sergeant,” corrected the chaplain. “Cole, it’s only that we must be dead sure.” He pushed a black-bound book across the table toward me. “This is the Bible. Do you believe in the sanctity of an oath.”

“My word’s good, sir, sworn on the Bible or not,” I told him, but I put my hand on the book. “Must I swear something?”

“Only that you told the truth about never having a sweetheart,” he said, and I did so. The chaplain put away the book, and looked at Sergeant Jaeger.

“Something tells me that we have the help we needed, and couldn’t be sure of in our own forces,” he said. “Take care of this boy, for we’re lost without him.”

He went out. Sergeant Jaeger faced me. He was no taller than I, even then, but about twice as broad.

“Since you’re a man of your word, will you give your parole?” he asked.

I swallowed the last bite of bacon, and shook my head. “I’ll escape,” I announced, “as soon as there’s light enough.”

“Will you give me your parole until sunrise?” he almost pleaded.

Wondering, I gave it. He put his hand on my shoulder again, steered me to a narrow stairway and up to a little room the size of a pantry. There was a cot with a gray blanket, Union army issue, on it.

“Sleep here,” he said. “No, no questions—I won’t answer them. Be ready for orders at an hour before dawn.”

He left me. I took off my tunic and boots, and stretched out on the cot. Still puzzling over things, I went to sleep.

I woke to the touch of a hand, cold as a washrag, on my brow. Somehow there was light enough to see a woman standing there. She wore a frosty white dress and veil, like a bride’s. Her face was still whiter.

I saw a straight, narrow-cut nose, a mouth that must be very red to be so darkly alive, and eyes that glowed green. Perhaps the eyes gave the light. I sat up, embarrassed.

“I was told to sleep here, ma’am,” I said. “Is this your house?”

“Yes,” she whispered, “it is my house.” She sat on the edge of the cot. Her hand moved from my face to my shoulder. Her grip was as strong as Sergeant Jaeger’s. “Your name is Cole Wickett. You are a brave soldier, but you never had a sweetheart.”

I was tired of hearing about it. I said nothing, and she went on:

“I will be your sweetheart.” And she put her arms around me.

She was beautiful, more than anyone I had ever seen. But when she came that close I felt a horrible sick fear. Perhaps it was the smell of deadness, as of a week-old battlefield. Or all of them.

I wriggled loose and jumped off the cot. She laughed, a little gurgle like water in a cave.

“Do not be afraid, Cole. Stand where you are.”

She, too, rose. She was taller than I. Her eyes fixed mine, and I could not move. If you want to know how I felt, stare for a while at some spot on the wall or floor. After a moment, you’ll have trouble looking away. It’s called hypnotism, or something. She came near again, and this time I did not shrink when she put her hands on my shoulders.

“Now,” she said.

Then Sergeant Jaeger opened the door, took one look, and began to say something, very rapidly and roughly. It sounded like Bible verses: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God—”

The woman shrieked, high and ear-tingling, like a bat. She let go of me.

She was gone. It was like a light being blown out, or a magic-lantern image switched from a screen.

I stared stupidly, like a country idiot. Jaeger cleared his throat, and tugged his beard. “That was close,” he said.

“Who was she?” I asked, and the words had a hard time forming in my throat.

“Somebody whose call we’ll return,” he put me off gruffly. “She thought she’d destroy the one power we’re counting on. It’s time to strike back.”

I followed him outside. The night was black, but the early-morning stars had wheeled up into heaven. We passed two different sentries, and came through the sleeping street of the little town to a church, either ruined or shell-smashed. Beyond was a burying ground, grown up in weeds and walled around with stone. At the broken-down gate stood the chaplain. He held the bridle of a chunky black stallion colt, not quite full grown.

“I can vouch for the beast,” he greeted Sergeant Jaeger. “It is sad that we watch our animals so much more carefully than our own children.”

“This night I almost failed in my own duty of watching,” replied Jaeger in a tired voice. To me he said, “crawl out of those clothes. Don’t stare. Do as I say.”

By this time there had been so much strangeness and mystery that I did not argue. I shucked my uniform, and the pre-dawn air was cold on my bare skin. The chaplain motioned for me to mount. I did, and he led the colt into the burying ground.

There were wreaths and wrappings of mist. Through them I saw pale, worn-out tombstones. We tramped over them. It wasn’t polite nor decent, but I saw that the chaplain and the sergeant—he came behind, carrying some shovels and a mattock—meant business. I kept my mouth closed. Riding the colt, I was steered across that burying ground, and across again.

In the middle of the second crossing, the colt planted his hoofs and balked.

Jaeger, bringing up the rear, struck with the handle of a shovel. The colt stood firm. The chaplain tugged in front, Jaeger flogged behind. The colt trembled and snorted, but he did not move.

The chaplain pointed. A grave-mound, a little naked wen of dirt among the weeds, showed just in front of the planted hoofs.

“Your book tells the truth,” he said, strangely cheerful. “Here is a tomb he will not cross.”

“Get down, Wickett,” commanded Jaeger. “Dress, and help dig.”

I hurried to the gate, threw on my clothes anyhow, and returned. The chaplain was scraping with a shovel. Jaeger swung a mattock. I grabbed another spade and joined in.

As the first moment of gray dawn was upon us, we struck a coffin lid. Jaeger scraped earth from it. “Get back!” he grunted, and I did so; but not before he heaved up the lid with his mattock.

Inside lay the woman who had come to my cot, in her bridal dress.

“The stake,” said the chaplain, and passed down a sharp stick like a picket-pin. I judged it was of hawthorn, cut from a hedge somewhere. “Strike to the heart,” went on the chaplain, “while I strike at the throat.”

He suited action to word, driving down the blade of his shovel. At the same moment Jaeger made a strong digging thrust with the stick. I heard again the bat-squeaking; and then, was made faint by a horrid stink of rottenness.

Jaeger slammed down the lid—I heard it fall—and scrambled out of the grave. He and the chaplain began tumbling clods into the hole.

Jaeger looked at me over his shoulder, haggard but triumphant.

“I give you back your parole,” he panted. “Jump on that colt and clear out. To the west there’ll be none of our troops. If you ever tell what was done here, nobody will believe you!”

I needed no second permission.

II

The Flying Horned One

I remembered that adventure, strangest moment of all my war-boyhood on a late night in the fall of 1876.

The wagon track I walked was frozen to rutted concrete. Wind as cold as fear rustled the tall dead grass and the naked twigs of roadside thickets. A round moon reminded me of a pancake, and I tried not to think of that or anything else to eat. It had been long since I had eaten.

The black beard prophesied me by a long-vanished Yankee captor hung thick on my jowls. I was gaunt, big-boned, seam-faced. My clothes were torn, dirty, inadequate—overall pants, a frayed jumper, a hickory shirt that was little more than the traditional “button and frill,” outworn cowhide brogans, no hat. I warmed my knuckly hands under my armpits, and blew out steamy breath.

A man, hungry and weary and unsheltered, might die tonight. I wondered, without much dread, if I were at the end of my sorry trail. Other Southern veterans had died, from sheer want, after surviving the heartbreak of war and defeat. In 1865, after becoming sergeant and finally lieutenant under Bedford Forrest, the general surrender on all hands had failed to include me. I had been detached somewhere, and had gone home. There was no home—Kilpatrick’s cavalry had burned the place in ’64, and I found only the graves of my mother and sister. They had died of sickness, as my father had died of a minie ball at Chattanooga. After that, the black “Reconstruction” period. I had been gambler, Ku Klux raider, jailbird, chicken thief, swamp trapper. And now a tramp.

Up ahead were lights, two houses fairly close together. I knew that I was near the Missouri-Arkansas border. A loosely joined community hereabouts was called Welcome Rock. Would those lights welcome me?

As I faced them, I saw the moon clear. Something winged slowly across it.

What I say seems unreal to you, as the sight then seemed unreal to me. That winged shape must have been larger than any creature that flies; I made certain of that later.

At the moment, I saw only how black it was, with a body and legs half-human, and great bat-wings through which the moon shone as through umbrella cloth.

I told myself sagely that hunger showed me a vision.

The thing flopped around and across the moon again. I saw its ball-shaped head, with curved horns. Then it swooped downward. Suddenly I heard the voices of men.

One laughed, another cursed. The third cried pitifully. From somewhere beyond me came strength, fury, decision. I ran heavily forward, my broken shoes heavy and clumsy. I saw the three at a distance. One was strung up by his hands to a tree’s bare branch, the other two were flogging him with sticks.

I passed under other trees to approach. Their crisscross of boughs shut away sight of whatever fluttered overhead. The captive’s face showed white as curd, and the floggers seemed black. Running, I stooped and grabbed up a stone the size of my fist. When I straightened, I made out horns on the black skulls, horns like those of the flying thing. Somebody jeered: “You told on us. Now you beg us. But we—”

The two floggers were aware of me, and dropped their sticks.

“Knife,” said one, and the other drew a blade from under his coat. I threw my stone, and it struck the knife-holder’s black horned brow with a sound like an axe on wood. The knife dropped, and its owner sprawled upon it. I charged in after my rock.

The other man stood absolutely still. His outline could stand for a symbol of frightened surprise. He was mumbling words in an unknown tongue:

“Mirathe saepy Satonich yetmye—but it won’t work!”

From the moonlit sky came a whickering, like a bad horse in terror. Then I was upon the mumbler.

We struggled and strove. His gabble of strange sounds had failed to do something or other. Now he saved his breath, and fought with more strength than mine. I found myself hugged and crushed in his long, hard arms, and remembered a country wrestling trick. I feigned limpness, and when he unconsciously slacked his grip, I slid down out of it. Catching him around the knees, I threw him heavily. Then I fell with all my weight upon him, clutching at his throat.

Overhead the whickering rose shrill and shaky, and grew faint. The man I fought thrust my hands from his windpipe. I now saw that the blackness of his face, and the horns to either side, were a mask. He was wheezing, “If I get away quick, will that suit you?”

I tried to gouge his eye through a slit in the mask, but with a sudden effort he tore clear from me. Rising, he seized and dragged away the man my rock had struck down.

My strength and fury were ebbing, and I waited on one knee, watching the two flee among the brush. I glanced up. The flier was also gone.

The man who hung in bonds began to babble brokenly:

“You’re free from cursing … free from cursing. …”

The knife dropped by one of the masked pair still lay on the frozen ground. I picked it up and went to the man. Cords were noosed over his thumbs, drawing him up to the branch so that his toes barely touched ground. The shirt was torn from his back, which showed a shocking mass of gore.

I cut him down, and he collapsed in my arms like a wet coat.

Then spoke a challenging voice I remembered from long ago, “What are you doing to him?”

I had breath left only to say: “Help!”

“I heard the noise of fighting, and came at once.” A thick body approached in the half-light. “Bring him to my cabin.”

I glanced upward, and the newcomer did likewise. “Oh, then you saw the Flying Horned One? He must have fled when I came.”

“He fled before that,” I said, for I had recovered a little wind. My words seemed to make the thick man start and stare, but he made no rejoinder. We got the poor flogged wretch between us and dragged him across a field to the nearest lighted house. The moon showed me a dwelling, small but well built of adzed logs, with the chinks plastered and whitewashed. On the threshold the man we helped was able to speak again:

“This is the preacher’s place. I want baptism.”

“I baptized you once before,” growled the burly man from the other side of him. “Once is enough, even when you backslide.”

“What he wants is doctoring, not baptizing,” I put in. “His back’s all cut to hash.”

It was all of that. But the answer was still: “Baptize me.”

We helped him in. “I don’t think it will hurt you,” said the burly one, and as we came into the light of a kerosene lamp I saw whose voice I remembered.

This was the Yankee Sergeant Jaeger, whom I had last seen nearly fifteen years before, spading dirt over a woman who had seemingly died twice. He wore rough country boots and pants, but a white shirt and a string tie. He set the poor fellow in a splint-bottomed chair, where I steadied him, then went to the kitchen and returned with his hand wet. He laid the wet hand on the rumpled hair.

“Peter, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, the Son—”

At his touch the tortured form relaxed, the eyes seemed to close softly in slumber. Jaeger looked across at me.

“You’re a stranger to the Welcome Rock country. Or are you?”

“A stranger here, but not to you,” I replied. “I’m Cole Wickett, formerly with General Forrest—at your service, Sergeant.”

His eyes fixed me. He tugged his beard, which I saw had begun to thread through with gray. He opened his hard mouth twice before speaking.

“It is the same,” he said then, more to himself than to me. “A strong weapon twice placed in the hands of the righteous.”

The man we had saved sank almost out of the chair, and I caught him. But he was dead, and no wonder, for the beating had been terrific.

Jaeger laid him out on a strip of carpet, and caught a blanket from a cot to cover him.

“Poor Peter Dole,” he muttered. “He backslid from one congregation without rebuke. When he tried backsliding from his new fellowship, it was his destruction.”

I told what had happened outside in full. Jaeger did not seem particularly surprised about the bat-winged monster or the men with masks. He only said, “God grant that the baptism Peter asked for will bring him peace in the grave.”

“What is this mystery, Sergeant Jaeger?” I demanded.

He waved the title away. “I am done with war. I am the Reverend Mr. Jaeger now, a poor man of God, striving with adversaries worse than any your rebel army marshalled against me—Wickett, you make a dark hour bright.”

“More mystery,” I reminded him. “I want explanations.”

He studied me, wisely and calculatingly. “If I’m not mistaken, you are hungrier now than when we met before. Wait.”

He left me alone with the blanketed corpse of Peter Dole, and I heard him busy in the kitchen. He came back with a tin plate on which were cold biscuits, sardines from a tin, and some sort of preserves.

He also brought a cup, old Union army issue, filled with hot black coffee.

“Eat,” he bade me, “while I enlighten you.”

III

The Night Side of Preaching

“I repeat,” began Jaeger, as I gobbled, “that your second appearance to me is in the nature of an act of Providence. How could you meet my need so aptly twice, with years and a continent in which to be lost? Probabilities against it are millions to one. Yet you’ve come, Cole Wickett, and with your help I’ll blunt the claws of demons.”

I scalded my throat with the coffee. “You promised me the story,” I reminded.

“It will be short. You remember the digging up of a grave. The woman you saw was not dead, nor alive. She was a vampire.”

That word is better known now, but I appreciated its meaning with difficulty. Jaeger’s voice grew sharp:

“You must believe me. You were close to a fearful fate, and to me you owe life and soul—when I defended you from that monster. Let me read from this book.”

He took it from a shelf above the table that served him for desk. It was old and musty, with a faded title in German. “The work of the German, Dorn Augustin Calmet,” he explained, and read from the cover: “A Treatise on the Appearance of Spirits, Vampires, and so on. Written a century ago. And here,” leafing through it, “is the reference you will need. I’ll translate, though my German is rusty.”

He cleared his throat and read: “ ‘They select a pure young lad, and mount him naked on a stallion colt that has never stumbled, and is coal-black with no white hair. The stallion is ridden in and out among the graves, and the grave which he will not cross, despite hard blows, is where the vampire is buried.’ ”

He closed the book. “You begin to see what service you rendered. That part of the country was plagued by what seemed consumption or fever—strong people sickening and dying. Only I, and that wise chaplain, saw that their lives were sapped by a vampire. Other cases have occurred in this country—in Connecticut before the war, and in Rhode Island only two years ago. Men would have scoffed at our claim, and so we acted secretly.”

I accepted the honesty, if not the accuracy, of his tale. “You speak,” I said, “as if I am doing you a similar service.”

“You can if you choose. I saw little of your struggle this night, but enough to know that enchantment cannot touch you.”

My eyes were on the blanket-draped corpse as I said, “You think that one victory begets another.”

“I do.” He leaned forward eagerly, the old book in his hands. “You survived one peril of the unknown. Like one who survives a sickness, you have some immunity.”

I let that hang, too. “You speak as if another combat of the sort is coming.”

“Again you anticipate me. The combat has now begun—here in the Welcome Rock country, from which I thought to stamp all evil worship.”

The story he then told me seems to be fairly well known, at least in that community, which once was called Fearful Rock. Leaving the Union army, he came there as a frontier preacher without pay. Vestiges of an ancient and evil influence clung around a ruined house, and stories about it caused settlers to stay away. After his efforts to exorcise the apparent malevolent spirit, several farmers homesteaded nearby, and the name of the district was changed. Recently, he and the men of his little congregation had built a church.

“That started things again,” he said, and I must have looked my utter stupid amazement, for he smiled sadly.

“If you study the lore of demon-worship, as I have studied it, you would know that the deluded fools must have a church at which to aim their blasphemies. Look at the history of the defilers of the North Berwick Church in Scotland. Look at the story of the Salem witches in a minister’s pasture.”

“Those are only legends,” I suggested, but he shook his head.

“They are true. And the truth is manifest here. I am being crusaded against. Stop and think—I defeated evil beings on their own dunghill. They were overthrown and chased out. But their black hearts, if they have hearts, yearn back to here. This place is their Unholy of Unholies.”

“I see,” I replied, wondering if I did. Then I glanced again at the blanket-covered thing on the carpet. Jaeger saw the direction of my glance.

“I’m coming to poor Peter Dole. It was last Sunday—five days ago. I came early to my little church. The lock was broken, the Bible tipped from the pulpit, various kinds of filth on the benches and in the aisles, and on the walls some charcoal writing. It is not fit to repeat to you, but I recognized the hand.”

“Bad boys?”

“Bad men. I cleaned up the mess, and made a change in my text and sermon. I preached from Twelfth of Revelations, ‘The devil is come unto you, having great wrath; for he knoweth that he hath but a short time.’ I stressed the second clause of the observation.”

“ ‘He hath but a short time,’ ” I repeated.

“Yes. I spoke of the outrage, and said that the enemy gained no victory, but only shame. I read a little further into Revelations, the part where certain people are made to hide among rocks to escape the just wrath of heaven. Then I said that I knew who had written on the walls.” He eyed my empty cup. “More coffee? No?”

I shook my head. He continued.

“Peter Dole came to me after the benediction. It was he whose writing I had recognized. Terrified, he confessed some things I had already made sure of—his membership as a very humble figure in a coven.”

I shook my head, to show that I did not know what a coven was.

“It’s an old-country word. Scotch, maybe. It means a gathering of thirteen witches or wizards or devil-worshippers, twelve rank-and-file, and a chief devil. Maybe that’s where we got the unluckiness of the number thirteen. Peter was of the twelve rank-and-file, and he pleaded for mercy. I referred him to the Lord, and asked who were his mates. He said he’d pray courage into himself to tell me. Tonight he must have been coming to see me. And his comrades beat him to death.”

“One of his comrades has wings, then,” I said.

Jaeger tugged his beard thoughtfully. “I have seen that shape against the full moon before this. Full moon-time is their meeting time, as with the underground cults of old Greece and Rome. The full moon makes wolves howl, and turns weak minds mad. I don’t like the full moon. Anyway, that creature is the chief devil of which I spoke.”

“Chief devil?” I repeated. “I thought that probably—”

“That probably some human leader dressed up for the part?” he finished for me. “Not here, at least. Hark!”

I, too, heard what his ear had caught—the flip-flop of great membranes, and the faraway chatter of strange inhuman jaws.

Then a knock at the door, sharp and furtive.

With shame I remember how I flinched and looked for a way out. Jaeger rose, flipped open a drawer in his worktable, and took out a big cap-and-ball revolver. He walked heavily toward the door.

Pausing with his hand on the knob, he spoke clearly:

“If you seek trouble, your search ends here. Too long have I borne with the ungodly, meekly turning my other cheek. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, I will repay.”

He opened the door, took one look, and lowered his weapon. A girl came stumbling in.

She wore a dark dress of coarse wool, very full-skirted and high-necked, with edging of white at throat and cuffs. Her brown hair was disarrayed, under a knitted shawl. Her face was cream-white, set with bright, scared eyes.

“Please,” she said, out of breath, “they shouted that I’d find my father with you.” She swallowed, and her lips quivered. “Badly hurt, they said.”

“Sit down, Susan,” bade Jaeger. “He is here, but no more in pain or terror.”

She saw the body then, seemed to recognize it through the blanket. Sitting down, as Jaeger had told her, she grew one shade whiter, but calm.

“I will not cry,” she promised us. “I would even be glad, if I thought the curse was gone from him—”

“Then be glad, Susan,” rejoined Jaeger, “for he repented and died a believer.”

He turned his gaze to me. “Now will be proven, or not proven, my thought that you have strength against wickedness. For the gates of hell are open, and our enemies close in about us.”

The girl Susan and I both turned toward him. He continued, with an impatient note in his voice.

“How can mankind defend himself when he does not take thought? This is Satan’s one night of the year, the wizard’s Christmas.”

IV

The Gathering of the Vultures

In the outer night rose again the whickering cry, that rose into a shrill yearning whine. Jaeger cocked his bearded head sidewise. “The flying horned one summons his faithful. This is their day, and midnight will be their hour. Shakespeare knew that, and passes the word on to us—‘The time of night when Troy was set on fire.’ ”

I looked at a little old clock of dark wood, set on a bracket. “It is past eleven now. Have you time to tell me what you mean by the witches’ Christmas?”

“Briefly, this: In ancient heathen times a festival of scorn was held, from which grew the Christian Halloween—”

“But this is the middle of November!” I protested.

“Witches are simple folk. They reckon by full moons. We have one tonight, and they’ve crept out of their dens to do what mischief their hearts, and their demon, tells them. Beginning at my house.”

