A ROMANCE OF HEREDITY
[Excerpts from the diary of Prof. Simeon Warrener, D. Sc., Ph. D.]
Sept. 20, 19—
Two letters in the afternoon mail; both requiring
answers. Most important, a note from Morgan Carew, inviting me to come to Wales
and join in some excavations he plans making this fall. He has stumbled over a
promising-looking mound near the village of Cag na Gith, not far from
Chatsworth, and expects some interesting digging. There is a dolmen in a pretty
fair state of preservation on one of the hills, and Carew thinks some
instructive kitchen-middens will be found in the neighborhood.
The second is a favor from Alice Frasanet, asking
me to tea at 4 to-morrow. I suppose I may curse Frank Seabring for that. Ever
since he met the girl he's been dancing attendance on her, singing my praises
when other conversational topics failed. There are several drawbacks to having
an assistant of the impressionable age. If it were not for Frank and the fact
that Frasanet, père, is a liberal contributor to the Society for
Anthropological Research, I'd ignore the invitation. But the boy is genuinely
fond of me, besides being an able and conscientious assistant, so I shall
accept both invitations.
Sept. 21, 19—
Taking it all in all, Alice's party was a success.
During the few moments I was able to pry Frank away, I told him my project to
join Carew, and asked him to get his traps together as quickly as possible, as
I want to leave before the autumn storms set in. I am not a good sailor.
He seemed a little crestfallen at first, but a few
minutes later came up all smiles, and assured me he’d not only be delighted to
go on the expedition, but to stay at Cag na Gith long enough to dig to the
center of the earth, or clear through, if I so desired. Frank is a good boy,
but a little inclined to be flighty.
If ever there were a born flirt, Alice Frasanet is
she. Before the guests had thinned out, she allowed herself to be teased into
singing, and, with Dora Caruthers' accompaniment, rendered The Land of The
Sky-Blue Water." I felt sorry for Frank. The little minx planted herself
squarely in front of him, and sang as directly to him as any Broadway chorus
girl torturing some hapless victim in the audience.
The half-mythical story of some remote ancestor of
Frank's who married a Mohawk woman in the days when Boston Common was a cow
pasture is a standing joke among his friends, and Alice declared she was
addressing the charming little ballade to the drop of redskin blood in him.
Certainly she succeeded in making him a temporary
aborigin, for he was red as a boiled lobster from collar to hair before she
brought the song to a close.
Another incident that helped me through the dreary
rounds of weak tea and vapid conversation was a story Shela Tague told me,
which directly concerned Cag na Gith. I chanced to mention my plan to go there
with Frank to help Carew in his digging, and at the village's name she turned
as white as though a chill had suddenly come on her.
Thinking she was sickened with the fetid air, I
was about to fetch her a glass of water, when she begged me to sit with her and
listen to an experience she had near the place three years before.
"I was stopping at a farmhouse, about half a
mile from the railway station," she began, "doing some sketching at
times; but mostly walking over the hills and moors about the village.
"One afternoon, near sunset, I had set up my
easel a few hundred feet from the station platform, and was painting away
industriously, trying to make my colors and the daylight come out even. I
chanced to glance behind me, and saw a queer-looking man sitting on a luggage
truck near the station, gazing intently at me.
"There aren't more than half a dozen houses
in all Cag na Gith, you know; and anything in the shape of a stranger, even a
tramp, is a sensation in the place. I thought I knew everyone, human and
canine, in the village; but this loafer was new to me.
"I went on with my painting until the sun had
gone behind the big hill where the dolmen is, and the air began to take on the
twilight chill. Once or twice I glanced back out of the tail of my eye, to see
what my companion was up to, and each time I saw him sitting in the same
stiffly upright position, gazing fixedly at me.
"As I folded up my easel and camp stool, and
started across the tracks for my boarding place, he rose and began to walk in
the same direction.
"There was no hurry in his gait, Dr.
Warrener, but I felt that he was all a-tremble, and terribly eager to overtake
me, I began to hasten a little, and with two long strides—positively, they were
like an athlete's standing leaps!—he lessened the distance between us by
fifteen feet, and I saw he'd be abreast of me before I could pass the water pit
lying on the farther side of the railway. I hadn't noticed him particularly,
and couldn't see him very well in the gathering dusk, but there was something
about that man that horrified me, though I couldn’t say exactly what it was. He
was tall, very tall, well over six feet, and startlingly thin, and seemed to be
wearing a tight-fitting suit of shabby, fuzzy gray cloth. And though he walked
directly on the gravel ballast of the roadbed, his feet made no sound.
"I hurried a few steps; then, when I saw I
couldn't possibly shake him, I determined to brazen the thing out, and turned
on him, asking angrily, 'What do you mean by following me?'