He fixed his eyes on the girl. She had been sitting silent and tense, staring straight before her. “Susan,” he said gently, “they sent you to find your father’s body. Did they send you for any other purpose? If so—”

She rose, and lifted her hands. She spoke, slowly and questioningly, as though reciting an unfamiliar lesson:

“Mirathe saepy Satonich—”

I started and opened my mouth, to tell her where I had heard those words, earlier in the night. But Jaeger signed me to keep silent. Susan was not chanting understandably.

“Stand still, stand still! No more than a tree or a rock can you depart! This by the four elements, the seven unspoken numbers, the innumerable stars in the sky! This by the name of—of—”

Abruptly she sat down, as if utterly weary. “I can’t!” she sobbed. “I can’t say that name!”

Jaeger smiled, beautifully for all his broad shagginess, and stepped across to her side. He laid his hand on her head. “No decent person can, child,” he comforted her softly. “They failed in the plot when they chose you for a tool.”

She looked up, and faint color had come to her cheeks. Her eyes and lips had regained steadiness. She appeared to be wakened and calmed from a nightmare.

“I’ll guess what happened,” he went on. “Those who told you that your father was here, also gave you a message to deliver. They spoke the words for you to repeat, making passes before your eyes—thus, eh?”

Slowly he drew his open hand through the air, as if stroking invisible fur. Susan nodded, and bit her lip.

“Several names for that,” Jaeger commented to me over his shoulder. “Mesmerism, animal magnetism, hypnotism. Most occult dabblers know a little of it, would God they did not! But I had no fear of Susan, even when I saw that she was entranced. In the book of James Braid I read that nobody will do things when hypnotized that he would not do in his right mind; and, whatever her father’s sad delusions, Susan is healthy and good.”

Susan began to weep. “I would never have hurt you, Mr. Jaeger,” she managed to protest.

“Certainly not.” He touched her head again, comfortingly. “That spell was to make us both stand like posts, while the prowlers came in and did what they pleased with us.

“Even had she said it in full, however, it would not work. It already failed on you, Wickett. For myself, I was silently saying the counter-charm, from this book.”

He again produced a volume from his shelf, this time a sort of pamphlet in gray paper. On its cover was the title:

Powwows, or Long Lost Friend

And, underneath, the picture of an owl. Jaeger flipped it open—I saw the page number, 69—and began to patter nimbly:

“Like unto the cup and the wine—may we be guarded in daytime and nightime—that no wild beast may tear us, no weapons wound us, no false tongues injure us—and no witchcraft or enchantment harm us. Amen.”

I took it that such was the counter-spell he mentioned, and thought it odd that a minister should use such a device. But scant time for philosophy was left us. Outside voices began to laugh.

I say voices, not men. To this day I do not know just what sort of throats uttered that merriment. At the time it seemed to me that human beings were trying to sound like beasts, or beasts were trying to sound like human beings. The blending of beast and human was imperfect, and horrid to hear. Jaeger laid down the little book on the table, and again took up his revolver.

“Wickett,” he said softly, “there is a window where you can watch the door. Take your post there. Watch. If they enter—and they probably will—stand still, as if the charm had worked. Because we can trap them so, as they meant to trap us.”

He had no more time to prepare me, for outside there came a new chorus, this time of rhythmic recital:

“I strolled through a red forest, and in the red forest was a red church. In the red church stood a red altar, and upon the red altar lay a red knife.”

A breathless moment of silence. Then a single booming voice, strangely accented, as if it echoed in a deformed mouth:

“Take the red knife and cut red bread!”

Jaeger sniffed. “Their sacrament ritual,” he muttered. “A vile blasphemy. The window, Wickett.”

He jerked his bearded chin toward an alcove by the door, and I moved into it. The window there looked upon the entrance from one side. Beneath the sill hung an old Chicopee saber, such as the Yankees once carried, and such as the Southern cavalry filched from enemy dead or captives. I started to draw it.

“No,” Jaeger warned. “Only stay near, and seize it when they least expect. They will expect Susan to put out the light before they venture any nearer.”

He bent toward the lamp, and blew strongly down its glass chimney. Its flame went out, and we were left in a sort of bluish gloom. I could barely see Jaeger’s thick body stiffen into a statue, and I imitated him, my eyes on the window.

“Move only when I do,” cautioned Jaeger softly.

Outside rose more racket. Those who besieged us were plainly trying to put fire into their own hearts.

“Hola noa massa!” spoke the strange booming voice. And back came a chorus intonation:

“Janna, janna! Hoa, hoa! Sabbat, sabbat! Moloch, Lucifer, Asteroth!”

Those, I fancied, were the names of pagan gods and devils. As the last syllable died away, something came into view beyond the window glass.

With the house dark, the moon made sufficient pale radiance outside. It showed me what was approaching the door.

It was a black low shape, greened here and there as light struck it, like an expanse of old worn broadcloth. My first impression was of a monstrous flood of filthy liquid.

Then I saw that it was indeed a creeping creature, not more in solid bulk than a big man, but with outspread wings like ribbed blankets. It paused at the squared section of log that served for doorstep, and straightened up from its crouch. I could not have looked away for wealth or hope of salvation.

This was the same thing I had earlier seen flapping across the face of the moon. Now it stood upon two flat slabs of feet, like charred shingles. Its legs were long and lean, and seemed to bend backward, cricket fashion. The deep chest thrust forward prowlike the breastbone must have been like a bird’s, a protruding blade from which great muscles branched to employ those wings. For the batlike membranes would measure twenty feet and more from tip to tip, and hung from two long lumpy arms. The thing had hands, or what might resemble hands. From them sprouted the wingribs downward, and the gaunt, sharp fingers outward.

But of face I saw nothing for all the moonlight, only an owlish roundness of skull, and two curved horns that gleamed like polished jet, and narrow green eyes like the eyes of a meat-eating animal.

It started to lift a flat foot to the step, then paused. It bent, and I knew now that it had a mouth, for it blew upon Jaeger’s lock, then whickered. The door opened slowly, as if pushed by invisible hands. The entity turned and moved away.

“Enter,” it boomed to whatever companions lurked behind. “Do as you been commanded, and do it well.”

I froze to immobility in my alcove. A moment later, the horde outside made a concerted rush across the threshold. With them came the ugliest and rottenest of pale lights.

V

The Rout of the Witches

I knew an instant of terror more complete and sickening than any that had been mine in the war, a worse chill than at Murfreesboro, Selma or Shiloh itself. Then the terror departed from me, and left me almost serenely strong and confident. For those who came in were only men.

They were murderous men, perhaps. They possessed ugly powers—witness that light in which they seemed to be dipped, and the chivvying commands from that being called the Flying Horned One. They were men joined for a steadfast purpose of evil. They did not simply lack ideals, morals or character, but adhered to ideals, morals and character antithetic to all I honored. They had a belief, even a form of travestied worship, that claimed them as ever pure religion claimed saints or martyrs. They had come to execute horrors upon me.

But their master had stayed outside. These, his followers, were no more than men, and as such had but muscles with which to attack, vital organs in which to receive wounds. I asked no lesser opponents than such.

Jaeger had spoken of twelve members to the coven, under rule of the Flying Horned One. The death of Peter Dole, the pitiful renegade, would leave only eleven. I think that that many came in now, and the light seemed to burst from the uplifted hand of the tallest. But my second glance showed me that the hand was not his. It was a five-fingered candle or taper, fixed by the wristlike base upon a tin plate, and each of the fingers sprouted a kindled wick.

I had lost sight, though not thought, of Susan. She stood near Jaeger, and came forward. One of the throng whooped in laughter—his voice was muffled by his mask and thickened by alcohol—and confronted her.

“She did it, good girl! She bound them!” He turned upon the motionless form of Jaeger. “Why aren’t you preaching, Parson? Walloping the pulpit and quoting chapter and verse? Pretty quiet and stiff, ain’t you?”

He drew a straight dagger like the one drawn against me at the scene of the flogging.

“Take the red knife,” he quoted unsteadily, “and cut red bread!”

“Wait,” interposed the tall man who held the five-fingered light. “There’s something to do first. There lies some dead clay under the blanket yonder. I’d guess it for what’s left of Dirt Fire, known to men as Peter Dole.”

Dirt Fire. Dirt Fire—I had heard somewhere of how witches, upon joining the circle, were baptized mockingly to new names. That had befallen Peter Dole, and he had asked for a second baptism to clear his soul of the horror he felt. The tall one passed his tin plate, with the light, to a pudgy figure who must have been a woman, masked and in men’s rough riding clothes. Then he took a step toward Susan and towered over her.

“You’ve served us well,” he spokes “Our coven is one short. You will fill the emptiness.”

There was no asking of her whether she wanted to. Perhaps some quick instruction by Jaeger had prepared her for this. In any case, she voiced neither acceptance nor refusal. She only faced the tall mask man, silently and gravely.

“Thirteen we shall be, counting our master,” intoned the tall one. “Susan Dole, say after me the words I now repeat.”

He lifted a hand, and made the stroking gesture in air that Jaeger had called “hypnotic.” Susan drew herself up. The spell seemed to be catching hold of her on instant.

Just then, Jaeger made a little twitching motion with the right hand that had hung quietly at its side. That hand held his revolver, unnoticed by the invaders, Fire spurted, powder exploded. The tall hypnotist seemed to somersault sidewise, a banged down on the floor to lie without a quiver.

I had been like a hound on leash all this while, forcing myself to wait for the cue of Jaeger’s first move. Now, before the sharp echo of the revolver-shot died that room, I had flung out my left hand and snatched the saber from its fastenings by the sill. My right hand brought it from the sheath with a loud rasp of metal. I gathered my legs under me and leaped at the man with the drawn dagger.

He knew I was coming, somehow or other. For he turned, trying to fend off with that straight blade he had meant for Jaeger. My first axelike chop broke his steel close to the hilt. My second assault a drawing slice, severed muscles, arteries and tendons at junction of neck and shoulder. Down he went at my knee, the gushing blood all black and shiny in that pallid light. I stepped across him, and into the melee that had sprung into being around Jaeger.

No less than myself, those invaders must have been keyed up to expectation of violence. When Jaeger’s first shot felled their comrade, they threw themselves upon the sender of that shot. A big mask-wearer came in under the revolver muzzle, stood up under a terrific blow with the barrel, and grappled Jaeger. Others seized him by the arms, beard, throat, legs. They were pulling him down, as dogs pull down a bear. The pudgy one who held the five-fingered light stood apart, drawing another of those straight daggers. The look of the hand that held the dagger convinced me more than ever that here was a woman in men’s garments.

Coming upon the press, I slid my saber-point into the back of the big fellow whose arms were around Jaeger. He subsided, coughing and struggling, and I cleared my weapon in time to face another who quitted his assault on Jaeger to leap at me. He tried to avoid my slash, and I smote his jaw with the curved guard that enclosed my knuckles. He sprawled upon a comrade, and both fell.

Then Jaeger, fighting partially free, fired two more shots. One of his attackers fell limply, and another flopped away, screaming and cursing by the names of gods I did not recognize.

The light-holder now gave tongue in a shrill warning:

“Betrayed, we’re betrayed! Run! Get away!”

Those who could respond did so. Jaeger fired yet again, his fourth bullet. The last of those who fled was down, floundering awkwardly to crawl across the hewn log outside the door. Two of the others caught the squirming body and dragged it clear. We were suddenly alone.

“Don’t close that door,” said Jaeger from the dimness that fell again—for the five-fingered light had been knocked down and extinguished. “I doubt if we need to be fenced in from them.” He was kindling his own kerosene lamp, that gave a healthier radiance. “Count the dead, Wickett.”

I did so, noting that all wore coats or jackets turned inside out. Two had perished by my saber, two more by Jaeger’s bullets, while a third whom he had shot, died even as I bent over him. The man I uppercutted with the saber-hilt was still alive and breathing heavily, but quite unconscious. I reckoned the one dragged away must be badly hurt, if not also dying.

“We killed or wounded seven,” was my report. Jaeger had led Susan to one side, where she might not look. Then he went from one body to the other, pulling away their horned masks of dingy black cloth. At the sight of each face he grunted his recognition.

“All of them are my neighbors,” he announced, “and all of them in my congregation, or pretending to be. Look Wickett! This one is a woman—she and that first man you sabered were husband and wife. I would have spared her had I known her sex. But here is one who seems to be awakening.”

The single survivor sat up. He fingered his bruised chin, waggling it tenderly. His face, unmasked, looked long and sharp and vicious. His small, dark eyes burned as they fixed upon Susan.

“She tricked us,” he accused, spitting blood.

“It was I who tricked you,” corrected Jaeger. “Stand up, Splain. But make any sudden move, and I will fire one of the two bullets still in this revolver.” He held it up significantly.

The captive stood up. Like the others, he wore his coat inside out. “My name isn’t Splain any more,” he stated, with a show of defiance. “Now I’m called—”

“Spare us what foolish name your devil master gave you,” interrupted Jaeger sharply. “I know most of that stupid ritual, that you think so frightening—another baptism, another book of prayer, another submission to mastery. I will call you Splain, and to that name you will answer, if you hope for mercy. Take off that coat, and put it on properly.”

“You can’t make me,” flared Splain.

Jaeger pocketed the revolver, caught Splain by a shoulder, and shook him like a rug in a high wind. Splain squealed, cursed, and fumbled inside his coat. But Jaeger pinned his wrists, gave it a wrench, and a knife fell to the floor.

“I’ve seen this kind of knife before,” I said, picking it up.

“Yes, several like it,” agreed Jaeger. He had shaken the resistance out of Splain, had roughly dragged the reversed coat from him, and was now turning it back as it should go. “Get into this, Splain. … Yes, so. Clothing turned inside out was an invulnerability charm as long ago as the Egyptian Pharoahs, but it did not protect you. Wickett, I judge that it is a magic dagger, so-called, that you hold. Potent against all enemies that are not prepared.”

“It looks homemade,” I ventured, examining the weapon.

“Of course. Each wizard must make his own knife, hand-forging it of metal never before used. The blade is inscribed? In strange characters? I thought so.”

We picked up four other knives, including the one I had broken, from the floor. Jaeger gathered them on a table, also the plate with the extinguished five-fingered taper.

“A poor imitation,” he said of this last object. “The hand of glory, cut from a hanged murderer’s arm, is supposed to shed light and strike victims numb. Having no hanged murderer convenient, these made a dummy of wax. It failed against us as other charms have failed.”

He smiled grimly at Splain. “Had the blades been simple and honest, your friends might have killed us. But they were enchanted—and useless. Get out, Splain.”

“Out?” repeated the other stupidly.

“Yes. Seek that monster you call your lord, who thought a poor minister of God could not plan and fight a battle. Tell him that I prophesy his defeat. Six of the eleven he sent against us have died. The souls and bodies of the remainder are his responsibility. I shall require them at his hands. You obey?”

“Yes, Parson,” grumbled Splain. He shambled toward the door.

Green fire suddenly played about him, like many little lightnings, or some display of fireworks. Splain shuddered, sagged, crumpled. He, too, was dead, the seventh to perish on the floor of Jaeger’s front room.

Jaeger looked at him, at me. Then he whistled in his beard.

“So much for a defeated wizard,” he commented pithily. “In some way the Flying Horned One knew of Splain’s failure, and he has no use for failures.”

He had produced his revolver once more. Flipping the cylinder clear, he drew the two charges remaining. Then he carefully loaded the gun afresh. From a box in the table drawer he took the bullets, pale and gleaming.

“Those look like silver,” I said.

“They are silver. The sovereign weapon against wicked creatures which are more and less than human.”

“You are going to shoot at the Flying Horned One?”

“No, Wickett,” said the Reverend Mr. Jaeger, and put the weapon into my hand. “You are.”

VI

The Five Silver Bullets

Jaeger’s talk about the influence called hypnotism came back to my mind later, when I found myself outside in the chill moonglow, the revolver in my right hand, moving with quick stealth toward a distant sound of mouthy misery.

Of me he had made a champion, in this frontier strife of angels good and bad. Reiterating his insistence that my share in that uncanny adventure after Shiloh had made me somewhat immune to evil magic, he had given me the revolver and sent me forth. Where? And to do what? My head was clearing now, as after too much drink. I began to ponder the recent events with something of disgusted wonder at my own readiness to mix into what was surely no business of mine.

After all, I was strange in this Welcome Rock country. I had had no idea of staying more than the night through. I had no practical interest in any quarrels there, even quarrels incited by demons. But from the first I had taken a hand—charging those who flogged Peter Dole, wielding a saber in the parson’s parlor, and now stepping forth, gun in hand, to seek and battle the Flying Horned One.

I told myself that I was a fool. I entertained the thought of finding the through trail and tramping away from Welcome Rock. There were silver bullets in the gun. They might have some cash value to buy me breakfast, miles away—

The cries grew louder. They rose from beyond one of the leafless thickets that banded the country. From that point also came a musty glow of the green cold light. I heard a voice:

“No! We did our best! Don’t!”

Something struck, hard and heavy. The voice broke away from the words into a scream of agony.

As at the flogging earlier that night, I quickened my pace to a run. I was fully prepared to meddle yet again.

Beyond two or three belts of trees I came in sight of a round cleared space. Away off to one side rose the dark pinnacle that once had been called Fearful Rock, in whose shadow had been done strange matters. I lurked inside the thicket, watching what happened in the open.

There were gathered my late adversaries, only four of them now. They were wailing, posturing and wriggling, as though blows fell upon them. But it was well away from them that the punishment was dealt. There stood the Flying Horned One, or perhaps he hovered—in any case his feet touched the ground, and his wings may have fluttered slightly to hold him erect. From him came the unpleasant light. He was striking again and again with a stick, at dark objects that lay limp on the ground.

“No! No!” the voices begged him. “Strike no more, master!”

He ceased the blows, and flourished the stick at them. “You have had enough?” he demanded, in that uncouth horselike voice of his.

They assured him, tearfully, that they had.

“Then obey. Go back and kill—”

“We have no powers, no powers!” cried the plump woman who had held the five-fingered candle.

Her misshapen ruler made an impatient fluttering gesture with his umbrella wings. “This, I think, is your coat,” he said, and touched with the point of his stick one of the dark objects on the ground. I saw then that these objects were garments, cloaks or coats. The woman squealed and clasped her hands.

“Don’t beat on me again!” she sobbed.

To my mind came one of the most familiar legends about witches, the one about hurting at a distance. The wax image or portrait pierced with needles, the hair or nail-clipping burnt—yes, and the discarded garment beaten. I was seeing such a thing done.

“Abiam, dabiam, fabiam,” babbled the monster over his stick. It was a conjuration of some sort, I guessed; indeed, Jaeger told me later that a similar spell is included in Albertus Magnus. “True you speak,” he continued. “But you are bad servants.” I saw his long green eyes glitter. “Perhaps I should discard you and get others. You who summoned me among you, step forward.”

A fragile, oldish man came away from the others. His mask had been torn, probably in the fight, and his skin showed corpse-pale through the rent.

“I did according to the law and the books,” he quavered. “If we have served you badly, it was because we did not know how to serve. Teach us.”

The Flying Horned One put his arm-like upper limbs, that bore the wings, akimbo. The membranes drooped around him like an ugly living shawl. “You never asked if I wished to leave my own world,” he charged fiercely. “You did not wait to think if I was happy there or not. You haled me in among strange things and thoughts. You talk about serving me, but you meant that I should serve you. Huh? Deny it if you will!”

They did not deny it. I gathered that he referred to some ceremony which had brought him into existence among them. Of such things, too, I had heard.

Again he addressed the thin oldster. “Do as you did when you summoned me.”

There was a moment of scared silence. Then, “mean the circle, master? And the pentacle?”

“You will be sorry if I command you twice,” said the Flying Horned One.

The magic-maker hopped and fluttered like a frightened rabbit to obey. Stooping, with his dagger in hand, he traced on the ground a figure like a shallow-pointed star, about three yards across. As he did so he mumbled words, apparently one for each point. “Gaba,” he said loud enough for me to hear, and again “Tetragrammaton.” The other words I did not catch. Having finished the star, he traced a circle outside it. His comrades all moved back, but the winged monster hovered near, in some eagerness.

“Shall I say the rest?” quavered the circle-tracer.

“Not unless you wish to bring me a brother among you,” replied the Flying Horned One, and it was plain that his hearers had no such wish. “Say only the first part.”

There came forth a flood of gibberish, spoken by the old man with both forefingers uplifted. The others joined in briefly at the end, chanting as if at prayer. I saw the lines that the knife had marked suddenly grow more plain and hot-looking—the star was outlined as in rosy brightness, like a figure of heated wire; and the circle gleamed blue-green, like a tracing of phosphorus.

“Look!” commanded the winged master, in a voice that made my flesh change position on my bones. “Is it—”

“The door!” hoarsely finished the magician. “It is ready to be opened unto us.”

“Yes,” agreed the Flying Horned One. “Opened unto you. Speak on.”

The magician fronted his glowing diagram. His words became spaced and cadenced, like verse from some ponderous tragedy:

“Fear is stronger than love!

“Serve those above with joy! Serve those below with terror!

“For those above, a sacrifice of one white sheep! For those below, a sacrifice of two black sheep!

“For those above, a sacrifice of one white slave! For those below, a sacrifice of two black slaves!”

“The door opens,” the others intoned.

It was more like a wall, dark and gloom-clotted, that showed itself in the center of the star-circle diagram. From it rose, lazily, a thin little veil of vapor.

“Enough,” decreed the Flying Horned One, and suddenly shot out his two upper talons to seize the shoulders of the magician.

I heard a thin choking squeal for mercy. The Flying Horned One lowered his wings about the man he had grasped, and I could only guess what happened to that man under their jagged shadow. It was sufficiently horrible, I make no doubt. Lifting the revolver, I fired my first shot.

It missed its mark, for I heard it strike a tree-trunk beyond. The three companions of the magician heard my shot and turned toward its sound. Not so the monster who ruled them, for he extended his wings and with a single beat of them rose into air. In all four of his talons he gripped the limp form of the magician. I am sure that I saw blood on that form—dark wetness, anyway. Two great flops carried the victim above the diagram and its inner opening. The talons let go, and the body fell into the hole, away from sight.

“Ohhh!” intoned the others, as if it were part of the ritual. Probably they were entranced, half delirious, unable to see their peril. Their lord flew back at and among them.

“In after him,” he grunted, and seized two of them by their necks.

I fired a second shot, more carefully. It tore a hole through one of those wing membranes. For a moment I saw the tear, quite large and ragged, and moonlight through it. Then the Flying Horned One had dashed his two captives at the hole, one after the other. They vanished. I could swear that the hole gulped at and seized them, like a hungry, knowing mouth.

I came into the open, firing twice more. But my hand trembled, and both bullets went wide. This revolver, with which Jaeger had killed so coolly and capably at our earlier fight, was doing very little for me. Then I ran close. The Flying Horned One had seized the last of his worshippers, the fat woman, and twitched her in front of him as I fired a fifth time.

She caught my bullet, and whether it inflicted a slight or serious wound I cannot say. The Flying Horned One whinnied, and tossed her after the others. She, too, was vanished. I faced the dark winged silhouette, with not a dozen yards between us.

“You, too, have power,” the inhuman voice addressed me levelly. “Power, but not wit. Do not use the weapon again, it is empty.”

That much was truth. Jaeger had loaded it with five charges, the hammer being down on an empty chamber. I poised the gun to use as a club, and came slowly forward. The winged form moved to meet me.

“You have escaped,” and the voice was scarcely more than a whisper. “Nothing that I said, or my slaves did, harmed you. Man, have you lived in more worlds than one, like me?”

I made no reply. I could think of none. Two talons reached out to clutch at me.

Then we struggled and fought. He tore at my face and at my chest, as though he would rend my flesh away. I struck with my fists and the clubbed revolver, but made no impression. His substance did not seem to have any true resistance, yet I knew that he had strength and weight.

“At my leisure, in another place—I will examine you,” he told me, and heaved me toward the glowing diagram.

I grabbed him close to the elbow-joints, and we both fell heavily toward the black hole.

I struck the ground first, and there was a flash of fire, real or imaginary. Too, there was a little breathless shriek, out of the dark face of my adversary. Suddenly all weight and grip was gone from me.

I set up. The diagram was no more than knife-edges in the moonlight. The hole—there was no hole any more, only hard earth. Of the Flying Horned One was nothing to be seen.

Jaeger, then had been right. Power to resist evil magic kept me safe. Endeavoring to carry me away, the Flying Horned One had fallen alone into the hole and had, so to speak, pulled the hole in after him.

Rising, I wondered if I should consider myself the victor.

VII

The Grave-Digging

The morning sun was warm, invigoratingly so. Jaeger and I strove, with grubbing hoe and shovel, at earth that was no longer frozen to stony hardness.

“Make the grave wide, but not too shallow,” he directed as he toiled. “Seven must go into it. I wonder if I can spare blankets enough to wrap them all.”

“Will nobody ask questions?” I demanded. “Have they no friends or families?”

“Their friends and families will know that fate overtook them, but not in what form,” replied Jaeger. “If no corpse shows above earth, I will not be required to explain anything. That is the way of the law hereabouts, and it is well. Wrestlings with demons do not court publicity.”

I reflected that, after all, here was a wild and unwatched country. It was no more than four or five years since many more persons had been killed in Kansas by the Bender family, and the detection had come only by the slimmest of chances. Jaeger seemed confident that the matter was as good as closed.

“I shall read a prayer for them all,” he took up the subject again. “God knows that few men have needed prayers more, but I do not despair of their souls. They were only misled, not wicked of their own wish.”

I wiped my face on my sleeve. “Didn’t they flog Peter Dole to death?” I reminded. “Didn’t they come to kill us? Didn’t—”

“All at the bidding of the Flying Horned One. He had bound them in a spell. But he is gone, and I doubt if he ever comes again to Welcome Rock.” Jaeger was speaking triumphantly. “His reception was calculated to daunt even a demon.”

“Demon,” I repeated. “Mr. Jaeger, tell me now, simply and shortly, what sort of a person a demon is?”

“No sort of person. For a demon is not born on Earth, nor does it die there. It comes from another place.”

“From hell, yes.”

“Perhaps from the place we think of as hell. What that place is like I cannot tell you, nor could any other man—not even if the Flying Horned One’s betrayed servants returned to life. For we live and behave in but one sphere, with no conception of others. Yet, if another sphere could touch ours by accident or purpose, and beings come from it to us—”

He paused, and let the rest of the explanation grow in my own mind.

I considered the bizarre possibility. We of this life are two-legged things with blood in our veins, appetites to satisfy, hopes and duties to impel our actions. Basic concepts of nature as we know her make us all brothers. This is what we call the universe, this tiny handful of objects experienced through our few senses and imaginations.

But another universe, wherein not only beings and viewpoints and constructions are different, but the very elements of them—had that spawned the Flying Horned One?

Perhaps his very appearance, strange though it seemed, was only his effort to conform with a new state of affairs. Perhaps his original impulses had been influenced by the worship paid him, and by the expectations of the worshippers. Perhaps he had thought of himself as neither good nor evil, but doing something which partook of neither quality. He might have been the least proper item by which to judge that stranger universe.

But I had no desire to visit such a place, or to encounter others of its creatures.

“Of morals to be drawn from our experience, there are perhaps a thousand,” Jaeger resumed. “One, however, I shall build into a sermon. My text shall be, ‘He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.’ ”

“From Ecclesiastes,” I said.

“What I shall say is that a fascinating study can sometimes do more harm than good, especially to the careless. What hopes must that poor fellow have had, who drew a diagram and clumsily performed a ceremony he could not understand—thereby opening a trapdoor to another sphere and admitting the Flying Horned One to ours!”

“He went to the Flying Horned One’s sphere, and his knowledge is painfully increased,” I reminded.

“Can you say for certain to what sphere they went? Perhaps they have blundered into yet another manner of living, bringing strangeness and pain with them.”

We had finished our digging. Jaeger looked toward the house.

“Smoke is coming up the chimney. Susan has made some sort of breakfast for us. After that, to bury the dead.”

“And after that?” I prompted. “I am too tired to move on just yet.”

Jaeger smiled.

“Why move on at all? There are empty acres here. Nobody will discourage a young man who wants to settle down, work, and rebuild his fortune. If you are lonely, notice that Susan Dole is beautiful and helpful.”

But I had already noticed that.

Warrior of Two Worlds

I

My senses came to me slowly and somehow shyly, as if not sure of their way or welcome. I felt first—pressure on my brow and chest, as if I lay face downward; then the tug and buffet of a strong, probing wind, insistent but not cold, upon my naked skin. Closing my hands, I felt them dig into coarse dirt. I turned my face downwind and opened my eyes. There was little to see, so thick was the dust cloud around me. Words formed themselves on my thick tongue, words that must have been spoken by so many reviving unfortunates through the ages:

“Where am I?”

And at once there was an answer:

“You lie upon the world Dondromogon.”

I knew the language of that answer, but where it came from—above, beneath, or indeed within me—I could not say. I lifted a hand, and knuckled dust from my eyes.

“How did I get here?” I demanded of the speaker.

“It was ordered—by the Masters of the Worlds—that you should be brought from your own home planet, called Earth in the System of the star called Sun. Do you remember Earth?”

And I did not know whether I remembered or not. Vague matters stirred deep in me, but I could not for certain say they were memories. I asked yet again:

“Who am I?”

The voice had a note of triumph. “You do not know that. It is as well, for this will be a birth and beginning of your destined leadership on Dondromogon.”

“Destined—leadership—” I began to repeat, and fell silent. I had need to think. The voice was telling me that I had been snatched from worlds away, for a specified purpose here on whatever windswept planet Dondromogon might be. “Birth and beginning—destined leadership—” Fantastic! And yet, for all I could say to the contrary, unvarnishedly true.

“Dondromogon?” I mumbled. “The name is strange to me.”

“It is a world the size of your native one,” came words of information. “Around a star it spins, light-years away from the world of your birth. One face of Dondromogon ever looks to the light and heat, wherefore its metals run in glowing seas. The other face is ever away in cold darkness, with its air freezing into solid chunks. But because Dondromogon wavers on its axis, there are two lunes of its surface which from time to time shift from night to day. These are habitable.”

My eyes were tight shut against the dust, but they saw in imagination such a planet—one-half incandescent, one-half pitchy black. From pole to pole on opposite sides ran the two twilight zones, widest at the equators like the outer rind of two slices of melon. Of course, such areas, between the hot and cold hemispheres, would be buffeted by mighty gales … the voice was to be heard again:

“War is fought between the two strips of habitable ground. War, unceasing, bitter, with no quarter asked, given or expected. Dondromogon was found and settled long ago, by adventurers from afar. Now come invaders, to reap the benefits of discovery and toil.” A pause. “You find that thought unpleasant? You wish to right that wrong?”

“Anyone would wish that,” I replied. “But how—”

“You are going to ask how you were brought here. That is the mystery of the Masters.” The voice became grand. “Suffice it that you were needed, and that the time was ripe. There is a proper time, like a proper place, for each thing and each happening. Now, go to your destiny.”

I rose on my knees, shielding my face from the buffeting wind by lifting a forearm. Somewhere through the murky clouds showed a dim blocky silhouette, a building of sorts.

The voice spoke no more. I had not the time to wonder about it. I got to my feet, bent double to keep from being blown over, and staggered toward the promised haven.

I reached it, groped along until I found a door. There was no latch, handle or entry button, and I pounded heavily on the massive panels. The door opened from within, and I was blown inside, to fall sprawling.

I struck my forehead upon a floor of stone or concrete, and so was half-stunned, but still I could distinguish something like the sound of agitated voices. Then I felt myself grasped, by both shoulders, and drawn roughly erect. The touch restored my senses, and I wrenched myself violently free.

What had seized me? That was my first wonder. On this strange world called Dondromogon, what manner of intelligent life bade defiance to heat and cold and storm, and built these stout structures, and now laid hands—were they hands indeed?—upon me? I swung around, setting my back to a solid wall.

My first glance showed me that my companions were creatures like myself—two-legged, fair-skinned men, shorter and slighter than I, but clad in metal-faced garments and wearing weapons in their girdles. I saw that each bore a swordlike device with a curved guard, set in a narrow sheath as long as my arm. Each also had a shorter weapon, with a curved stock to fit the palm of the hand, borne snugly in a holster. With such arms I had a faint sense of familiarity.

“Who are you, and where are you from?” said one of the two, a broad-faced middle-aged fellow. “Don’t lie any more than you can help.”

I felt a stirring of the hair on my neck, but kept my voice mild and level: “Why should I lie? Especially as I don’t know who I am, or where I’m from, or anything that has happened longer ago than just a moment. I woke up out there in the dust storm, and I managed to come here for shelter.”

“He’s a Newcomer spy,” quoth the other. “Let’s put him under arrest.”

“And leave this gate unguarded?” demanded the other. “Sound the signal,” and he jerked his head toward a system of levers and gauges on the wall beside the doorjamb.

“There’s a bigger reward for capture than for warning,” objected his friend in turn, “and whoever comes to take this man will claim ‘capture.’ I’ll guard here, and you take him in, then we’ll divide—”

“No. Yours is the idea. I’ll guard and you take him in.” The second man studied me apprehensively. “He’s big, and looks strong, even without weapons.”

“Don’t be afraid,” I urged. “I’ll make no resistance, if you’ll only conduct me to your commander. I can show him that I’m no spy or enemy.”

Both stared narrowly. “No spy? No enemy?” asked the broad-faced one who had first spoken. Then, to his comrade: “No reward, then.”

“I think there’ll be a reward,” was the rejoinder, and the second man’s hand stole to the sword-weapon. With a whispering rasp it cleared from its scabbard. “If he’s dead, we get pay for both warning and capture—”

His thumb touched a button at the pommel of the hilt. The dull blade suddenly glowed like heated iron, and from it crackled and pulsed little rainbow rays.

There was no time to think or plan or ponder. I moved in, with a knowing speed that surprised me as much as the two guards. Catching the fellow’s weapon wrist, I clamped it firmly and bent it back and around. He whimpered and swore, and his glowing sword dropped. Its radiant blade almost fell on my naked foot. Before the clang of its fall was through echoing, I had caught it up, and set the point within inches of its owner’s unprotected face.

“Quiet, or I’ll roast you,” I told him.

The other had drawn a weapon of his own, a pistol-form arrangement. I turned on him, but too late. He pressed the trigger, and from the muzzle came—not a projectile but a flying, spouting filament of cord that seemed to spring on me like a long thin snake and to fasten coil after coil around my body. The stuff that gushed from the gun-muzzle seemed plastic in form, but hardened so quickly upon contact with the air, it bound me like wire. Half a dozen adroit motions of the fellow’s gun hand, and my arms were caught to my body. I dropped my sword to prevent it burning me, and tried to break away, but my bonds were too much for me.

“Let me out of this,” I growled, and kicked at the man with my still unbound foot. He snapped a half-hitch on my ankle, and threw me heavily. Triumphant laughter came from both adversaries. Then:

“What’s this?”

The challenge was clear, rich, authoritative. Someone else had come, from a rearward door into the stonewalled vestibule where the encounter was taking place.

A woman this time, not of great height, and robust but not heavy. She was dressed for vigorous action in dark slacks with buskins to make them snug around ankles and calves, a jerkin of stout material that was faced with metal armor plates and left bare her round, strong arms. A gold-worked fillet bound her tawny hair back from a rosy, bold-featured face—a nose that was positively regal, a mouth short and firm but not hard, and blue eyes that just now burned and questioned. She wore a holstered pistol, and a cross-belt supported several instruments of a kind I could not remember seeing before. A crimson cloak gave color and dignity to her costume, and plainly she was someone of position, for both the men stiffened to attention.

“A spy,” one ventured. “He pushed in, claimed he was no enemy, then tried to attack—”

“They lie,” I broke in, very conscious of my naked helplessness before her regard. “They wanted to kill me and be rewarded for a false story of vigilance. I only defended myself.”

“Get him on his feet,” the young woman said, and the two guards obeyed. Then her eyes studied me again. “Gods! What a mountain of a man!” she exclaimed. “Can you walk, stranger?”

“Barely, with these bonds.”

“Then manage to do so.” She flung off her cloak and draped it over my nakedness. “Walk along beside me. No tricks, and I promise you fair hearing.”

We went through the door by which she had entered, into a corridor beyond. It was lighted by small, brilliant bulbs at regular intervals. Beyond, it gave into several passages. She chose one of them and conducted me along. “You are surely not of us,” she commented. “Men I have seen who are heavier than you, but none taller. Whence came you?”

I remembered the strange voice that had instructed me. “I am from a far world,” I replied. “It is called—yes, Earth. Beyond that, I know nothing. Memory left me.”

“The story is a strange one,” she commented. “And your name?”

“I do not know that, either. Who are you?”

“Doriza—a gentlewoman of the guard. My inspection tour brought me by chance to where you fought my outposts. But it is not for you to ask questions. Enter here.”

We passed through another door, and I found myself in an office. A man in richly-embossed armor platings sat there. He had a fringe of pale beard, and his eyes were bluer than the gentlewoman Doriza’s.

She made a gesture of salute, hand at shoulder height, and reported the matter. He nodded for her to fall back to a corner.

“Stranger,” he said to me, “can you think of no better tale to tell than you now offer?”

“I tell the truth,” was my reply, not very gracious.

“You will have to prove that,” he admonished me.

“What proof have I?” I demanded. “On this world of yours—Dondromogon, isn’t it called?—I’m no more than an hour old. Accident or shock has taken my memory. Let me have a medical examination. A scientist probably can tell what happened to put me in such a condition.”

“I am a scientist,” offered Doriza, and came forward. Her eyes met mine, suddenly flickered and lowered. “His gaze,” she muttered.

The officer at the table was touching a button. An attendant appeared, received an order, and vanished again. In a few moments two other men came—one a heavily armed officer of rank, the other an elderly, bearded fellow in a voluminous robe that enfolded him in most dignified manner.

This latter man opened wide his clear old eyes at sight of me.

“The stranger of the prophecy!” he cried, in a voice that made us all jump.

The officer rose from behind the table. “Are you totally mad, Sporr? You mystic doctors are too apt to become fuddled—”

“But it is, it is!” The graybeard flourished a thin hand at me. “Look at him, you of little faith! Your mind dwells so much on material strength that you lose touch with the spiritual—”

He broke off, and wheeled on the attendant who had led him in. “To my study,” he commanded. “On the shelf behind my desk, bring the great gold-bound book that is third from the right.” Then he turned back, and bowed toward me. “Surely you are Yandro, the Conquering Stranger,” he said, intoning as if in formal prayer. “Pardon these shortsighted ones—deign to save us from our enemies—”

The girl Doriza spoke to the officer: “If Sporr speaks truth, and he generally does, you have committed a blasphemy.”

The other made a little grimace. “This may be Yandro, though I’m a plain soldier and follow the classics very little. The First Comers are souls to worship, not to study. If indeed he is Yandro,” and he was most respectful, “he will appreciate, like a good military mind, my caution against possible impostors.”

“Who might Yandro be?” I demanded, very uncomfortable in my bonds and loose draperies.

Old Sporr almost crowed. “You see? If he was a true imposter, he would come equipped with all plausible knowledge. As it is—”

“As it is, he may remember that the Conquering Stranger is foretold to come with no memory of anything,” supplied the officer. “Score one against you, Sporr. You should have been able to instruct me, not I you.”

The attendant reentered, with a big book in his hands. It looked old and well-thumbed, with dim gold traceries on its binding. Sporr snatched it, and turned to a brightly colored picture. He looked once, his beard gaped, and he dropped to his knees.

“Happy, happy the day,” he jabbered, “that I was spared to see our great champion come among us in the flesh, as was foretold of ancient time by the First Comers!”

Doriza and the officer crossed to his side, snatching the book. Their bright heads bent above it. Doriza was first to speak. “It is very like,” she half-stammered.

The officer faced me, with a sort of baffled respect.

“I still say you will understand my caution,” he addressed me, with real respect and shyness this time. “If you are Yandro himself, you can prove it. The prophecy even sketches a thumbprint—” And he held the book toward me.

It contained a full-page likeness, in color, of myself wrapped in a scarlet robe. Under this was considerable printed description, and to one side a thumbprint, or a drawing of one, in black.

“Behold,” Doriza was saying, “matters which even expert identification men take into thought. The ears in the picture are like the ears of the real man—”

“That could be plastic surgery,” rejoined the officer. “Such things are artfully done by the Newcomers, and the red mantle he wears more easily assumed.”

Doriza shook her head. “That happens to be my cloak. I gave it to him because he was naked, and not for any treasonable masquerade. But the thumbprint—”

“Oh, yes, the thumbprint,” I repeated wearily. “By all means, study my thumbs, if you’ll first take these bonds off of me.”

“Bonds,” mumbled old Sporr. He got creakily up from his knees and bustled to me. From under his robe he produced a pouch, and took out a pencil-sized rod. Gingerly opening the red mantle, he touched my tether in several places with the glowing end of the rod. The coils dropped away from my grateful body and limbs. I thrust out my hands.

“Thumbprints?” I offered.

Sporr had produced something else, a little vial of dark pigment. He carefully anointed one of my thumbs, and pressed it to the page. All three gazed.

“The same,” said Doriza.

And they were all on their knees before me.

“Forgive me, great Yandro,” said the officer thickly. “I did not know.”

“Get up,” I bade them. “I want to hear why I was first bound, and now worshipped.”

II

They rose, but stood off respectfully. The officer spoke first. “I am Rohbar, field commander of this defense position,” he said with crisp respect. “Sporr is a mystic doctor, full of godly wisdom. Doriza, a junior officer and chief of the guard. And you—how could you know?—are sent by the First Comers to save us from our enemies.”

“Enemies?” I repeated.

“The Newcomers,” supplemented Doriza. “They have taken the ‘Other Side’ of Dondromogon, and would take our side as well. We defend ourselves at the poles. Now,” and her voice rang joyously, “you will lead us to defeat and crush them utterly!”

“Not naked like this,” I said, and laughed. I must have sounded foolish, but it had its effect.

“Follow me, deign to follow me,” Sporr said. “Your clothing, your quarters, your destiny, all await you.”

We went out by the door at the rear, and Sporr respectfully gestured me upon a metal-plated platform. Standing beside me, he tinkered with a lever. We dropped smoothly away into a dark corridor, past level after level of light and sound.