"Professor Warrener, if I live to be a
hundred years old, I'll never be able to forget that face. It was small and
narrow, and drawn to a point, almost like a dog's, and the teeth protruding
from the great, wide mouth were long and yellow and hooked, like an animal's
fangs. But the eyes were the most horrible part of it. They glowed and glowered
at me like two disks of phosphorus in the half-light, and I remembered thinking
for one awful moment—absurd as it may seem to you—of a quotation from 'Red
Riding Hood.' Do you remember where she asks the wolf,' 'What great eyes you
have, Grandmamma' and 'What great teeth you have, Grandmamma'? Those were the
very words that popped into my mind, and their awful answers came running in
their wake like the echo of a horror, I'll never be able to look at a book of
fairy tales again, without a shudder; for since that night the story of 'Red
Riding Hood' is a frightful ghost story to me, and a real one, a terribly real
one.
"What the monster—I can't think of him as a
man—would have done if he'd gotten to me, I don't know, and I don't like to
speculate on it; but what I saw a few seconds later wakes me up screaming at
night, sometimes, even now.
"While he was still fifteen or twenty feet
away, a silly, little gray rabbit popped out of its hole in the rocks beside
the tracks and scudded between us. As it flew past, the thing caught sight of
it, and, seeming to forget me, gave chase. You know how fast a frightened
rabbit can run, Professor? I assure you the poor little bunny didn't have a
chance with that tall, lean pursuer on its track. He ran it down before it had
covered a hundred yards. I heard the poor thing scream as he crushed it in his
long, bony fingers, and lifted it, still struggling, to his mouth, and tore it
to bits with his teeth.
"I ran as I'd never run before to my cottage,
and got there more dead than alive, for every drop of blood in my veins seemed
to be running cold as a night-sweat. My landlady shook her head when I told her
what I'd seen, and said, 'Don't ee go out o' nights nae mair, Missie; for there
do be bogles in the hills, an' I've heard me gran'faither say they crave human
meat a' times.'"
Despite Shela's earnestness, I could not forbear a
grin.
"We'll be looking for dead rabbit hunters;
not live ones," I told her. "What you saw was probably some poor,
half-starved tramp; maybe a lunatic escaped from some asylum."
"No," she insisted, "it wasn't.
Nothing human could have looked like that thing. Please, please, Professor
Warrener, don't go to Cag na Gith; I know something terrible will happen if you
do. Why, I wouldn't go there, not even at midday, for all the money in the Bank
of England."
"Possibly," I assented, "but we're
looking for something more valuable than money: we're digging for relics of a
vanished civilization."
To my astonishment, the little Irish-woman
suddenly crossed herself.
"Digging?" she almost shrieked.
"Digging? And in those hills? Professor Warrener, you don't know what you're
doing. The country people wouldn't put a spade in one of those mounds for
anything. They say the body of a bugwolf is buried there, and to turn the sod
would liberate its spirit."
"A bugwolf?" I echoed. "That
accounts for the condition of the dolmen and mounds. Fear of the werewolf has
probably kept the peasantry away. Carew told me that the excellent state of the
land, archeologically speaking, puzzled him. Your friend, the werewolf—or, as
the Welshmen will have it, the bugwolf—has performed a valuable service to
science. I'll have to propose him for honorary membership in the Society for
Anthropological Research."
"Ah, Dr. Warrener, don't make light,"
Shela begged. "You scientists who don't believe in God nor devil think you
know everything; but you don't. These stories of ghosts and werewolves are as
old as humanity itself; surely there must be some truth in them, or they
wouldn't have persisted so long."
"Well," I replied, "if what you saw
really was a wolf-man, he'd better lie low while we're about. Frank Seabring is
part Mohawk, you know. An ancestress of his was a woman of the totem of the
bear; and the tribes claiming descent from the great bear, and those who had
the wolf for their manitou, were always at war. If I remember my pre-colonial
history rightly, the bear people usually came out ahead, too."
Shela twitched her shoulders as she rose, for all
the world like a spaniel shaking the water from its fur.
"You'll be sorry if you dig in those
hills," she warned.
"I'll be sorrier if the society's board of
governors learns that I knew about them and didn't dig there," I
countered. "Scientists of today are like bricklayers or carpenters, you
know. So many bricks laid and so many nails driven, so much wages; so many
scientific discoveries a year, a new appropriation; no discoveries, no salary.
It's so much for so much, you know; and I think I'd rather brave your Welsh
werewolf than the gaunt gray wolf that accompanies an unpaid salary."
With which bit of homely philosophy, I bade Alice
adieu, got my hat and stick, and left to pack for the trip.