“Our cities are below ground,” he quavered. “Whipped by winds above, we must scrabble in the depths for life’s necessities—chemicals to transmute into food, to weave into clothing, to weld into tools and weapons—”

The mention of food brought to me the thought that I was hungry. I said as much, even as our elevator platform came to the lowest level and stopped.

“I have arranged for that,” Sporr began, then fell silent, fingers combing his beard in embarrassment.

“Arranged food for me?” I prompted sharply. “As if you know I had come? What—”

“Pardon, great Yandro,” babbled Sporr. “I was saying that I arranged food, as always, for whatever guest should come. Please follow.”

We entered a new small chamber, where a table was set with dishes of porcelain-like plastic. Sporr held a chair for me, and waited on me with the utmost gingerly respect. The food was a pungent and filling jelly, a little bundle of transparent leaves or scraps like cellophane and tasting of spice, and a tumbler of pink juice. I felt refreshed and satisfied, and thanked Sporr, who led me on to the next room.

“Behold!” he said, with a dramatic gesture. “Your garments, even as they have been preserved against your coming!”

It was a sleeping chamber, with a cot made fast to the wall, a metal locker or cupboard, with a glass door through which showed the garments of which Sporr spoke.

The door closed softly behind me—I was left alone.

Knowing that it was expected of me, I went to the locker and opened the door. The garments inside were old, I could see, but well kept and serviceable. I studied their type, and my hands, if not my mind, seemed familiar with them.

There was a kiltlike item, belted at the waist and falling to mid-thigh. A resilient band at the top, with a series of belt-holes, made it adaptable to my own body or to any other. Then came an upper garment, a long strip of soft, close-woven fabric that spiralled around the torso from hip to armpit, the end looping over the left shoulder and giving full play to the arms. A gold-worked fillet bound the brows and swept back my longish hair, knotting at the nape of the neck. The only fitted articles were a pair of shoes, metal-soled and soft-uppered, that went on well enough and ran cross-garters up to below the knee, like buskins. The case also held a platinum chain for the neck, a belt-bag, and a handsome sword, with clips to fasten them in place. These things, too, I donned, and closed the glass door.

The light struck it at such an angle as to make it serve for a full-length mirror. With some curiosity I gazed at my image.

The close-fitting costume was rich and dark, with bright colors only for edgings and minor accessories. I myself—and it was as if I saw my body for the first time—towered rather bluffly, with great breadth of chest and shoulder, and legs robust enough to carry such bulk. The face was square but haggard, as if from some toil or pain which was now wiped from my recollection. That nose had been even bigger than it was now, but a fracture had shortened it somewhat. The eyes were deep set and dark and moody—small wonder!—the chin heavy, the mouth made grim by a scar at one corner. Black, shaggy hair hung down like brackets. All told, I looked like a proper person for physical labor, or even fierce fighting—but surely no inspirational leader or savior of a distressed people.

I took the military cloak which Doriza had lent me and slung it over my shoulders. Turning, I clanked out on my metal-soled shoes.

Sporr was waiting in the room where I had eaten. His eyes widened at sight of me, something like a grin of triumph flashed through his beard. Then he bowed, supple and humble, his palms together.

“It is indeed Yandro, our great chief,” he mumbled. Then he turned and crossed the room. A sort of mouthpiece sprouted from the wall.

“I announce,” he intoned into it. “I announce, I, Sporr, the reader and fore-teller of wisdom. Yandro is with us, he awaits his partners and friends. Let them meet him in the audience hall.”

Facing me again, he motioned most respectfully toward the door to the hall. I moved to open it, and he followed, muttering.

Outside stood Doriza. Her blue eyes met mine, and her lips moved to frame a word. Then, suddenly, she was on her knee, catching my hand and kissing it.

“I serve Yandro,” she vowed tremulously. “Now and forever—and happy that I was fated to live when he returned for the rescue of all Dondromogon.”

“Please get up,” I bade her, trying not to sound as embarrassed as I felt. “Come with me. There is still much that I do not understand.”

“I am Yandro’s orderly and helper,” she said. Rising, she ranged herself at my left hand. “Will Yandro come this way? He will be awaited in the audience hall.”

It seemed to me then that the corridors were vast and mixed as a labyrinth, but Doriza guided me without the slightest hesitation past one tangled crossway after another. My questions she answered with a mixture of awe and brightness.

“It is necessary that we live like this,” she explained. “The hot air of Dondromogon’s sunlit face is ever rising, and the cold air from the dark side comes rushing under to fill the vacuum. Naturally, our strip of twilight country is never free of winds too high and fierce to fight. No crops can grow outside, no domestic animals flourish. We must pen ourselves away from the sky and soil, with stout walls and heavy sunken parapets. Our deep mines afford every element for necessities of life.”

I looked at my garments, and hers. There were various kinds of fabric, which I now saw plainly to be synthetic. “The other side, where those you call the Newcomers dwell and fight,” I reminded. “Is it also windswept? Why can two people not join forces and face toil and nature together? They should fight, not each other, but the elements.”

Doriza had no answer that time, but Sporr spoke up behind us: “Great Yandro is wise as well as powerful. But the Newcomers do not want to help, not even to conquer. They want to obliterate us. There is nothing to do—not for lifetimes—but to fight them back at the two poles.”

We came to a main corridor. It had a line of armed guards, but no pedestrians or vehicles, though I thought I caught a murmur of far-off traffic. Doriza paused before a great portal, closed by a curtainlike sheet of dull metal. She spoke into a mouthpiece:

“Doriza, gentlewoman of the guard, conducts Yandro, the Conquering Stranger, to greet his lieutenants!”

I have said that the portal was closed by a curtainlike metal sheet; and like a curtain it lifted, letting us through into the auditorium.

That spacious chamber had rows of benches, with galleries above, that might have seated a thousand. However, only a dozen or so were present, on metal chairs ranged across the stage upon which we entered. They were all men but two, and wore robes of black, plum-purple or red. At sight of me, they rose together, most respectfully. They looked at me, and I looked at them.

My first thought was, that if these were people of authority and trust in the nation I seemed destined to save, my work was cut out for me.

Not that they really seemed stupid—none had the look, or the subsequent action, of stupidity. But they were not pleasant. Their dozen pairs of eyes fixed me with some steadiness, but with no frankness anywhere. One man had a round, greedy-seeming face. Another was too narrow and cunning to look it. Of the women, one was nearly as tall as I and nobly proportioned, with hair of a red that would be inspiring were it not so blatantly dyed. The other was a little wisp of a brunette, with teeth too big for her scarlet mouth and bright eyes like some sort of a rodent. They all wore jewelry. Too much jewelry.

My mind flew back to the two scrubby, venial guardsmen who had first welcomed me; to stuffy Rohbar, the commander; to Sporr, spry and clever enough, but somehow unwholesome; Doriza—no, she was not like these others, who may have lived too long in their earth-buried shelters. And Doriza now spoke to the gathering:

“Yandro, folk of the Council! He deigns to give you audience.”

“Yandro!”

They all spoke the name in chorus, and bowed toward me.

Silence then, a silence which evidently I must break. I broke it: “Friends, I am among you with no more memory or knowledge than an infant. I hear wonderful things, of which I seem to be the center. Are they true?”

“The tenth part of the wonders which concern mighty Yandro have not been told,” intoned Sporr, ducking his bearded head in a bow, but fixing me with his wise old eyes.

One of the group, called Council by Doriza, now moved a pace forward. He was the greedy-faced man, short but plump, and very conscious of the dignified folds of his purple robe. One carefully-tended hand brushed back his ginger-brown hair, then toyed with a little moustache.

“I am Gederr, senior of this Council,” he purred. “If Yandro permits, I will speak simply. Our hopes have been raised by Yandro’s return—the return presaged of old by those who could see the future, and more recently by the death in battle of the Newcomer champion, called Barak.”

“Barak!” I repeated. “I—I—” And I paused. When I had to learn my own name, how could it be that I sensed memory of another’s name?

“Barak was a brute—mighty, but a brute.” Thus Gederr continued. “Weapons in his hands were the instruments of fate. His hands alone caused fear and ruin. But it pleased our fortune-bringing stars to encompass his destruction.” He grinned, and licked his full lips. “Now, even as they are without their battle-leader, so we have ours.”

“You honor me,” I told him. “Yet I still know little. It seems that I am expected to aid and lead and save the people of this world called Dondromogon. But I must know them before I can help.”

Gederr turned his eyes upon the woman with the red hair, and gestured to her “Tell him, Elonie.” Then he faced me. “Have we Yandro’s permission to sit?”

“By all means,” I granted, a little impatiently, and sat down myself. The others followed suit—the Council on their range of chairs, Doriza on a bench near me, Sporr somewhere behind. The woman called Elonie remained upon her sandalled feet, great eyes the color of deep green water fixed upon me.

Elonie was taller than any of her fellow Council members, taller than Sporr, almost as tall as I. Her figure was mature, generous, but fine, and set off by a snugly-draped robe as red as her dyed cascade of hair. Red-dyed, too, were the tips of her fingers, and her lips were made vivid and curvy beyond nature by artificial crimson. She made a bow toward me, smiled a little, showing most perfect white teeth. She began:

“Dondromogon began with the First Comers. Many ages they ruled here, the Fifteen of them. Forever they were fifteen, for when one died, another was bred; when one was born, the oldest or least useful was eliminated. It was they who planned and began this shelter-city, found the elements that support life and give comfort.

“Others came, from far worlds. The Fifteen changed their policy of a fixed number, and became rulers of the new colonists. But after some study, it was decided to set a new limit. Seven hundred was decided upon, and seven hundred we still remain.”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “You mean that, when new children are born among you, someone must die?”

She nodded. “Exactly as with the Fifteen. We eliminate the least useful. Sometimes we eliminate the child itself. More often, an older and worn-out individual.”

I thought that I sensed an uncomfortable wriggle in Sporr, behind me. “Why is this?” I demanded.

“Because, Yandro, there cannot be room and supplies enough for a greater number.”

I scowled to myself. So far I had seen luxury enough in Dondromogon’s chambers and tunnels. But there remained so much to learn. “Go on,” I bade her.

She nodded again, and obeyed: “Thus we on Dondromogon live and have lived. This world is ours, its good and evil. But,” and her voice, from a soft, shy murmur, turned hard, “there are those who do not wish it so. The Newcomers—the invaders!”

“Ill be their fate,” growled Gederr beside her, as if rehearsed.

“They came to us, not long ago in years … but I forget, Yandro does not know as yet the length of Dondromogon’s year, or Dondromogon’s day. They came, then, no longer ago than the time needed for a baby to become a child.”

Three years of my own reckoning I decided, and wished she had not mentioned babies and children. I still disliked that arbitrary survival-of-the-fittest custom. “Where did they come from?” I asked.

“Who can tell? Perhaps from the forgotten world where came our ancestors. Somehow they had learned of our conquest here, our advances and wealth-gathering in spite of natural obstacles. That is what they hope to plunder from us, these conquering Newcomers!”

“Ill be their fate,” repeated Gederr, and two or three of the Council with him.

“But the winds are too high for a final battle to happen quickly. After some fighting, they seized upon the other strip of habitable land, on Dondromogon’s other side. We fight them at the two poles—mostly underground. Do you understand?”

“I seem to,” I replied. “But now what about me? The story of Yandro?”

“Did not Sporr tell everything?” broke in Gederr. “He should have done so. Sporr, the Council is not pleased.”

“I had to go slowly,” apologized the old man, and Elonie took up the tale:

“It is known to all on Dondromogon. The days of the First Comers held great minds that could see the future. Then it was foreseen that, in Dondromogon’s hour of peril and need, a time set by the destruction of an enemy great and mighty—”

“Barak,” I said aloud, still puzzling over that strangely familiar name.

“At that time,” finished Elonie, “a leader to be called Yandro, the Conquering Stranger, would come. Even clothing was supplied—clothing not like that we wear today.”

She gestured toward me. Indeed, the garments I wore were different from those of my companions. I shook my head slowly, and tried to digest what I had heard once again. But one bit of it still clamored for rejection.

“About these eliminations,” I harked back. “Who decides on which person must die to keep the number down to seven hundred?”

“We do,” replied Gederr, almost bleakly.

“And the Newcomers, have they a similar custom?”

“Not they, the greedy interlopers.” Gederr looked very greedy himself. “They delve and destroy in Dondromogon, feeding ever new spates of arrivals.”

“It seems,” I offered, “that you would be well advised to grow in number, and so win this war.”

But Gederr shook his head. “We checkmate them at the two poles, where the way into our territory is narrow. And more than seven hundred would be hard to make comfortable.”

“Friends, I do not like it,” I stated flatly. “There seems to be ruthlessness, and waste.”

“Why waste?” spoke up another of the Council, the narrow man, whose name was Stribakar. “This war has begun only recently, but it will last forever. At least, so I see it.”

“Now that Yandro is here, it shall be brought to an end,” pronounced Elonie, her green eyes fixed on me. “Will it please Yandro to see something of this war?”

“Since you make it so much my business, I would be pleased indeed,” I told her, and Sporr rose from his seat. He went to an oblong of white translucency, on a side wall of the stage within sight of us all. It was about twice a man’s height by thrice a man’s width.

“The screen of a televiso,” he said to me, and touched a dial beside it. The screen lighted, with confused blurrings of color and movement. He dialed quickly and knowingly.

“We see an underground passage,” he said. “And those who dispute therein.”

I could see a gloomy stretch of earth-walled passage, lighted from somewhere by a yellow radiance that became dim and brown toward one end. I had no way of judging the true size of the object whose image I saw, until I made out stealthy movement at the darker end. Sporr’s dialing made parts of the scene clear, and the movement proved to be that of a human figure, prone and partially concealed in a depression of the floor. That figure was no more than half-height, by which I estimated the passage itself to be some fifteen or eighteen feet to the top of its rough-dug ceiling.

“A scout,” breathed Doriza beside me, pointing to the prone man. “See, Yandro, he wears earth-colored cloth over his armor, and his arms and face are smeared with mud. The thing he holds is a ray-digger, whereby he burrows his way forward to the enemy.

“Enemy in the same tunnel with him?” I asked.

“Right.” I saw her blond head dip. “Our tunnel broke into one of theirs, by accident or plan. At point of contact, both forces are cautious, fearing ambush. Now—”

She said no more. The scout on the screen was apparently creeping forward through the solid soil of the floor, only the top of his head and shoulders showing. Once or twice I saw the object he employed, a baton-like tool of black metal with a bulb or ball at one end. It emitted faint sparks and shudders of light, which melted or vaporized the earth ahead of him.

“See! He senses danger near.”

Indeed he did; for he paused, and took something else from his belt—a disk the size of his palm. This he held close to his face, studying it.

“Televiso,” explained Doriza. “It has limited power of identifying both sound and sight near at hand. The scout knows that enemy approach.”

Still working his dials, Sporr made the scene slide along. The bright end of the tunnel came into view for some yards. All who watched leaned forward excitedly.

“Newcomers,” breathed Gederr, and added his familiar curse, “ill be their fate! They have one of those vibration-shields.”

“Warn the advance party,” bade Stribakar, and Sporr, turning from his dials, muttered quickly into a speaking tube.

The situation that thus interested and activated my companions was hard to make out. I saw only an indistinct fuzziness in a sort of niche against the tunnel wall. Doriza pointed.

“A vibration-shield,” she told me. “The Newcomers have such things. Some machine or other power stirs the molecules of air to such a new tempo as to create a plane of force. No missile, no light even, can penetrate. They are sheltered and all but indistinguishable. See, they go forward.”

The eddying cloud moved along the tunnel. We could see the scout again. He tucked away his disk and employed the ray-digger. Quickly he sank deeper and out of sight.

“Burrowing in,” pronounced Gederr. “If he succeeds in what he hopes—”

“Spare him, you mean?” asked Stribakar, and Gederr nodded.

The eddying blotch that marked the power-shield of the invaders came closer. I saw it approach the place where the scout had burrowed away. It paused there, as if those hidden by it were investigating. Then—

“Brave fellow!” cried Elonie, like someone at an exciting sports event or play.

The scout had dug himself a little channel beneath the floor. Now he burst into view, beyond and behind the invaders. He held a pistol-weapon in each hand. One spat sparks—some sort of pellets or projectiles. The other was plainly a web-spinner like the one that first had bound me, and this he poised ready for use.

His projectiles seemed to find an opening behind the power-shield. A human form lurched into view—a glowing, writhing form, like a man of red-hot metal. An agonized leap, a shudder, and the body fell, abruptly falling into clinkered bits. A moment later, the power-shield disturbance vanished, and there stood revealed two others, clad like the scout in earth-colored jumper over armor.

“He got the power-shield man!” exulted Elonie. She was on her feet, applauding wildly. In the same second, I saw the scout point and discharge his spinner-gun. Whirling coils of cord struck, wound and tangled the two foremen. The scout’s bearded mouth opened, as if he yelled in exultation.

But that was his last cry and action. Another eddy, larger and swifter, suddenly came into the picture behind him. From it sprang a pale shaft of light. The scout went down on his face as if in sudden prayer. He moved no more.

Toward the dark end, Dondromogon figures seemed to move. There was a great spatter of spark-pellets. But the eddy of the new power-shield had scurried forward, enveloping and vanishing the two bound men. It retired as quickly. No movement, no figure, except those of the dead scout and the charred remains of the man he had killed.

“There will be little action here for some time to come,” announced Gederr. “Switch it off, Sporr.”

Sporr did so. I shook myself, as if to rid my body of unpleasant dampness and chill.

“Exciting,” I said. “Unusual. I suppose this goes on all the time.”

“Not all the time,” Elonie demurred. “As Yandro has heard, the battle-areas are limited, in the region of the poles. There is much maneuvering, but not too much contact. This incident was an order.”

“Order?” I repeated.

“We sent the man you saw, knowing that you would want this televiso view of how we made war.”

I snorted and faced her angrily. “You sent him to his death? So that I could see a show? You value life very cheaply, Elonie.”

III

She smiled, as if I had complimented her. “Oh, the man was up for elimination. He was supernumerary. Of course, if he had succeeded in his capture of prisoners and one of the devices that make those power-shields—”

I remembered what Stribakar had said to Gederr. “He was brave,” I said, “and it was a shame that he had to die. You want me to be a leader in war like that? I have other ideas of warfare.”

All of them looked at me, and one spoke from behind Gederr: “We had hoped that Yandro would say that. Yandro means to lead us in person—in a great and decisive battle.”

“At least it would be cleaner than this mole-digging and sneaking,” I said hotly.

Gederr rose. “Sporr, tune in whatever terminal you can find among the Newcomers. I shall say something to them.”

Obediently Sporr manipulated levers, push-buttons and dials near the speaking-tube. Gederr crossed to it and spoke harshly:

“Newcomers, ill be your fate! Your defeat is at hand! We give you warning! Our engines will burrow a mighty cave near the north pole. Let you come there, with all your hosts—and so shall we, so shall we!” His voice rose to a scream. “With us—leading us—comes the greatest fighter that Dondromogon has ever known, and the sight of him shall break your hearts!”

My ears rang, as the ears of all listeners must have rung, with those last words. Gederr turned away, and Sporr dialed the power off.

“Now,” Gederr said, “is there not some plan for amusement? A pleasant hour in the Pavilion? Great Yandro’s heart is troubled—for it is as great as himself—by thoughts of war and its pains. Let him come with us for solace.”

“Amen to that,” said Elonie, and she walked toward me. I rose, and she slid her bare arm through mine. Her face was close to mine, smiling and full of invitation. It seemed that Doriza was going to say something, but Elonie spoke first: “He will need no military aide, Doriza. Nothing military about the Pavilion, you remember.”

We walked out together—Elonie and myself, then the others. We found a wider corridor, and one full of hum and motion. The smooth floor of the passage was seamed with metal-shod grooves, in which moved vehicles—ovoid vehicles, of various sizes, balancing, it seemed, on one whirring wheel apiece. Elonie escorted me to one such car, which stood poised on its wheel like a dancer on tiptoe. There was room inside for the two of us only, among luxurious cushions. At her respectful invitation I sat inside, and she operated controls.

“Thus we travel in this city,” she chatted as we rolled along. “Not swiftly, of course, in this nor in our other city, near the South Pole. The real speed is in the way-tunnels between.”

“Way-tunnels the width of a world?” I asked, wondering. “How can only seven hundred persons do such work?”

“You saw the ray-digger on the televiso. There are larger and more complex diggers of that type, by which we can journey almost anywhere underground—clear through the core of Dondromogon and up into Newcomer lands, were it not for the inner fires. Perhaps we shall dig them out by the roots in time, despite their defenses.”

Once again I thought of so much science and wealth, and of people dying because their rulers thought seven hundred were none too few to enjoy the benefits of a world.

We stopped down a fork of the vehicle-corridor, and Elonie dismounted before another of the metal curtain-doors. At her touch of a button and a word into a speaking tube, it opened to us. We passed into a smaller passageway, and then out into a place of aching beauty.

My first impression was of pastel lights, changing and mingling constantly—blue, violet, pink, green, orchid, pale. They struck from starlike points in a great domed ceiling, over a floor like a mirror. And the pastel-tinted air was filled with music, soft but penetrating and heady. There was a breeze from somewhere, scented and warm. In and out of other doorways across the floor wandered figures, male and female, murmuring together and helping themselves to cups from great trestles and tables.