Oct. 10, 19—
CAG NA GITH. And a dreary little hole it is. Six
or eight sad-looking cottages cling with despondent tenacity to the hillsides
rising from the shabby little railway station. A nervous little train fusses up
to the platform twice a day, always threatening to deposit a stranger in our
midst, and never doing it. Even the loafers at the public house wear an air of
settled gloom. The only thing of interest in the neighborhood is the great
dolmen that crowns the tallest hill. There it stands, foursquare with the
compass, frowning disdainfully upon these degenerate offspring of the once
mighty Britons like an ancestral portrait regarding the family spend-thrift.
Carew has engaged a cottage a few minutes' walk
from our digging grounds. A widow who boasts more wrinkles than I've ever seen
in a human face lives a quarter-mile away, and, for a consideration, cooks our
meals and otherwise ministers to our wants. The remains of an ancient
stone-quarry lie about a hundred yards from the dolmen; here we have staked out
a plot of promising ground. Tomorrow we commence digging.
Oct. 12, 19—
Nothing remarkable. Our excavations have been more
productive of disappointments than anything else. A few feet down we struck a
stratum of coarse sand and gravel, and one or two bits of rough blue stone,
clearly not indigenous to the neighborhood. After that, water. If nothing
further develops in the next two or three days we shall move our operations to
another hill.
Oct. 13, 19—
No further discoveries of note.
A few bones, apparently canine, came to light in
the moist sand today.
The weather is perceptibly cooler, and brisk winds
spring up at dusk. Last night the breeze was so strong it rattled the doors and
windows in a most annoying manner; once or twice my lamp flickered and nearly
went out.
There is a chill quality in the air, too, which
baffles all the efforts of our little fire to keep the room comfortable.
Several times the gusts of air played so about the door I could have been
certain a dog was snuffing at the crack. Yet when I flung the door open there
was nothing there. Our house must be in the path of some air current shot down
between the hills, for I chanced to look out the window while the panes were
rattling, and the fir trees on the hilltop were perfectly quiet.
Frank has been very restless all day. Twice he
left the work to go to the village, coming back each time with disappointment
written large in his face. I suppose he has been expecting a letter from the
Frasanet girl.
Oct. 14, 19—
It is really most extraordinary, the way the wind
seems to have singled out our cottage for its pranks. Just before dawn I was
awakened by the rattling of the casement. It shook and quivered till I thought
someone was trying to force an entrance. Neither Carew nor Frank seemed
disturbed by the noise, so I got up to investigate. Immediately I turned my
flashlight on the window, the rattling ceased. The minute I left the window, the
clatter recommenced; when I stood at the casement several minutes, the noise
began at the back door. I hurried through the barren little kitchen, and heard
it at the front of the house.
For several minutes I played a sort of crazy blind
man's buff; finally I cursed myself for a fool and crawled back to bed. But the
wind’s sharp, furious stabs persisted some time, knocking at windows and doors,
whining and whistling about the eaves and chimneys, and buffeting the walls.
Almost as abruptly as it commenced, the racket ceased, and the absolute silence
of the pre-dawn settled over the house.
Old Mrs. Jones was laying the tea things when I
came in a few minutes before the others this afternoon.
"Be ye goin' to-stop yer diggin' soon?"
she asked, swathing the earthen pot in a tea-cozy.
"No," I answered, "we've just
commenced."
"Ye'll not be diggin' by th' quarry,
though?" she pursued. "Not much deeper?"
She avoided looking at me; but there was an almost
feverish anxiety in her words.
"We haven't found much there," I
conceded, "We'll try somewhere else if the luck doesn't turn in a few
days."
The old woman busied herself with the toast and
marmalade a moment, then, abruptly, "Did ye hear th' dargs last
night?"
"Dogs?" I queried. "No; how do you
mean?"
"Oh," she evaded, "they was howling
at someat as was runnin' through the hills. Th' wind, p'aps."
"I certainly heard the wind," I assured
her. "It raced round the house for an hour or more last night. Is it a
habit of Welsh dogs to bark at the wind?"
"'Tis a habit of all dargs to bay th' wind
when there's evil in it," she answered seriously. "Sixty-five years,
girl an' woman, I've lived in these parts, an' there's always trouble come to
them as dug in th' hills. I'm not sayin' it's true; but me faither used to tell
of a bogle his faither had seen beside that heathen grave on th' big mound.
'Tis some as says th' old dead warn't buried deep enough, and they walks at
night when their graves is scratched; an' some says it's a bogle that watches
beside th' quarry; but none round here would strike a pick in th' hills for
love nor gold. When our dargs howls, we knows there's things abroad."
"You think the dogs can see what you can't,
then?" I asked, amused at her earnestness.
"Aye," she answered simply, "th'
darg sees what mortals' eyes can't, because there's no soul in him."