“The refreshments are provided,” Elonie told me softly. “We need not wait for the others. Come, Yandro. They have poured wine—Yandro knows what wine is? And we have music, perfume, light, laughter, and for companions all of Dondromogon.”

“All?” I repeated.

“All save those on guard or garrison duty. Come, mighty one. Know happiness that is worth fighting and conquering to keep.”

She tugged at my arm, urging me toward the wine-tables.

And now there was a louder murmur, excitement and even apprehension, at my entrance. I suppose I was an extraordinary figure—taller than any person there, indeed none were anywhere near my height save the nobly proportioned Elonie herself. And I was more sinewy, and darker, as if of another race entirely. Timid memories struggled somewhere within me, as if knocking at the closed doors of my consciousness. Somewhere, somehow in the past, things had happened that might explain so much, make my present position clearer to me.

Gederr was following close behind, muttering something to Doriza. Then he pressed on beyond me, and mounted a sort of dais or platform.

“You of Dondromogon!” he called, and such was his voice, or perhaps the acoustic properties of that hemispheric room, that all could hear him easily. “Have you not heard rumors of a great happening? The ancient legend of a mighty leader to come among us—”

“Yandro!” cried a deep-voiced fellow in the front belt of listeners. His eyes were on me, studying, questioning.

“Yes, Yandro, champion of our cause, sent by the First Comers themselves!” That was Elonie, and with a hand on my elbow she urged me up on the platform beside Gederr.

Applause burst out, some of it a little drunken, but quite hearty and honest. “Yandro!” cried the deep-voiced man again, and others took it up: “Yandro! Yandro!” Whatever my own doubts, they had none.

Gederr held up an authoritative hand for silence. “He came from far in space and time, and one look will assure you of his leadership. The time for deliverance is at hand, men and women of Dondromogon! We trust in mighty Yandro!”

There was louder applause, in the midst of which Gederr sidled close. “Speak to them,” he mumbled in my ear.

Like him, I lifted a hand for silence. It came, and I eyed my audience, as I sought for words to speak.

The first thought that came was that, if Elonie were right and these people were the selected best of the race, then Dondromogon was decadently peopled. Not only were they smallish and mostly frail, but few had a distinguished or aggressive cast of countenance. The Council members had been wise-seeming, perhaps, but even they had not struck me as healthy types. To one side stood Doriza, militarily at attention, blue eyes fast upon me—she was a notable exception, compact and strong and healthy of body and mind, and at the same time quite as feminine as the more flashy and languorous Elonie just beside my platform. Through the rear ranks of listeners moved old white-bearded Sporr, who had much to say to certain members of the throng, perhaps explaining me and my legend.

“Friends,” I began at last, “I am new here. A little child might have more experience of your ways and wishes. Yet it becomes apparent that great service is expected of me, and such a service I would greatly love to do.”

“Hear! Hear! Wise are the words of Yandro!” Thus went up a new chorus. I felt reassured, and spoke more confidently.

“Your Council has explained much. Now I come to the people represented by that Council. If I am to help, you are to explain how. For the voice of a people is seldom wrong or foolish.”

“Wise are the words!” They chorused again, and the man with the deep voice suddenly put up his hand and moved forward. I saw that he had the armor and weapons of a soldier, and in one hand he held a cup, from which he had been drinking. He was fairly well knit for a Dondromogonian, and, though his face was simple, it was manly enough. He cleared his throat diffidently.

“We have been told of Yandro’s coming, throughout our halls and dwellings,” he began. “That he should ask for our word is an honor. But since he asks, I make bold to reply—” He choked a little. “Peace!” he cried hoarsely. “Peace—and comfort—”

“Peace! Peace!” cried the others around him, and “Peace!” bellowed hundreds of voices.

I was a little perplexed. After the warlike talk of the Council, this was different, and disturbing. But Gederr, beside me was not at a loss.

“Peace you shall have, as Yandro’s gift!” he cried. “The Newcomers—ill be their fate—have been warned and promised of his coming, and now they shake in dread! He shall lead you to victory, complete victory, and the fruits of victory!”

It was powerfully said, and the cheering was greater than ever. Under cover of the din, Gederr took my elbow and escorted me from the platform.

“They have been despondent, Yandro. They grow unwilling to face death and wounds. But you have changed all that. Hark to their cries of your name! Now there shall be no more speaking, only happiness.”

Elonie had joined us again. Her hand dropped warmly over mine. “This way,” she bade. “This wine is for the Council only—the best on Dondromogon. Honor us by taking some.”

She gave me a goblet, of some transparent substance clasped in bright metal, and brimming with a red liquor. I took it with a bow, and she lifted her own goblet. As we drank together, I had another impression of Doriza’s studying, wondering eyes. Did the warrior-woman, appointed as my military aide, disapprove? But the wine was excellent, and my spirits rose.

“Come,” said Elonie. Her arm was through mine again, warm and gently urging. She led me toward a niche, set deep and shadowy into the wall. There was a divan with cushions, and a table with cups and flagons for drinking. The music had begun again, and some of the people were dancing together.

“Yandro is gracious to grant me these moments alone,” purred Elonie. “Yandro is overwhelming.”

“Can’t we drop the third person?” I asked. “I do not feel much taste for formalities.”

She clutched at that with a little cry of gladness and her eyes and smile were radiant. “You offer me intimacy!” she exclaimed. “It’s honor—it thrills—” She lifted her glass. “Drink again, I beg you! You and I shall drink to each other.”

“Why not?” I said, and touched her glass with mine. “To you, Elonie.”

“To you, Yandro, my dear lord!”

The wine was galvanizingly strong. I felt my ears ring a little, and—why not admit it?—Elonie’s nearness and adulation were wine in themselves. She leaned toward me on the divan, so that our bare shoulders touched. Her lips, full and trembling, were very close.

“Yandro,” she whispered. “Yandro … you could make me happy, and yourself happy, too. …”

Suddenly I shook my head a little, to clear it. For her eyes, a moment ago so fascinating, suddenly made me uneasy. It was as if claws had reached from their brightness and fastened upon me. She steadfastly fixed my gaze with hers.

“Yandro …” Her voice was soft, monotonous. “All is well with you … trust us, trust me, Elonie … I shall guide you to victory, you need have no qualms …”

Her arm stole across my chest, curved around my neck. She drew my head toward hers. Her brilliant eyes seemed to fill the whole field of my vision, impelling, hypnotic—

Hypnotic—that was it!

The strange half-lost thoughts from my unknown former life sized the idea and held it up to me. Danger, danger, they were crying at me. Most ungallantly I took her wrist and disengaged myself from her embrace.

“Since I am destined for war, is there time for this?” I asked, trying to laugh.

“Is there not?” she murmured.

I rose from where I sat, and sipped more wine. Where it had fuddled me before, it cleared me now. “Elonie, you are charming. I do not know whether I have standards by which to judge, but you do things to men. Perhaps I should have time to make up my own mind.”

“If I have offended—” she began to stammer.

“Oh, not in the least. But there is so much for me to be sure of.”

She, too, rose, and left me without a word. Had I made her angry? Yet her last words had been of apology. I sat down again, alone and mystified.

But I did not remain alone for more than two minutes. Outside the niche, Elonie was talking to Gederr. Gederr scowled, nodded, then with an air of inspiration beckoned to Doriza. Doriza joined them, listened respectfully to Gederr. Finally she nodded, as if in acceptance of orders, and walked toward me.

I rose to meet her. She looked me steadily in the eye, but when she spoke it was hesitantly, and with a shyness most womanly, too womanly for a military person.

“Great Yandro is not pleased with Elonie of the Council. Is it possible that he would prefer another woman—me?”

Just like that, she offered herself. And if ever I had made up my mind in a hurry, it had been to the effect that Doriza was nothing but reserve and prudence.

What answer I might be able to give was suddenly unnecessary.

Just outside the niche angry voices rose. An officer, all fair beard and flapping cloak, was accosting Gederr with something less than the respect due a member of the Council.

“I say, she was promised to me—to me! And to me she goes, for my part in bringing him to you!”

“Silence, Rohbar,” commanded Gederr in a voice as sharp as a dagger, but the officer pushed him roughly aside and strode into the niche.

It was the man who had interviewed me after my first capture. His pale eyes gave off sparks in the subdued light, and one hand sought the hilt of his pistol.

“Yandro, they call you!” he flung out. “Yandro, sent from out of space and time to Dondromogon! Well, be that true or no, Doriza is not for you—and deny me if you dare! I’ll send you back out of space and time, with whatever weapon you choose!”

IV

Rohbar glared, but I could have smiled. Smiled in welcome. He was extricating me from a most embarrassing position. I faced him and spoke steadily.

“My friend, you were rude to me at our first meeting. Now you threaten. I begin to think you don’t like me, and that we’ll only be happy shedding each other’s blood.”

“Amen to that!” he snarled. And to Doriza: “Get out, get away from him.”

I moved a step closer, and rapped him on the chest with my knuckles. “She came to speak courteously to me, and she shall go only if she so desires.” As I spoke, I reflected that she might be worth fighting for, after all. I turned to her.

“Doriza, is this true? Do you belong to Rohbar.”

She shook her bright head, and for once her eyes did not meet mine. I felt a sudden joy and relief, such as Elonie’s frank throwing of herself at my head could not bring.

But Rohbar had drawn his pistol-weapon. Another moment, and he would have brought it in line with my chest. But I caught his weapon wrist in my left hand, and with the heel of my right I whacked him solidly on his bearded chin. His head bobbed, and a moment later I had twisted the pistol away from him, throwing it back into the niche. A moment later, Gederr and several others had hurried in, seizing him. He struggled and cursed.

“Put him under arrest!” Gederr bade, and Rohbar ceased struggling. He drew himself up.

“So that’s it!” he roared. “Do you think you dare treat me thus, Gederr? I do not care if you’re of the Council—I know a secret very close and very valuable—”

“Stop his mouth!” Elonie was imploring, and he cursed her, too.

“It seems,” I put in, “that Rohbar makes a practice of rudeness to women.”

I got smiles from Elonie and Doriza both, and Rohbar fairly blackened in the face as he strove to pull free and get at me.

“You!” he choked. “Yandro you call yourself—you’re a fraud, a figurehead, foisted by these scheming, sneaking Council folk—a living lie!”

“Let him go,” I bade those who held him. “Nobody says ‘lie’ to me and goes unpunished.”

There was silence, as far as my voice had reached. Only in the background did music and pleasant conversation continue. It was Elonie who spoke first:

“Yandro, you have privileged me in my speech to you. May I dare point out that this is dangerous—that Rohbar, long a guard officer, is skilled in every weapon—”

“Elonie, you now make it impossible for me to withdraw, without being thought cowardly,” I said. I put my hand to the saber I wore. “Is there a quiet place apart? Let the two of us fight.”

Rohbar was quiet again, in the hands of his captors. He now spoke, almost as gently as Elonie: “I have no friends here. The fight might not be fair.”

“Nonsense,” I snapped, and looked past the little group. There was a face I knew—the man with the deep voice. “You,” I hailed him, “come here.”

He came respectfully, and stood at attention.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Klob is my name, great Yandro. Under-officer of the guard.”

“Klob, do you know Rohbar?”

“I do, sir.”

“If I, Yandro, ordered you to act as second for a man in a duel, would you perform the office faithfully?”

He braced more stiffly to attention. “Though I died for it, sir.”

“You shall not die, but be commended if you do well. Represent Rohbar in the formal duel he is about to fight.”

“As Yandro commands. And his adversary—the man he will fight?”

“Me.”

Klob was embarrassed, and so were the others. I spoke sharply. “Am I the one you take for your war leader? Then obey. This man has threatened me. I have been placed in a position where I must fight or be thought cowardly. Come into this passageway.”

They followed me. Nobody was in the corridor. I spoke again, and they released Rohbar. “What weapon?” I asked him.

“Ray-sabers,” he growled, and drew his. A touch of his thumb on the hilt-stud, and it glowed brilliantly.

“I shall be second to Yandro, if it pleases him.” That was Doriza, my appointed aide. But I waved her back.

“Since we fight, partially at least, for you, it is not well that you take, sides,” I reminded. “I need no seconds. If play does not continue fair, I can change it.”

I drew my own ray-saber. My thumb, seemingly wiser than my blank brain, touched the stud and the blade pulsed out its heat-rays. Those of the Council who had come along moved back out of the way. Rohbar and I touched blades, and the fight was on.

From the first, it was no contest.

Rohbar wore armor, on chest and head, while I fought without. He was in a cold rage, and I was only puzzled. Despite his lesser height, he had strangely long arms, that gave him an inch or two of reach beyond mine. But he was like a child before me. Indeed, I had leisure to observe myself, to wonder and puzzle over my own skill. I knew this weapon, that should be strange to me, as if it were born a part of me. Rohbar slashed and fenced; I parried easily, almost effortlessly. Avoiding an engagement, I clanged home against his armored flank. He moaned and swore, for even through that metal protection the heat of the blade must have hurt him. A moment later I sped a backhand blow that knocked his helmet flying. He threw caution to the winds, and charged close. So sudden was his attack that I was caught almost unawares, and parried his blade within inches of my own chin. Our blades crossed, close to the guards, and we stood for a moment looking into each other’s eyes at a bare foot’s distance.

“You ignorant fool!” he spat at me. “To be made a tool, and then to believe—”

“Silence, you crawling informer!” bawled Gederr, and his deadly warning startled Rohbar, who sprang back from me. At the same time I advanced in my turn, touched his blade as if to engage, then cut under quickly and came solidly home where the neck and shoulders join.

The ray-mechanism in my weapon hummed and sang. A great red spark leaped from the point of contact, and Rohbar, stricken with heat and current alike, spun around like a top. His saber fell, and he went down beside it. There was life in him, for he struggled up on an elbow, turning an agonized face toward me.

“You haven’t forgotten that skill!” he cried, as if charging me with a crime. “Have you forgotten anything, then? Are you truly here without memory, or are you a traitor to—”

Gederr stepped close to him. He leveled a pistol-device, which threw rays. Rohbar suddenly lacked a head.

“That was the most merciful thing to do,” said Gederr, holstering his weapon. “Send someone to drag the rest of him away.” He faced me. “Yandro will please accept my admiring congratulations. What better proof of his great gifts and high destiny than this easy conquest of one who was judged skilful with the ray-saber.” He strode toward the sound of faint music. “Come, you others. The entertainment has certainly not been spoiled.”

I switched off my saber’s power, and sheathed it. I had just killed a man, because I felt I had to, but I had no sense of triumph. I walked at the rear of the group, Doriza moving respectfully beside me.

“Doriza,” I said, “he tried to tell me something. What?”

She shook her head. “I did not know Rohbar’s mind.”

“Yet he felt close to you. Wanted to fight to keep you from me. That’s another thing. Why did you ask me if I wanted you?”

She smiled a little, with a certain shy humor. “Do not all things on Dondromogon belong to Yandro?”

I smiled back. “Doriza, perhaps I should act complimented. Yet it seems to me that Gederr and Elonie told you to make the offer. And I’m not sure—I can say this to my personal aide, can’t I?—that I want any favors at their hands.”

“Or at mine?” And she smiled again.

“Come off it, Doriza, you’re not the best of flirts. Shall we take a drink together? It wasn’t pleasant, killing that man, though you don’t seem to mourn him.”

Back in the great chamber, a sort of cloud of light was thrown in the center by several reflectors, and a sort of motion picture show was going on in the midst of it. I drank much, but the wine did not affect me greatly. Finally I felt tired, and said so. Gederr and Doriza escorted me to sumptuous apartments, where I quickly slept.

I do not know how many hours I lay asleep, but I woke refreshed. A breakfast of strange synthetic foods was waiting, on a lift that rode up in a slot of the wall. I ate with relish, took a brisk shower in a room behind my sleeping quarters, and resumed the costume of Yandro. Then came a buzz at the door, and a voice came through a speaker system: “Gederr requests that Yandro admit him.”

I opened the door. Gederr was there, and Doriza behind him. I felt the gaze of her blue eyes, very soft and pretty. Gederr smiled respectfully.

“We have talked much about the duel, we of the Council. It is agreed that great Yandro’s value is more than inspirational. If a single combat could be arranged, with some champion of the Newcomers, ill be their fate! Some boasting successor to Barak—”

“Barak,” I repeated and wondered again why his name stuck so in my fogged mind. “I—I do not know how to say it, but I seek no quarrel with Barak. I do not fear him, or anyone else; but I do not wish to fight him.”

“Barak is dead,” snapped Gederr, quite ungraciously. “Yandro need have no apprehensions.”

“I have said I fear nobody,” I reminded, stiff and lofty.

Gederr bowed. “Who could doubt it? But to return to our talk of battle; at the South Pole an inner blaze of flame from within Dondromogon has kept opposing forces from contacting each other. Only here at the North Pole can we fight, and there has been a lull since—since the destruction of their champion, Barak. We have taken advantage to hollow out a great pocket underground. See, I will show you.”

He went to a little televiso screen, and switched on the power, then dialed. I saw a great domed cavern, larger than the hemisphere room of last night’s recreation period. Around its edges toiled men with ray-batons, shaping and enlarging.

“Elsewhere we have set up cunning defenses,” explained Gederr. “Great force-fields, that interfere with their digging advance. But at one point we have purposely allowed their advance tunnels to come along easily. What you see here is behind that point. We fall back—”

“Fall back?” I repeated.

Gederr winked. “Their forces will follow, and fill this chamber. Beyond, we have entrenchments, sortie tunnels, weapons. And the floor of the chamber is mined—enough explosive even to wreck those power-shields. Their van, with its heavy equipment, will perish. We’ll wipe out the others easily!”

“How many?” ventured Doriza.

“Who can say?” Gederr responded. “They are many, but most of them must work to sustain life and action in the section of Dondromogon they have seized. They have not the sunken cities, the synthesizing advances, the other time-seasoned devices for living that we have developed. Several hundred fighting men, not many more than ours, are all that can be sent against us.”

“Are they brave?” I demanded.

“They have stubborn courage. They will rush after their comrades who fall. Perhaps if we capture a few, they will try a rescue. It will bring them to defeat—us to glory!”

His voice rose in exultation, and I chose to disagree.

“Not glory, Gederr. We can claim cunning for such a plan—yes. The pride of successful ambush and deceit—yes. But there is hardly any glory in trickery. Not as I see it, anyway.”

He bowed again. “Great Yandro is bravest of the brave, but his thoughts are those of the First Comers, ages ago. He does not understand modern sophistication and practicality.”

“I understand the practicality,” I assured him, “but I don’t glory in it. A fair combat, like the one last night with Rohbar, is like a game—grim, but like a game. Not so these strategems and pitfalls, which are only an unpleasant job to be done.”

“The strategems need not affect Yandro,” stated Gederr. “As for a simple single combat, I say that will be arranged. We broadcast, Yandro will remember, a warning and a challenge. The enemy has sent back a message that they are making ready a fighter to face anyone we can furnish.”

“I see,” said I. “Well, they speak my language.” Both Doriza and Gederr started violently, and stared. “Probably they are simple of battle-viewpoint, like me. They’ll blunder easily into your trap.” I said those last two words to assure Gederr that I considered the whole deception his. “Now, when is all this to happen?”

“Perhaps within twenty hours. Perhaps within thirty.”

“I feel like a puppet,” I said. “Like the figurehead poor Rohbar called me. Perhaps I am, and perhaps it is as well, because I’m not in tune with your strategy. Understand me, I see its need and its practicability. That is all I see, though.”

“Will Yandro walk forth?” asked Doriza. “There are troops waiting to be reviewed.”

We went into a corridor, and entered one of the purring vehicles. It took us away—toward the fighting sector, I judged—and I dismounted in a great low stretch of subterranean cavern. This was lighted by great glowing bulbs hung to the ceiling, and men were drawn up in triple rows, armed and at attention. An officer was speaking to them, and toward one side stood the two unarmed men, under guard.

“Not yet, mighty Yandro,” counselled Doriza beside me. “There is—a ceremony.”

I could hear the officer speaking, though not clearly:

“In this moment, the eve of certain triumph over the enemy, two men see fit to circulate lies that calculate to dismay and destroy our plans. For them is only one fate, as judged by the Council. Attention to that fate!”

The two unarmed men were marched forward. I stared and scowled.

“I’ve seen them before,” I said to Doriza. “The broad face of one—the figure of the other! Aren’t they—”

“Yes!” Doriza said tonelessly.

The officer lifted his hand, with a disintegrator pistol in it. Pale green rays leaped. The two familiar figures gyrated, great parts of them vanished. They fell, and two men carried the bodies away.

“They were the two guards I first met!” I cried.

“Yes,” she agreed softly. “Men who served under Rohbar, and who spoke rebelliously because Yandro killed him. They said that Yandro was not Yandro.”

I smiled ruefully. “From the first they didn’t seem to believe that. Nor did Rohbar. Nor did you, until Sporr identified me.” I looked into her blue eyes, calculatingly. “It comes to mind, Doriza, that of all who doubted me you are the only one left alive.”

“I, too, have thought that,” she said, and her voice was quiet but not frightened. “Perhaps my turn is next.”

I shook my head. “I seem to have power on Dondromogon, and I will not let you be destroyed without more warrant than I see now.”

“Yandro is kind,” she said.

“And Doriza is attractive,” I rejoined. “Well, that unpleasant little formality seems to be at an end. Shall we inspect the troops?”

So saying, I moved forward. The officer in charge saluted and accompanied me on my inspection. The first two ranks of soldiers were men of various builds and feature, solemn-looking fellows for the most part. The first rank was headed by Klob, whom I had named for Rohbar’s second last night. I was struck by the efficient air of their armor and equipment, as contrasted with their almost frail physiques. Again I thought, the stock of Dondromogon’s natives must be running down.

The third rank was women.

They, too, wore armor, and bore weapons and tools, but I judged that they were more of a reserve than a first fighting force. More thoughts coursed through my head—if my earlier memories were departed, they left the more room for recent happenings and speeches. The Council had insisted that it was necessary to keep the population of Dondromogon small, for the sake of good living. Yet it seemed false reasoning if even women must be armed for battle. And the women, on the whole, were better specimens than the men. They were not large—none anywhere near as tall as Elonie or as compactly vigorous as Doriza—but seemed healthy and intelligent for the most part, and some were even handsome. One or two gave me an appraising, admiring look, such as soldiers should not give frankly to commanders.

I concluded the inspection, and returned to a position in front of the force. “At ease,” I bade them. “I have words to say.

“Some, at least, must have seen me last night at the recreation hour. I spoke then as to the general population of Dondromogon. Now I speak to you specifically, as soldiers facing battle duty. Your commanders think that the time is at hand for a victorious termination of the war with those strangers you call the Newcomers.”

I paused, and watched the expressions of my listeners. At the phrase, “termination of the war,” some of them positively yearned. As Gederr had admitted, the commoners of Dondromogon wanted no more fighting. Perhaps my coming was indeed by providence, to bring peace. A better peace, I now decided, than they had ever known.

“When the war is over,” I went on, “I propose to lead you still. Since I am accepted as a leader, I have a right to do that. It seems that your health and happiness will be bettered if, in some way, we achieve a new conquest—conquest of the outdoors. There may be storms, but there are also natural sunlight and fresh air. Yes, and perhaps fresh natural foods, that will strengthen you more than synthetics. Does that appeal to you?”

Plainly it did.

“As to the Newcomers, I do not know them. Yet it seems that, with the fighting ended, some friendly agreement may be reached. If they do not harm us, they may help us. That will follow victory. I feel thus assured. That is all I have to say.” I faced the officer in charge. “Take over.”

Doriza and I walked away, back to our vehicle. “Where now?” I asked.

For answer, she pointed to a white oblong on the inner wall of the vehicle. It was a little screen, on which figures appeared. “Gederr requests that we return to him. He feels that we may be too close to possible violent action, and he is not yet ready that Yandro risk himself.”

We rolled back toward the main passages of the community, and eventually to an office, where Gederr was in close, muttered conversation with Sporr and Elonie. They greeted my entrance in various ways—Sporr with a senile smirk that he hoped was ingratiating, Elonie with a most inviting smile, Gederr with blank embarrassment. Gederr bowed and gestured toward an inner door. “Will Yandro pleasure me with a private conference?”

I bowed in turn, and followed him in.

“I heard Yandro’s words to the troops, by speaker system,” he began silkily. “Eloquent and inspiring—but Yandro must realize some salient facts.”

“Such as?” I prompted.

“The talk of friendly agreement with the Newcomers—ill be their fate! They must be wiped clean off of Dondromogon.”

“Perhaps,” I agreed, and he smiled.

“I am honored that Yandro agrees so quickly—”

“I said, perhaps. Because I do not know the Newcomers as yet. It may be that they deserve death to the last man. But they may also deserve honorable treatment, alliance even.”

He opened his mouth to speak again, but interruption came from outside. Sounds of struggle, and the cry of Doriza:

“Help me—help!”

I bounded to the door and tore it open, injuring the automatic lock. An officer stood in the outer office, and two soldiers had Doriza by the wrists. I made a lunge, knocked one of them spinning against a wall. “What is this?” I roared. “She is my aide.”

“Her arrest has been commanded,” spoke up Elonie in a sullen voice.

“Who commanded it? I countermand it!” I faced the roomful of protesting faces. “You call me Yandro, your leader from divine source. Let me say that nothing will happen to Doriza except by my will.”

Gederr spoke from the inner doorway: “Great Yandro speaks in riddles. I had thought that he had no attachment for Doriza.”

“Oh, you tried to make me a gift of her last night,” I exploded, “but that has nothing to do with the present case. Doriza lives. She remains free. Understand?”

“Perhaps,” mused Sporr, as if to himself. “There have been accidents. …”

“Come,” I said to Doriza. “To my quarters.” I faced the others again. “Danger to her shall be answered by me. Is it understood?”

We rode silently in the vehicle, and came to the rooms set aside for me. Once inside, I made sure that speaking tubes and televiso were turned off. Then:

“Doriza! There are things I do not know. Tell them to me.”

She hung her head. “They would have seen me dead, like the others, to shut my mouth.”

“And I saved you. Now speak. All I seem to find familiar is the name of Barak.”

She looked up again. “You remember the name?”

“Faintly. Vaguely. But what is happening just beyond my knowledge?”

She caught me by the forearm, her small, strong hands gripped like vises.

“I’ll tell you! Tell you everything! Those devils of the Council have long exploited and drained Dondromogon—with lies about the First Comers, and the exclusive use of science! The Newcomers are to be trapped through you, the natives deluded through you! But you—you are to die when your usefulness is through!”

“They’d do that?” I demanded. “After they name me as Yandro, their legendary hero?”

“That’s part of the great lie!” And Doriza was sobbing. “You aren’t Yandro—you’re Barak of the Newcomers!”

V

I stared at her, astounded, shocked—and suddenly remembering things.

“Barak,” I repeated foolishly. “Barak. Yes, I am Barak. I—how did I get here? Things are still so shadowy—but I’m beginning to recollect—”

“Try,” she begged. “Try hard. It’s the only way you can save yourself. Let me remind you; this world called Dondromogon was settled long ago by adventurers. For centuries their descendants built up a luxurious way of living. Messages filtered back to the old home planet—Earth, in the Solar System—”

“I remember that much,” I told her. “Something about a group of chiefs growing fat on the labor of the community, and killing those who threatened to rival them?”

“Yes. Calling those deaths necessary for the good of the race, but preserving really the soft and easily ruled of the race. And an expedition was sent, to point out that Dondromogon really was a colony of Mother Earth. Gederr received the Newcomers with false welcome, and tried to have them assassinated. But reinforcements arrived, and the war goes on—”

Again I did not let her finish. “And Gederr has been deceiving his followers, by the line of talk I heard from him! That the Newcomers are not rescuers or dealers of justice, but invaders and destroyers! I remember that, too!”

“Do you remember yourself?” she demanded. “Barak, the wonder warrior, who met the enemy by twos and threes, and conquered them like flies, like puffs of wind? Barak, mighty in battle, who offered to fight the whole Council of Dondromogon single-handed? Who led one digging assault after another, and who fell only to a stupid trick?”

“I don’t remember that last,” I confessed. “It is in my mind that I was somewhat rash, and had skill and luck enough to live in spite of my rashness, through several combats.”

“No time for modesty!” she chided me, and smiled despite the desperation of our plight. “You were a natural engine of warfare, Barak. And once you pursued your retreating adversaries far—too far—until it was Gederr himself who squirted anaesthetic gas upon you and felled you, senseless. Then they gathered around you, like carrion feeders, that whole Council, to see how they could profit best. And Gederr and Elonie, with Sporr’s help, made the decision.”

Her eyes held mine earnestly. “As you began to revive, with your wits still unguarded and baffled, Sporr and Elonie hypnotized you. They both know how to do that—”

“I fought off Elonie’s hypnotism last night,” I remembered.

“Because your knowledge of its danger remained in your subconscious. After that, you were placed outside—naked, without memory or knowledge. And a speaking device brought what would sound like a cosmic voice of destiny. After that, all was prepared to draw you into their plot as a tool.”

I groaned. It had been as simple and raw as all that. “But the legend of Yandro?” I asked.

She waved it aside. “Someone named Yandro did exist, in the old days when Dondromogon was not Council-ridden. When he died, it was suggested that he would return again in time of need. Many a time did Gederr inspire some better-than-ordinary fighting man to face you, Barak, by telling him that the soul of Yandro had wakened in him. But when you fell into their hands and they decided to use you, they twisted the legend to suit your coming—even with a picture and your own thumb print to help convince you.” She sighed. “Very few had seen your capture. Only Rohbar and the two guards you saw die would recognize you. Those three men, and myself, were in the farce.”

“You!” I said, and gazed at her. That lost former life was creeping back, like a dream becoming plain and fusing into reality.

“You, Doriza! I—remember you—”

“You should,” she murmured, pink-cheeked. “We used to say kind things to each other. With the Newcomers—remember?”

“You were one of us—a year ago! A technician in the synthetics department! But you vanished—and now you’re here! Why?”

“I—I—oh, don’t ask me that!”

I clutched her elbow, so fiercely that she whimpered. “Did you turn traitor? Answer me, Doriza!”

“You hurt me—don’t—Barak, before you call me a traitor, answer this. Are you wholly for destruction of this people of Dondromogon? Haven’t you changed?”

“Why—why—” And I paused. “I want to crush the Council, but the people—”

“Barak, I want to help them, too! The people—and you, Barak!” She looked at me beseechingly. “Can’t you trust me?”

My heart flopped over and over, like a falling leaf, but I could not steel myself against her. “You were sweet once, Doriza, though you went away from me.” As if by long practice, my arm encircled her.

“Believe me, I’m not a traitor,” she whispered against my shoulder. “I want to save you—and others—and myself—”

I shook my head. “They want to kill you. They shan’t. Let’s defend ourselves.”

For answer, she pointed to the door. A quiet humming sounded. I saw that a panel bulged and vibrated.

“Disintegrator,” she whispered in my ear.

I thrust her into a corner and moved close to the doorjamb. A moment later the rayed panel fell away in flakes, and a man stepped through, the officer who had tried to arrest Doriza.

I clutched the wrist of the hand that held his disintegrator pistol, and almost tore his head off with an uppercut. He went down, and Doriza caught up his weapon as it fell. There was a spatter of sparks as someone fired through the hole with electro-automatic pellets, but already Doriza was using the ray to knock a lock from a door beyond.

“One side,” I heard Gederr growl from the corridor. “I have a disintegrator, too. I’ll open a hole too big for him to defend!”

But we had hurried through the door Doriza opened. Beyond was a vehicle, the same that had carried us earlier in the day. “In,” she said, took the controls.

We rumbled away, not daring to speed and thus attract too much attention. Doriza drove us toward the point where conflict was being centered, and at a deserted stretch of the tunnelway braked us to a halt.

“We must know what they’re doing about us,” she said, and began to tune the televiso apparatus.

Figures leaped into view on the screen. I stared. Members of the Council—I recognized them—were marshalled against a wall, as if for a firing squad. And a firing squad faced them. Someone lifted a hand as a signal. The line of soldiers lifted their electro-automatics. I saw the play of sparks, heard the whip and thud of pellets. A form fell, another, another.

“They’re rebelling!” I cried. “Overthrowing the Council! Somehow,” and my heart sang wildly, “they know the truth!”

But Doriza put her hand on mine, and it trembled. “No, Barak. Watch.”

One of the riddled forms floundered and tried to rise. Elonie, no longer lovely, but an agonized and gory victim. Someone stepped forward and cooly shot her through the head. It was Gederr.

He faced forward. They brought broadcasting equipment to him, and he suddenly grew huge on the screen.

“Attention,” he bawled, “all true people of Dondromogon! We do not hesitate to kill traitors, even the highest of rank! Those false folk who made up the Council—they have died!”

He paused, glared, and swallowed. “I, Gederr, have discovered their plot! They foisted off upon us a man of the Newcomers as Yandro—caused us to accept him as a hero, when he was only the tool of their plan to betray and sell us!”

A cheer came from somewhere, and he went on.

“They are dead! I remain to lead and protect you! And my command is, find the false spy we accepted as Yandro! Search for him, find him and kill him!”

Doriza and I looked at each other. “Where now?” she asked.

“Toward the battle zones,” I replied. She closed a circuit and steered us away.

The main corridor was almost deserted—apparently noncombatants had been cleared out in anticipation of the battle. Again the speaker began to yammer, Gederr speaking again:

“All defenses on alert! Watch for this man, falsely called Yandro—very tall, strongly made, dark, young, scar on chin. He wears a red cloak. With him is a woman of medium height, young, light brown hair, blue eyes, more robust than common—”

“Not flattering, are they?” Doriza said, and smiled.

Up ahead, two guards gestured and bawled. One pressed a wall-button, and a folding barrier crept across our way. “Vehicles out of running,” said a guard as we slowed up.

“We’re on the trail of those spies!” I yelled from the dark interior. “Get that barrier out of our way!”

They hesitated, and Doriza threw in the speed-ahead lever. We smashed through and away. Cries rang in our wake, and slugs struck the rear of the vehicle. Two burned clear through the metal. I opened a panel to kick them out, and they scorched my foot, clear through the stout shoe sole.

“We must abandon this car, it’s marked.” Doriza was cutting speed. “Let’s jump, here in the shadows.”

I jumped through the open panel, and managed to stay on my feet, catching and helping Doriza as she jumped after me. The car hummed onward, and smashed loudly into the wall beyond. Guards ran into view from a doorway, chattering loudly.

Every back was toward us. We stole forward, and into the guardroom they had abandoned. I saw dials and mechanism of both televiso and speaker system. A couple of twists and pulls, and I had them out of commission.

“Slovenly discipline,” I growled. “They should have left at least one man in charge.”

Dropping the telltale red cloak Doriza had given me—how long ago? Yesterday?—I caught up instead a blue military cape, the property of some officer. There was also an ornate helmet, which I jammed on my head. “Stoop,” Doriza counseled. “You’re taller than any man on Dondromogon. Now, maybe you’ll get away with—whatever you’re getting away with.”

Emerging, I strode toward the wreck. A man saw my cape and helmet of authority. “Attention!” he called, and they stiffened respectfully.

“How close is the point of contact with the enemy?” I demanded with official brusqueness.

One pointed the way. “Not far, sir. We’re the last message-relay station. Everything’s in order, and—”

“Thanks,” I said, and beckoned Doriza. We walked past. I wondered what I could have done if these men had paused to think I might be the culprit for whom Gederr was clamoring.

Up ahead was a cross-tunnel, and beyond that a fork. We heard men talking and moving in the distance. Doriza pointed to an inscribed door.

“The way to the works below. I’ve seen it on the televiso. The mined floor of the main chamber has a second cavern below.”

I scowled. “As I remember, Gederr said he had blocked all advance tunnels of the Newcomers, except at one spot. What kind of explosives will he use?”

“Glare-rays,” said Doriza. “You wouldn’t know, Barak, the Newcomers haven’t any such. It’s a special vibration-speed that sets atoms at a pitch ready to fly violently apart. Anything it involves can be exploded at the first touch of fire.”

“Anything?” I repeated. “Weapons, men, earth? Doriza, can you operate such a ray?”

“I think I can.”

“Then come,” and I pushed open the panel.

The elevator cage was waiting, and its operation not hard to study out. Quickly we sped down and stepped forth into another great chamber, bright and echoing. A sentry confronted us.

“Your pass?” he demanded.

I chose to bluster it out. “What kind of idling goes on here?” I snapped at him. “I’m from the Council, to see if the report is true—that you haven’t made all ready for the ambush.”

“But we have,” he protested.

“You give me arguments, you insolent upstart? Where’s your commander?” I turned to face an officer that hurried up. “This sentry needs to be disciplined, taught respect for his superiors,” I scolded. “What have you to say, sir, about the laxity and slowness of work here?”

“But we’re ready and more than ready,” the officer assured me. “Look, sir,” and he pointed. “This whole cavern is dug out to completion, the overhead roof thinned for the explosion. See the play of glares upon it.”

I looked, and nodded as if in sour agreement. The earth floor was a maze of cables and coils, and here and there, strategically placed, were little wheeled stands with mechanisms atop. From each of these beat upward a cone of glaring golden light against the rough ceiling. It blinded me to look at them.

“The glares,” Doriza murmured.

I gazed at the men on duty. “Is nobody armed? What if the Newcomers get in here?”

The officer shook his head. “You know that weapons would be our own destruction. Electro-automatics, disintegrators, ray-sabers—they all give off flame. And a touch of flame in any one of these glare-fields would explode the whole chamber, and the solid soil around it, into atoms.”

I glanced toward the far end. “Up yonder I see no glares.”

“Of course not. Beyond and above is the point that coincides with the narrow approach left for the Newcomers.” The officer studied me narrowly. “If you are from the Council, why are you ignorant of all these things?”

It would be a difficult question to answer plausibly, but I was spared the task. Someone hurried from a little televiso shack and saluted the officer.

“Orders, sir. Important. We’re to withdraw immediately. The Newcomers are advancing, and the forces above will take over operation.”

“Of course,” the officer said, and turned from me to shout commands. Men began to hurry away past us, toward the elevator, eager to quit the post of danger.

“Come, Doriza,” I said softly, and she followed me along a wall. “Here’s one of those explosion mechanisms. If we can bring it between us—”

She did something to turn it off, and we trundled it along on its wheels. I pointed to the spot above which the entry-point was said to be, and toward it we went, unchallenged and unnoticed. We reached the earthy far wall, and it was steep, but with the point of my ray-saber I dug pits for hands and toes. Up I scrambled to the ceiling. There I paused, hanging like a bat.

“Disintegrator,” I called down to her.

“Dare we?”

“We must dare!”

She tossed me the disintegrator pistol. I turned it on and fate favored me once again. No explosion occurred. I tunnelled upward, upward, and climbed up the slanting chimney-like tunnel I made. Moments later, I broke into open air above.

I was in a necklike passage. Lying flat, I looked each way. To one hand was a great cavern, the ambush-space, in which Dondromogon’s warriors were cautiously ranging themselves. Opposite was a wide tunnel, empty as yet—a work of the Newcomers, into which this passage had been invitingly opened by the defenders. I was not observed as, rising to my knees, I tore my cape into strips and knotted them into a line.

I lowered it. “Fasten on the glare-ray,” I told Doriza, and when she had done so I drew it up. After it climbed Doriza herself.

“Now what?” she demanded. “I haven’t had time to ask.”

“Turn on the glare. Like that, yes—set it against one wall, and let it fall on the opposite, to fill this little passageway through which they must pass to fight each other.”

The golden glow sprang into being. At the same moment a shout rose from the direction of the corridor. A patrol of Newcomers appeared, and others behind.

I sprang erect.

“Attention, all!” I roared at the top of my lungs. “Fire no shots, send no rays, or you will all perish in the explosion! You came to fight, exterminate! But I—I, Barak, the foremost fighter on this planet—am here to see that it does not happen!”

And I drew the saber at my side.

VI

I struck a pose as I stood there. I hoped that a grim and heroic attitude might give them pause.

“It’s Barak!” said an officer at the forefront of the Newcomers.

“Barak!” echoed a warrior of Dondromogon. I heard a rattle and clink of weapons.

“Remember,” I made haste to call out, “a bullet or ray will tear this place—and both forces—to bits! I’ll perish, and so will every man on either side, as far as the explosion reaches!”

The Newcomers were only a trifle mystified, but the Dondromogon party, which knew what was beneath us, wavered. Those in the front rank appeared to give back a little. The Newcomers saw this beyond me, and made to move forward. Their officer, he who had recognized me, gestured outward with his arms to make some sort of battle formation. “Rush through,” he said, “and fight it out in the clear beyond.”

“Come on if you dare!” blared an officer of Dondromogon.

“Let nobody dare,” I said, “unless he thinks he can fight his way past me.”

The Newcomers paused in turn. “Barak,” said the officer, “don’t you know us? Don’t you know me?”

I did know him, now that he spoke again. “You’re Harvison, aren’t you?” I hailed him. “Don’t be the first I must kill.” I wheeled around. “My challenge isn’t to the Newcomers alone. I said, nobody shall pass through. My sword, if not my voice, will stop this war, here and now.”

I heard a laugh, deep and familiar. Gederr had come among his troops.

“That’s logic for you!” he mocked me. “Barak was always a man of blood! He’ll kill us all to stop this slaughter. Someone finish him.”

One of his lieutenants spoke to two of the foremost men, who stepped forward, rifles at the ready.

“If they shoot—” began Doriza tremulously.

“If they do, they destroy everyone!” I reminded yet again. “Come, who dares. Swords if you will, but no fire!”

The officer who had given the order stepped between the two soldiers, saber drawn. “Ready to rush,” he said. “My blade, your butts—”

They approached, side by side. Their faces were set, grim. They faltered for only a moment at the entry to the glare field.

In that moment I rushed them.

They hadn’t expected that, three against one. I shouted, and hurled myself at the soldier on the left. He made to dodge, and the officer opposed his own saber; but I spun away from it and before the other soldier knew my mind I was upon him. I could not use the ray in my blade, but it drove past his hastily lifted gun-barrel and struck his mailed shoulder so heavily that he dropped his weapon. Stepping in close, I uppercut him with the curved hilt as with a mailed fist.

Leaping over his falling form, I was upon the officer. A single twist, and I had his saber in my left hand. Two blows sent him staggering back. I parried a blow from the rifle-stock of the remaining soldier with my left-hand blade, while with my right I stabbed him in the side. He, too, retreated, clutching his wound. I waved my blood-streaming weapons.

“Who next?” I called.

Harvison made stout reply:

“You’re mad, Barak. I know I’m no match for you, nobody is—but here I come!”

He came, and his fellows. They all tried to crowd at once into that narrow corridor, and hampered each other. I had a mighty sweep with both my swords, spanning twelve full feet with them—enough for my purpose. At my first parry I turned aside three points at once, disengaged, and got home on poor Harvison, through the shoulder. He sank to one knee, and further impeded his friends. I made a sweeping cut with both blades, and despite themselves they gave back.

“This is monotonous,” I taunted them. “Make it exciting.”

“Rush at his back,” I heard Gederr yelling.

“Careful!” Doriza warned me. And then another voice I knew, deep and stout:

“I won’t let them! Yandro, or Barak, or whoever you are—I’m with you!”

“Klob!” I yelled joyously over my shoulder. “I should have known I could count on you!”

He had rushed, facing about at my very shoulder-blades. I heard the snick of his blade against another weapon. Doriza again cried a warning, to Klob this time, and he scored on his adversary, for he snorted triumphantly. Then the Newcomers surged at me again.

I could not kill my own people. I strove to wound only. Three staggered back, out of the fight, but the others pressed me bravely. Both my swords must be everywhere at once. My breath began to come quickly, my mind floundered here and there for new stratagems. The saving answer came, not from my own brain, but from Klob.

“You!” I heard him address a new adversary. “You want to kill me? Truly?”

“Why—” panted the other. “Why, no—Klob—why kill—”

“You were my friend!” Klob harangued him. “Turn here with me! A chance for an end of war! Will you—won’t you? If not, defend yourself, and I could always fence better—”

“I’m with you, Klob,” the other agreed, rather sullenly. And then he stood by Klob.

At that moment I beat the biggest of my own adversaries to his knees, and the others stood off. I stole a quick glance around. Klob had been joined by his late opponent, a short but well-knit warrior armed with both sword and rifle. It gave me hope and an inspiration.

“Fools!” I said, pointing my swords. “You won’t trust me, when I only want to help you, and these other fools who have been fighting you! You can’t conquer me! So join me!”

“Why?”

That was Harvison, again on his feet, holding a bloody hand to his wound. The query was enough to slow up the others. They listened, and I had time and wit to reply.

“A handful of rulers, with blind ambition, caused the war. They’re mostly gone. I want peace, a chance to bring both sides together.”

“Stop his traitor mouth!” cried someone far back.

“Who’s afraid to hear?” I yelled. “You almost walked into a trap, and I stopped you. These defenders have mined the cavern beyond—”

“He tells the truth, you Newcomers!” Klob seconded me. “If you can’t understand truth and tell it from lies—look out, they come!”

He meant his own late comrades. Gederr had urged a fresh body at us.

“Quick!” I cried. “They heard me tell of their ambush, they want to silence me! Won’t anyone help!”

“I will,” gurgled Harvison, wounded as he was. He stepped past me, sword in his left hand, and engaged a Dondromogon warrior. Another big Newcomer leaped forward to do likewise. I seized my opportunity.

“Don’t move without my order!” I addressed the remainder of Harvison’s party, as if they were my allies again. “These defenders have the advantage of you in their planted explosives!”

“Then destroy them some other way,” growled an under-officer.

I whirled toward the Dondromogon front. The attackers fell back.

“You still scare any man you look at, Barak,” said Harvison. He was a little tottery from loss of blood, but game. “Well, shall we charge?” He managed a grin.

“I’ve been trying to keep you from doing that,” I groaned. “I don’t want tragedy here and extermination afterward. Can’t this world stand peace—”

“If you can do it,” someone said behind me, “I give you full authority.”

I knew him. He was Dr. Thorald—high in the Newcomer command. With him were the other leaders, Parkeson and Captain Cross.

“Danger!” I gasped at them. “Don’t come through here. Doriza, see that they do not—” I looked for her. She was not there.

“She slipped away while we fought,” said Klob. “First setting the glare-lamp to run—”

My heart sank. “Which way did she go? Toward the Newcomers, or toward Dondromogon?”

“Toward Dondromogon,” he said, and my heart sank the rest of the way.

She had decided to betray me after all.

“Wait here, all,” I commanded, and moved clear of the glare-field. Moved straight toward the host of Dondromogon.

Gederr laughed again. I could read his thoughts. He had clinched his own power by judicious murders. Now he thought I was in his hands. “Shoot him down,” he bade.

“Let no man shoot,” I warned. “A pellet flying past me will strike and set off the glare-field. It’s still swords, and in the open we can use their rays.”

I flicked on my own. The blade glowed like hot iron.

“Come and fight,” I invited. “All of you. Or withdraw and explode this trap on me alone.”

“He’s tired of life,” snarled Gederr, hidden in the ranks.

“I’m tired of this fighting,” was my reply. “If I die alone, the Newcomer force remains intact. It can move upon you and force you to peace. Men of Dondromogon, overthrow this coward tyrant Gederr, who defends his pride and power with your bodies!”

I think they indicated that they knew the truth of that, and Gederr knew it, too. At any rate, he moved boldly to reestablish his influence.

“I’ll prove he lies! I hide nowhere!” The words fairly rang out. “Retreat, quickly, to the positions behind. Leave me to face him.”

They fell back, quickly and orderly. Of a sudden I found myself in that big cave, and Gederr before me, no more than twenty paces distant. He held his ray-saber, glowing and ready, in his right hand. In his left was some sort of silvery cylinder. He grinned murderously.

“You offer yourself as a sacrifice,” he said, “and I accept you.”

I moved toward him, my body in line with the glare-field.

“You overgrown bully-swordsman,” he taunted. “An ounce of my brain can defeat a ton of your big lumpy muscles.”

“Explode the mine,” I said. “It will take us both. You can’t retreat out of both my reach and the explosion’s.”

“Can’t I?”

He held up his cylinder. “Here’s the fuse. By remote control it can set off all, or any part I select. Understand before you die, Barak. I’ll blow up a small area, and you with it, as soon as you set foot where I want.”

His broad face sniggered. “Oh, you’ve played into my hands from the first! You tried to disrupt—you only gave me an excuse to wipe out the rest of that Council, and take all power for myself. Now I’ll kill you. Will you come on? Or retreat, and die as you flee? Or just stand there, like a captive statue?”

I continued my advance upon him. “You’re lying,” I said, but my heart told me that for once he was not.

“Your life is in my hands,” he said. “You don’t know what moment will see your own feet carrying you to your death. Come, pursue me, brave Barak, stupid Barak. Let your last thought be this—your death helps me immeasurably.”

“You’re lying,” I said again, and he laughed again.

“Reflect. Let your thick skull filter these facts. I shall destroy you. To my followers I will be a hero. Your own Newcomers will pause and wonder. I can reorder my defenses, and most of the planted mines will remain to check any advance—”

Forgetting all caution, all planning, I charged him. He turned and ran like Dondromogon’s outer winds.

But I had taken no more than half a dozen steps in pursuit when all the thunders and lightnings of the universe seemed to burst around me.

I fell, swiftly and deeply, into black nothingness.

I was able to establish which way was up, which down, and that I lay horizontally, as if floating in liquid or upon clouds. My ears hummed a trifle, and a voice spoke.

“He will be all right.”

Dr. Thorald! I opened my eyes, and they were blurred. I lifted a hand to them, and moaned despite myself.

“Were you killed, too?” I muttered.

“Killed? Not me. Nobody was killed, except that fat pig you met in the cavern. Not enough of him left to make a funeral worth while.” Thorald looked behind him. “Ahoy, Parkeson! Cross! Barak’s going to be all right.”

The other two heads of the Newcomer expedition pushed into view, and looked down upon me where I lay.

“High time,” grumbled Parkeson. “They’re yelling for him—both sides. Barak, you’ll have to drop all your weapons and take up political economy. I greatly fear you’ll have a world to run.”

“World?” I echoed stupidly. “What world?” My head cleared a bit. “Where’s Doriza?”

“The fighting’s over,” Parkeson soothed me. “Just as you forced it to be. I’m still trying to decide whether you were an epic hero or an epic idiot, there at the crossways of battle, making us all stop, or fight you! But your hunch paid off. The entire Council of Dondromogon is dead, and—”

“Doriza,” I said again.

“Somebody named Klob, a sturdy soldierly chap, is taking charge. An old sneak named Sporr tried to foment a counter-rising, but Klob disintegrated him. However, the army of Dondromogon still holds an inner defense—says it doesn’t trust us quite. Wants only you to assure it that we mean peace. Feel like getting up, Barak?”

Dr. Thorald leaned over. “You’ve engineered this yourself, Barak, or maybe you didn’t engineer it—maybe you only bulled it through. So I won’t put words in your mouth, or thoughts in your head. But tell those deluded people to start by trusting us. And you know that they can. Nobody wanted war less than I. Peacetime endeavor on Dondromogon is quite difficult and exciting enough.”

“Doriza,” I said yet again, and then, “All right, gentlemen. You won’t tell me about her. Maybe you don’t dare. But how did I survive?”

“Oh, that?” put in Captain Cross. “Don’t you know? The explosion was set off prematurely, to trap and destroy Gederr. It blew him to atoms, but you were clear of it. You had a bad tumble into the lower chamber—”

Now I sat up. “Never tell me that he bungled it that badly! Gederr was a tyrant and coward and murderer, but not a bungler!”

“He was to some extent. Is your head clear? Now we can begin to explain.”

Cross subsided, and Dr. Thorald took up the tale: “We sent a spy among them, a long time back, a spy that would pretend to be renegading from us. The spy was good, but got a rather visionary idea, like your own—that peace was better than war between us.”

“Practically treason,” opined Parkeson sagely.

“We might have held a court-martial and an execution,” went on Dr. Thorald, “but for you. Because you seemed to plan out all this Horatius-at-the-bridge coup. And just when we thought it had achieved success—we thought you were failing.”

“And up bobs our ex-spy, and sets off the explosion,” chimed in Cross. “Sets it off to destroy Gederr and save you. And that left them without a leader to order battle, and they were more than glad to talk peace.”

“What,” I growled, “has all this to do with Doriza?”

“Why,” grinned Dr. Thorald, “they’re yelling for her, too, to lead in the final peace talks. Because, you see, she was our spy, our pseudo-renegade, who set off the explosion!”

Doriza came forward to where I had sagged back on the pillows. At sight of her smile, I thought no more of strife and wounds and worries.

All Were Monsters

“I’ve watched you in the sky,” I whispered, staring in shocked disbelief at the humanoid male from the little space ship. “For three nights, with my telescope.” I gestured toward the roof where the instrument stood. “I made it myself, and I can see the rings of Saturn and Jupiter’s moons. I live alone on this farm, and—” I stopped abruptly, telling myself I was quite mad to think that he could understand me.

“Oh, but I can,” he said instantly. In the gloom he looked just the way you’d expect an inhabitant of another world would look, from his long, thin, snug-garmented arms and legs to his high domed forehead. “I know how to communicate telepathically with your kind,” he said. That made sense, but the rest of it didn’t.

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “The first ship from another world! Why didn’t the big observatories report on your coming?”

“They didn’t see me,” was his measured reply.

“But if my crude, homemade telescope picked you out—”

“I didn’t want them to see me,” he explained patiently. “Too much attention would have been exhausting. I wanted to start, quietly, with you. Long before I set down on your world I decided on you, with your telescope and your lonely home out here away from any densely populated area. Let’s go in.”

As I led him toward my back door I still couldn’t grasp it. He looked too patly like the popular conception of a creature from another planet.

“You can’t grasp it,” he said. “I look too patly like the popular conception of a creature from another planet.”

“You can read my mind?” I gasped, forgetting that he’d just informed me that he had telepathic powers.

“And I can speak your language. As to my appearance—I have adopted a synthetic disguise to avoid startling you too much. If you saw and heard me as I really am, you’d refuse to believe in my existence.”

I opened the kitchen door for him. Inside, his snug garments shone metal-bright. He had large, glowing eyes, and his thin face seemed inscrutably observant and somehow very wise. Just as I closed the door behind us, he goggled upward, and shrank back as though terrified.

“What’s that?” he gasped.

“A moth,” I replied. “It was drawn to the electric light.”

Snatching the little creature out of the air, I crushed it in my fingers and dropped it on the table.

“You did that almost instinctively,” he said. “And ruthlessly.”

“It was only a moth,” I said.

“That was the first time I ever saw a violent death,” he told me. “I’d heard of it, but only as it happens on your world. You see, we’ve studied you, far across space, but we didn’t know you had these little living things—moths, as you call them.”

Looking at him, I wondered if he really was what he claimed to be—an inhabitant of another world.

“I’ll convince you,” he read my mind again, “and you’ll help me convince others. I have thought of a way to make you believe—a scientific way. Gold-making puzzles you, doesn’t it?”

He seated himself at the kitchen table, and drew toward him a tarnished fork. From his belt-pouch he took a small object resembling a saltshaker and sprinkled dull dust on the utensil. Pouching the shaker, he produced a tiny black vial and carefully trickled liquid on the dust. He twiddled the fork briefly, then held it out. It gleamed yellow, and weighed heavy in my hand. To outward appearance, at least, it was gold.

“What else?” he asked. “Restoring the dead to life?”

Again he produced a vial, and shook a single drop of yellow liquid on the crushed body of the moth. From a tiny syringe, he blew a cloud of vapor. Finally he turned a red glow, like a miniature flashlight, on the insect. Then he shrank back in his chair, for the moth had stirred, and was fluttering up to the light.

Again I swiftly caught and crushed it, and he relaxed. “You’re afraid of your own gift of life,” I said.

He shook his big head. “We’ve studied only your civilized race. We knew of no other living things—uncivilized, uncontrolled. Forgive me if I seem nervous.”

“How did you study us?” I asked.

Closemouthed, he smiled. “We use mechanisms of awareness. Without optical or auditory experience of you we have familiarized ourselves with even your slipshod, fantastic notions about other worlds. That is why I look and speak as I do, to conform with your notions. I even rigged my vehicle to resemble your mental picture of a spaceship, recognizable to your preconception. I can even achieve complete invisibility. I’ll show myself only to scholars and scientists of your choosing.”

“What name shall I give you?” I asked.

“You could not speak my real name. You may call me Provvorr. That sounds like the name of someone from another world—to you.”

“Where is your world, Provvorr?” I asked. “What is it like?”

“It’s far from your System. We’ll reach a point of en rapportment which will enable you to understand its location. But it is more important that I first know about you.”

I sat down opposite him. “Do you intend to make war upon us?” I asked. “Have you drawn up a plan of conquest?”

Shaking his head, he smiled again. “We have no such plan. We don’t understand killing and conquering. But when I bring my people back, we must understand how to survive here. Our world is overcrowded, exhausted. We’ll colonize this one.”

“But you just said,” I reminded him gently, “that you didn’t want to conquer us.”

Again he smiled. “When we come back you won’t be here, any of you. Our observers give your race something like two of your decades in which to destroy yourselves.”

I looked at him in tight-lipped silence. It was no new idea. Most thinking people agree that we’re on the doorstep of self-extermination. But Provvorr came out with it so facilely, like someone who knows that an apartment will be vacant for him by the first of the month. Only a quite insane mind—

“I’m completely sane,” he assured me.

“You can predict the future. Is that it?”

“Anyone can predict the future who makes a careful, scientific study of the present and the past. Your race will be gone, except for a few scattered survivors, by the time I bring back enough of my people to populate this world.”

He looked at me as he spoke.

“Is there no hope for us then?” I asked. Then I realized with horror that I was accepting his prediction at face value, and almost shouted at him. “This is our world. Do you hear? Ours, not yours.”

“Why begrudge it to me and mine after you leave it empty?” he asked. Then he started violently, staring. “What’s that?”

My sharp voice had summoned Skip, my bull terrier. Entering the kitchen, he stationed himself beside the stove, and he looked at Provvorr.

“It’s just my dog,” I said. “He always gets excited when I raise my voice.”

“This isn’t at all what I expected,” Provvorr said shakily.

Skip stood stiff-legged a yard from Provvorr, and growled almost savagely.

“Get him out of here,” Provvorr pleaded.

“Down, Skip,” I commanded. “That’s it, old fellow. Calm now—” Skip sat down, his eyes still on Provvorr. “There, he won’t harm you,” I said. “He knows you’re frightened, and that makes him foolhardy.”

“But I tried to go invisible,” Provvorr said. “I tried to vanish completely from his consciousness. It should have worked, but—he knows I’m here.”

Provvorr quivered. I stared at him, amazed. “I thought you had pretty thorough impressions of our world.”

“Only of your chief activities and preoccupations. Nothing about the hideous, monstrous creatures you call dogs.”

“Perhaps we take dogs too much for granted,” I said. “We should not. They’re our friends.”

“But they’re so—so repellently alien,” he protested. “Not your kind at all.”

I stared at him. “Don’t you have pets and other animals on your world?”

“My people are the only inhabitants,” he explained. “Once there were others—strange and terrifyingly different. So long ago that we see only their remains in our sedimentary rocks.”

His shoulders twitched nervously. I recalled how he’d acted about the moth, and began to understand the creepy strangeness which was making him quake.

“Are there many dogs like this one?” he asked apprehensively.

“Almost everybody has a dog,” I replied. “Or a cat.”

“What is a cat?” he asked, but there was no need for me to enlighten him.

Oscar strolled in after Skip, a four-footed perambulating muff. He sat beside Skip, his green eyes on Provvorr. He purred like an outboard motor. I thought Provvorr would leap out through the window glass.

“A cat,” he said. “You keep him for—what purpose?”

I tried to be reassuring. “Just for his company and respectability. Of course, he catches mice.”

“What are mice?”

As I told him, his face grew tense and sick.

“All are monsters,” he said. “Your world breeds a horrible variety of abnormal creatures. We thought you were like us—a single living species, subduing a planet to your will. These other things are—uncivilized.”

I was quite sure the word didn’t mean exactly what he wanted it to mean. Skip and Oscar were civilized enough, if it came to that. I think he meant that they were uncanny, beyond those mechanisms of awareness he was accustomed to.

“They won’t hurt you,” I assured him. “Watch while I feed them. You’ll see how friendly they are.”

I took a plate of leftover pork roast from the refrigerator and with a sharp kitchen knife I shaved off scraps. Oscar and Skip accepted the repast with well-bred relish.

“What are they eating?” Provvorr wanted to know.

“Meat,” I said. “Animal food—pork.”

“We make our food from the elements,” Provvorr said.

“Synthetics,” I nodded, understandingly. “You’d have to, with no domestic food animals.”

“From what animal does that food come?” I described a pig. Then in more colorful detail, a steer. He drummed his tapering fingers on the table.

“Your world swarms with hideous life,” he repeated.

“It all depends on how you look at it,” I said. “We’re used to it.”

“I’m not.”

“Therefore it gives you the creeps. The way I’d feel in a roomful of snakes.”

“What are snakes?”

I told him. He asked more questions, and I spoke of rabbits that scampered across fields; of fish swarming in streams, and lakes and oceans; of birds in the air; elephants and lions and tigers. He listened, in a silence that grew ever more ominous around him.

“Your planet is infested,” he said. “This is terrible.”

“Why terrible?” I asked, really wanting to know.

He looked sidelong at Skip and Oscar, their sharp white teeth busy with the pork. “Monsters can’t be rationalized. I can’t read their minds. I can’t disappear from them. They are utterly new to my experience.”

They really are terrifying to him, I thought. Like ghosts. …

“What are ghosts?” he demanded, instantly.

“Strange, mysterious beings that ignorant people believe in,” I said. “Spirits of dead creatures, of evil intelligences, lurking and spying, ready to do harm.”

“Are they animals,” said Provvorr.

“No,” I told him. “Ghosts are imaginary. Animals are real.”

“Animals,” he said, “are evil intelligences, lurking and spying, ready to do harm.”

“Nonsense, Provvorr,” I tried to reassure him. “Animals know us for their masters. We’ve won mastery over them.”

“But your race kills and conquers,” he said. “Mine doesn’t. That’s why these creatures don’t think I’m a master. And when your race destroys itself, these other races will remain here—”

He rose, shrinking away from Skip and Oscar. “Have you a light to show me to my ship?” he asked.

I took a flashlight and escorted him from the house. Skip and Oscar watched us from the door, in quiet unconcern.

Out in the field beside his ship, Provvorr looked wan in the flashlight’s beam. “Goodbye,” he said. “We won’t attempt to colonize this monster-thronged world. It’s as you said. We would feel as you would feel among snakes. I can understand that feeling as it is registered in your mind.”

“Then,” I said, “if my race ends the way you say, the world will belong to animals. Perhaps dogs will rule—or cats, or mice. Home folks, anyway. Maybe they’ll do better than we could ever hope to do.”

“Since we won’t come here,” said Provvorr, “would you like to know how to avoid destroying yourself?”

“How?” I cried eagerly.

His smile was tight as he studied me carefully. “When I tell you, it will seem simple.”

And how simple it seemed as he told me, just before he left. So simple, the way to stop wars and conquests and destruction—I hope it won’t sound ridiculous when I pass it on to the United Nations.

Half Around Pluto

Their glassite space helmets fogged, and their metal glove joints stiffened in the incredible surface cold: but the two men who could work finished their job. In the black sky glistened the little arclight of the sun, a sixteen-hundredth of the blaze that fell on Earth. Around them sulked Pluto’s crags and gullies, sheathed with the hard-frozen pallor that had been Pluto’s atmosphere, eons ago.

From the wrecked cylinder of the scout rocket they had dragged two interior girders, ready-curved at the ends. These, clamped side by side with transverse brackets and decked with bulkhead metal, managed to look like a sled.

At the rear they set a salvaged engine unit. For steering, they rigged a boom shaft to warp the runners right or left. For cargo, they piled the sled with full containers, ration boxes, the foil tent, what instruments they could detach and carry, armfuls of heat-tools, a crowbar, a hatchet, a few other items.

Moving back from the finished work, one of them stumbled against the other. Instantly the two puffy, soot-black shapes were crouched, gloved fists up, fierce in the system’s duskiest corner.

Then the moment passed. Warily, helmets turned toward each other, they went back in the half-stripped wreck.

In the still airtight control room, lighted by one bulb, their officer stirred on his bedstrip. His tunic had been pulled off, his broken left arm and collarbone set and splinted. Under a fillet of bandage, his gaunt young face looked pale, but he had his wits back.

“The appropriate question,” he said, “is ‘What happened?’ ”

The two men were removing their helmets. “Conked and crashed, sir,” said Jenks, the smaller one, uncovering a sallow, hollow-cheeked face.

Lieutenant Wofforth sat up, supporting himself on his sound arm. “How long have I been out?”

“Maybe forty hours, sir. Delirious. Corbett and me did the best we could. Take it easy, sir,” he said as Wofforth began to get up. “Lie back. We’ve done what Emergency Plan Six says—bolted a sled together and coupled on a sound engine unit for power.”

“Quite a haul back to base,” said Wofforth, almost cheerfully. His eyes were bright, as though he savored the idea. “About halfway around Pluto. We’d better start now, or they’ll get tired of waiting.”

“They’ve gone, sir,” Corbett growled before Jenks could gesture him to silence. He was beefy, slit-eyed. “We saw the jets going sunward this morning.”

Wofforth winced. “Gone,” he said. “That’s right. I didn’t stop to think. You said forty hours. … They couldn’t wait that long. We’re past opposition already, getting farther away all the time. They had to go, or they wouldn’t have made it.”

He stood up uncertainly and reached for his ripped tunic. Corbett stepped over and helped him slide his uninjured arm into the right sleeve, then to fasten and drape the tunic over his splinted left arm and shoulder.

“We’ll just have to get back to Base Camp and wait,” said Wofforth grimly.

“Sir,” said Jenks, “our radio is gone. I tried to patch it up, but it was gone. When they didn’t get a signal, they must have thought—”

“Nonsense!” Wofforth broke in. “They’ll have left us supplies. They couldn’t wait, signal or none. Our job is to get back, and stick it out there until they come for us.”

He sat at the control and began to write in the log book. Corbett and Jenks drifted together at the other end of the room.

“You meat-head,” snarled Jenks under his breath. “You knew he took the berth to Pluto because the first mate was a lady—Lya Stromminger.”

“He had to know they were gone,” protested Corbett, equally fierce.

“Not flat like you gave it. He came here to be with her. Now she’s jetted away without him. How does a man feel when a woman’s done that—”

“Stop blathering, you two, and help me into my suit,” called Wofforth, rising again. “We’re going to rev up that sled engine and get out of here!”

Outside, the sled lay ready under the frigid sky. Wofforth tramped around it, leaned over and poked the load.

“Too much,” said his voice in their radios. “Keep the synthesizer, the tent, these two ration boxes. Wait, keep the crowbar and the hatchet. Dump the rest.”

“We travel that light, sir?” said Jenks doubtfully.

“I’ve been figuring,” said Wofforth. “We’re on the far side of Pluto from Base Camp. That makes ten thousand miles, more or less. Pluto’s day is nineteen hours and a minute or so, Earth time. We can travel only by what they humorously call daylight. And we’d better get there in ten days—a thousand miles every nine and a half hours—or maybe we won’t get there at all.”

“How’s that, sir?” asked Corbett.

“The heaters in these suits,” Wofforth reminded him. “Two hundred and forty hours of efficiency, and that’s all. Well, it’s noon. Let’s take off.”

His voice shook. He was still weak. Jenks helped him sit on the two lashed ration boxes, and slung a mooring strap across his knees. Then Jenks took the steering boom, and Corbett bent to start the engine.

When the arclight sun set in the west, they had traveled more than four hours over country not too rugged to slow them much. Darkness closed in fast while Jenks and Corbett pitched the pyramidal tent of metal foil and clamped it down solidly. They spread and zipped in the ground fabric, set up lights and heater inside, and began to pipe in thawed gases from the drifts outside.

After their scanty meal, Corbett and Jenks sought their bedstrips, on opposite sides of the tent. Wofforth tended the atomic heater for minutes, until the sound of deep breathing told him that his companions were asleep.

Then he put on his spacesuit, clumsy with his single hand to close seams. He picked up sextant and telescope, and slipped out into the Plutonian night.

It was as utterly black as the bottom of a pond of ink. But above Wofforth shone the faithful stars, in the constellations mapped by the first stargazers of long ago. He made observations, checked for time and position. He chuckled inside his helmet, as though congratulating himself. Back in the tent, he opened the log book and wrote:

First day: Course due west. Run 410 mi. To go 9,590 mi. approx. Supplies adeq. Spirits good.

Wriggling out of his space gear, he lay down, asleep almost before his weary limbs relaxed.

Everyone was awake before dawn. They made coffee on the heater, and broke out protein biscuits for breakfast.

As the tiny sun winked into view over the horizon, they loaded the sled. Corbett slouched toward the idling engine at the tail of the sled.

“No, get on amidships,” said Wofforth. “I’ll take over engine.”

“My job—” began Corbett.

“You’re relieved. Strap yourself on the ration boxes. That’s right. Jenks, steer again. Make for the level ahead.”

With his right hand Wofforth ran a length of pliable cable around his waist and through a ring-bolt on the decking. He touched the engine controls, and they pulled away from camp.

The sled coursed over great knoll-like swellings of the terrain, coated with the dull-pale frozen atmosphere. Beyond, it gained speed on a vast flat plain, almost as smooth as a desert of glass.

“What’s this big rink. Lieutenant?” asked Jenks.

“Maybe a sea, or maybe just a sunken area, full of solid gases. Stand by the helm, I’m going to gun a few more M.P.H. out of her.”

“No wind,” grunted Corbett. “Nothing moving except us. The floor of hell.”

“If you was in hell, the rest of us would be better off,” said Jenks sourly.

Wofforth began to sing, though he did not feel like it:

Trim your nails and scrape your face,
They’re all on the Other Side of space!
Tokyo—Baltimore, Maryland—
Hong Kong—Paris—Samarkand—
Tokyo—London—Troy—Fort Worth—
The happy towns of the Planet Earth …

At camp that night he wrote in the log book:

Second Day: Course due west. Run 1,014 mi. To go 8,576 mi. approx. Supplies adeq. Spirits fair. …

“What’s for supper?” bawled Corbett, entering. “I could eat a horse.”

“That’d be cannibalism,” said Jenks at once.

“Yah, you splinter! Don’t eat any lizards, then.”

Spirits good, Wofforth corrected his entry, and closed the log book. He thought of Lya Stromminger. She was a most efficient officer. Her hair was black as night on Pluto, and her eyes as bright as the faraway sun.

Wofforth wrote in his log book:

Fifth day: Course north, west, then southwest. Curving thru mountainous territory. Run 1,066 mi. but direct progress toward base camp not exceeding 950. To go, 6,260 mi. approx. Supplies short. Spirits fair.

He wrote in his log book:

Seventh day: Course west, southwest, west, northwest, west. Run 1,108 mi. To go 4,090 mi. approx. Supplies low. Spirits fair.

He wrote in his log book:

Ninth day: Course northwest by west, west. Run 1,108 mi. To go 2,030 mi. approx. Supplies low. Spirits low. …

“Lieutenant,” said Jenks from across the tent, as Wofforth closed the book.

“Well?”

“We know you’re in command. This party and all of Pluto. But we ask permission to state our case.”

“What case is your case?” demanded Wofforth, rising. “I’m doing my best to get you back to Base Camp.”

“Sure,” said Corbett. “Sure. But why Base Camp?”

“You know why.”

“That’s right, we know why,” agreed Jenks, and Corbett grinned in his ten days’ tussock of beard.

“They’ll have left supplies for us,” Wofforth went on. “Shelter and food and fuel and instruments. They’ll expect us to reach Base Camp and hold it down for the next attempt to reach Pluto.”

“We know why,” repeated Jenks. “And that’s not why, lieutenant. Let me talk, sir. It’s a dead man talking.”

“You won’t die,” snapped Wofforth. “I’ll get you both there alive.”

He stepped to where, in one corner, he had managed a bath—a hollow in the frozen ground, lined by pushing the floor fabric into it. From the heater he ran tepid, clean water into it. He clipped a mirror to the tent foil, searched out an automatic razor, and began to shave his own dark young thatch of beard.

“You’re proving my point, lieutenant,” said Jenks. “Policing up your face to look pretty.”

“Why not?” growled Wofforth, mowing another swath of whiskers.

“No reason why not. Ten, twenty years from now they’ll find your body—whenever the inner orbits get to where they can boom off another expedition. You’ll look young and clean-shaved. You know who’ll weep.”

Wofforth lowered the razor in his good hand and glared at the two. They grinned in the bright light opposite him. They looked as if they hoped he’d see the joke.

“I said it’s a dying man that’s talking,” said Jenks again. “Won’t you let me say my dying say, lieutenant? Let’s all die honest.”

“I’m going to get you there,” Wofforth insisted.

“Ah, now,” said Corbett, as though persuading a naughty child. “You think they’ve left twenty years’ worth of supplies to keep us going? The ship didn’t carry that much, even if they left it all.” He grinned mirthlessly. “I can figure what you’re figuring, lieutenant,” he went on, with a touch of Jenks’ sly manner. “You die, young and brave. You’ll shave up again before you lie down and let go. And when the next shipload arrives there’ll be you, lying like a statue of your good-looking young self, frozen stiff. Am I right?”

Corbett was right, Wofforth admitted to himself. The man was more than a great meaty lump, after all, to see another man’s unspoken thought so clearly.

“Then,” Jenks took it up, “First Mate Lya Stromminger will have a look. She may command the new expedition. She’ll be promoted away up to Admiral or higher—twenty years of brilliant service—gone gray around the edges, but still a lovely lady. There you’ll lie before her eyes, young and brave as you was when she deserted you. She’ll cry, won’t she? And hot tears can’t thaw you out or wake you up—”

“Shut your heads, both of you!” shouted Wofforth, so fierce and loud that the foil tent wall vibrated as with a gale in the airless night.

But they had guessed true. He’d wanted to be found at Base Camp. He’d wanted Lya Stromminger to know, some day, that she’d blasted off and left behind the man most worthy of all men on all worlds. …

“Everybody takes a hot bath tonight,” said Wofforth. “We’ll all sleep better for it. Tomorrow’s our last day on the trail.”

“To do two thousand miles?” said Jenks.

“To do all of that. The expedition mapped an area at least that wide around Base Camp, and it’s slick and smooth. We can almost slide in.”

“All slick and smooth but just this side of Base Camp, lieutenant,” said Jenks.

“How do you mean?”

“That string of craters. Don’t you remember? It’s just this side—east of Base Camp. This sled’ll never go over that, sir.”

“Nor around,” Corbett put in. “We’d have to detour maybe three thousand miles. And the heaters in our suits won’t last.”

“I know about the craters,” said Wofforth. “Well take care of them when we reach them.”

Stripping, he lowered his body into the makeshift tub and began to scrub himself one-handed.

He wakened in the morning to the sound of furious argument.

Corbett and Jenks, of course. A trifle—division of the breakfast ration, or of the breakfast chores—had set off their nerves like trains of explosive. Even as Wofforth rose from his bedstrip, Corbett swung a cobble-like fist at Jenks’ gaunt, grimacing face. The nimbler, smaller man ducked and sidled away. Corbett took a lumbering step to close in on his enemy, and Jenks darted a hand to his belt behind, then brought it forward again with an electro-automatic pistol.

“I’ve been keeping this for you!” Jenks shrilled. “I’ll just diminish the population of Pluto by thirty-three and one-third percent!”

“Hold it!” bellowed Wofforth.

He was too late. A stream of bullets chattered through Corbett’s body, folding him over and ripping through the paper-thin wall of the tent. Air whistled out; the tent began to collapse.

Jenks, pinned under Corbett’s body, was squealing like a pig. “Lieutenant, help me—!”

Wofforth saw in an instant that the wall could not be patched in time; the bullets had torn loose an irregular strip, pressure had done the rest: even now, the tent was only a few seconds away from complete collapse. As he stumbled across the floor toward the spacesuits, his heart was laboring and his chest straining for breath. Spots swam in front of his eyes. He found the topmost spacesuit by touch, and fumbled for the helmet. The tent drifted down on his head in soft, murderous folds. He opened the valve, shoved his face into the helmet, and gulped precious oxygen. His dulled awareness brightened again, momentarily; but he knew he was still a dead man unless he could get into the suit before pressure fell completely. Numbed fingers plucked at the suit opening. Somehow he got the awkward garment over his legs, closed and locked the torso, pulled down the helmet. …

He was lying in darkness, with a low, steady hiss of oxygen in his ears. He rolled over weakly, got to his feet. He turned on his helmet light. He was propping up a gray cave of metal foil, that fell in stiff creases all around him. At his feet were the bodies of Jenks and Corbett. Both were dead.

After a while, clumsily, painfully, he dragged the two corpses free of the tent. He found the heater and thawed a hole in the frozen surface, big enough for both. He tumbled them in, then undercut the edges of the hole with the heater, so that chunks fell in and covered them. While he watched, the cloud of vapor he had made began to settle, slowly congealing on the broken surface and blurring it over again. In a year, there would be no mark here to show that the surface had been disturbed. In a thousand years, it would still be the same.

In the first ray of dawn he flung all supplies from the sled except the fuel containers. He checked the engine, and started it.

Into his belt-bag he thrust the log book. Nothing else went aboard the sled—no food, no water container, no tools, instruments or oxygen tanks. The tent he left lying there, with all that had been carried inside the night before.

As the sun rose clear of the distant rim of the plain to eastward, he rigged a line to the steering boom, then lashed himself securely within reach of the engine. Steering by the taut line, he started westward, slowly at first, then faster. It was as he had hoped. The lightened sled attained and held a greater speed than on any previous day.

“I’ll make it,” he said aloud, with nobody else to listen on all Pluto. “I’ll make it!”

Faster he urged the engine’s rhythm, and faster. He clocked its speed by the indicators on the housing. A hundred and fifty miles an hour. A hundred and sixty; not enough. Whipping the boom line tight around his waist to hold his course steady, he sighted between the upcurve of the runner forward. There was level, smooth-frozen country, mile upon mile. He speeded up to one hundred and seventy-five miles an hour. More. The sled hummed at every joining.

At noon, he had done a good thousand miles. At midafternoon, sixteen hundred. Two and a half hours of visibility left, and more than four hundred miles to go.

“I can do those on my head,” muttered Wofforth to himself, and then, far in the distance, the flat rim of the horizon was flat no longer.

It had sprung up jagged, full of points and bulges. Speeding toward it, he steered by the line around his waist while he cut his engine. He came close at fifty miles an hour, almost a crawl.

Some ancient volcanic action had thrown up those mountains, like a rank of close-drawn sentries. The sled could not cross them anywhere. Still reducing speed, Wofforth drew close to a notch, but the notch gave into a crater, a great shallow saucer two miles in diameter and filled with shadows below, so that Wofforth could not gauge its depth. Opposite, another notch—perhaps once the crater had been a lake, with water running in and out. If he had come there at noon, he could have seen the bottom, and perhaps—

“But it isn’t noon.” Wofforth was talking to himself again. His voice sounded thin and petulant in his own ears. “By noon tomorrow, the heat will be out of this suit.”

He stopped the sled, unlashed himself and trudged to the notch. He stood in it, looking down, then across.

The little bright jewel of the sun, sagging toward the horizon, showed him the upper reaches of the crater’s interior, pitched at an angle of perhaps fifty degrees.

Even if it had been noon, it would have been no use. The sled could never climb a slope like that.

Then he looked again, this way and that. He nodded inside his helmet.

He might as well try.

Returning to the sled, he started the engine and lashed himself fast again. He steered away from the crater, and around. He made a great looping journey of twenty miles or so across the plain, building speed all the time.

As he rounded the rear curve of his course, he was driving along at two hundred and sixty miles an hour, and he had to apply pressure to the boom with both hand and knees to point the sled back straight for the notch. Straightening his humming vehicle into a headlong course, he leaned forward and sighted between the upcurved runners.

“Now!” he urged himself, and watched the break in the crater wall rush toward him.

It greatened, yawned. He leaped through, and with a groaning gasp of prayer he dragged the boom over to steer the sled right.

It worked, as he had not dared hope. The runners bounced, bit. Then he was racing around the inside of the great cup’s rim, like a hurtling bubble on the inner surface of a whirlpool’s funnel. Two miles across, three miles and more on the half diameter—the engine laboring up to three hundred miles an hour, centrifugal force holding it there—

Little more than thirty seconds raced by when he knew he had won. He saw the far notch growing near. He came to it in a last booming rush, and hurled his whole weight against the boom to face the runners into the notch.

Under the low-dropping sun, he and his sled shot into open country beyond the range.

His right arm felt dead from shoulder to fingertip. His head roared and drummed with the racing of his blood. His face had tired spots in it, where muscles he had never used before had locked into an agonized grimace.

On he sped, straight west, gasping and gurgling and mumbling in crazy triumph.

An hour, an anticlimactic hour wherein the sled almost steered itself over the smoothest of plain, and up ahead he spied the black outline of Base Camp.

It was a sprawling, low structure, prefabricated metal and plastic and insulation, black outside to gather what heat might come from outer space. It held aloof on the dull frozen plain from the irregular stain where the expedition ship had braked off with one set of rockets and had soared away with another set. Larger, more familiar, grew Base Camp with each second of approach. Shakily Wofforth cut his engine, slowed from high speed to medium, to a hundred miles an hour, to sixty, to fifty. He made a final circle around Base Camp, and let it coast in with the engine off, to within twenty yards of the main lock panel.

He got up, on legs that shook inside his boots. He felt his heart still racing, his head still ringing. He sighed once, and walked close, his gauntlet fumbling at the release button on the lock panel.

But the button did not respond.

“Jammed,” he said. “No—locked.”

He couldn’t get in. He had reached Base Camp, but he could not get in. They hadn’t counted on his return. They’d gone off and left Base Camp locked up.

He sagged against the lock panel, and cursed once, with an utter and furious resignation.

He felt himself slipping. He was going to faint. His legs would not hold him up. He was slipping forward—seemed to be sinking into the massive and unyielding outer surface of Base Camp. It was a dream. Or it was death.

He did not lose all hold on his awareness. He had a sense of lying at full length, and blinding light flashes that made his eyelids jump. And a tug somewhere, as though his helmet was coming off. He would have put out a hand to see, but his left arm was broken, and his right arm limp from weariness.

“You’re back,” said a voice he knew, a voice strained with wonder. “You managed. I knew you would.”

“Now,” said Wofforth, “I know it’s a dream. We dream after we die.”

A hand was cupped behind his neck, lifting him to a sitting position. He felt warm fluid at his lips. “It’s no dream,” said the voice beseechingly. “Look at me.”

“I don’t dare. The dream will go away.”

But he opened his eyes and looked at her hair like Plutonian night, her eyes like bright stars. “Lya,” he said. “I’m going to call you Lya.”

“Please call me Lya.”

“I’d be bound to dream about you. I’ve dreamed about you so much. … Owww!”

He got his right hand up to cherish his tingling cheek.

“So you felt that,” she said. “Now you know you’re awake. Or must I slap you again?”

“I’m sorry, Madame.”

“You called me Lya. Can you stand up? I’ll help you.”

She helped him. He stood up, there in the admission chamber of Base Camp. Lya Stromminger was smiling, and she was crying, too.

“You didn’t go away,” he said. “You’re still here.” The weight of his odyssey, half around Pluto, was beginning to stagger him.

“No, I stayed. I knew you’d come back. I knew Pluto couldn’t kill you or keep you from coming back.”

He drank more from the cup she held to his lips.

“We’ll wait together for them to come with the next expedition,” she promised him.

“Twenty years? Supplies—”

“There’ll be plenty. Don’t you know about Pluto? Didn’t those craters, those old volcanoes, tell you?”

Thinking of how he had crossed the crater, Wofforth shuddered.

“Pluto is colder than anybody even guessed—outside. But inside are the internal fires—like all the solid planets. We made our tests and we can tap them. I kept the instruments for that. It means we’ll have power, and can make our synthetic foods and so on for as long as we need them. You and I are the inhabitants here—”

He stumbled to a chair and sat. “Twenty years—” he said.

Her arm was still around him. Her hair brushed his cheek. “It won’t be long. We have so much to say to each other.”

Colophon

Short Fiction
was compiled from short stories and novellas written and published between 1932 and 1958 by
Manly Wade Wellman.

This ebook was produced for
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The cover page is adapted from
The Antigraceful,
a painting completed in 1912 by
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The cover and title pages feature the
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