I fumbled in my jacket pocket for my pipe,
bringing out a small, hard object along with the briar. It was one of the bits
of blue stone we'd dug from the quarry the day before. Tossing it on the
mantel, I opened my tobacco pouch.
"Where'd ye come by that?"
Mrs. Jones was staring at the bit of blue rock as
if she saw a specter hovering over it.
"Oh, that?" I replied. "Why, we dug
it from the gravel the other day. Odd, isn't it? No stone like it anywhere
about. Can't figure how it got here.
"Ye put it back—tonight!" she
interrupted excitedly. "It's th' bugwolf stane. Man, man, ye don't know
what ye did when ye took that bit o' rock from th' ground."
"The bugwolf stone?" I echoed.
"What d'ye mean?"
She twisted the hem of her apron between her
gnarled hands, and swallowed painfully.
"I'm a Christian woman, an' I don't set much
store by th' old tales; but 'tis said a demon wolf used to roam th' hills,
killin' all he met; an' when th' faithers kilt his body they buried it under a
cairn o' them magic stanes, to hold his spirit in. Man, ye unstopped th' flask
when ye took that stane from th' earth. He'll be runnin' loose again, a-pryin'
at yer doors an' winders, and some time he'll get in, an' that'll be th' death
o' ye."
I balanced the bit of rock in my palm a minute,
then flipped it through the door.
"Let him come for his confounded stone,"
I said contemptuously, reaching for a blazing splinter to light my pipe.
The slamming of the door answered me. Mrs. Jones
was scrambling down the path as fast as her old rheumatic legs would carry her.
Oct. 15, 19—
Mrs. Jones has discharged us. Bribery, threats and
entreaties are alike of no avail to bring her back. An offer to replace the
blue stone mollified her temporarily: but when we went to look for it, the
thing was nowhere to be found. I must have tossed it farther than I realized,
yesterday.
Oct. 18, 19—
There are certain advantages in having an
assistant of the impressionable age. Alice Frasanet arrived this morning, bag
and baggage, including her Aunt Anna.
Frank has been of little practical use, anyway,
and the small loss of his assistance is more than compensated by Alice's
services. Like the practical little person she is, Alice has taken up our care
where Mrs. Jones left off, and we have already been treated to a batch of
biscuit, real biscuit, American biscuit. The ladies have obtained lodgings at
the Jones cottage, and if all the guile I can exercise will keep them there
they shall remain till we've completed our excavations.
Oct. 19, 19—
Our first real find was made today. Grubbing in a
half-hearted way, I unearthed what appeared to be a human tibia; in a few more
strokes we had an almost perfectly articulated skeleton out of the sand.
Whoever possessed those bones in life must have been a human bean pole, for the
limbs are disproportionately long. His hands and feet must have given him
considerable trouble, too, for their bones are half again as long as those of
any modern man’s.
We laid the frame on a blanket beside the trench
and searched about for the skull. Here the mystery began, for though we churned
up the sand for yards round, we could find no head. Finally, after about an
hour's search, we dug out a large dog's skull, which processed neatly upon the
vertebræ. We shall pack these bones carefully, and hold them to compare with
further discoveries. Is it possible we have stumbled on the remnant of an
ancient dog-headed people, or did the old Druids have an unrecorded custom of
burying the head of a dog with the malefactor in some instances of capital
punishment? It is too early to indulge even in hypotheses, but the
possibilities are fraught with interest.
"Maybe we've dug up Shela Tague's
werewolf," Frank suggested as he and I packed the skeleton down the trail
to our cottage.
"Maybe you're a fool!" I told him.
Oct. 20, 19—
Someone is interfering with our work. When we
arrived at the quarry this morning, we found sand scratched into our trench,
stakes pulled up and several of our tools missing. Prints of large, naked feet
in the earth showed that the miscreant had removed his boots in an effort to
hide his identity, though why he should have done this is more than I can
understand. One pair of village boots is exactly like another to me.
Toward evening it blew up a rain. Carew and I
smoked endless pipes and played endless games of cribbage. Frank went to the
Jones cottage. It was nearly midnight when he burst in, drenched and excited.
"I saw him!" he exclaimed, flinging his
dripping waterproof over a chair. "I saw him; but he got away."
"Who?" Carew and I chorused.
"The fellow who's been jazzing up our work.
When I left the Jones house, that mongrel pup of the old lady's set up an awful
howling—you'd have thought his grandmother was dead from the noise he made—and
I spied a suspicious-looking bird down the road. I kept my eye on him as I
walked along, and when he left the trail and made for the quarry, I followed
him. He went straight to our trench and got down on his all-fours, scratching
sand into the hole like a dog.
"I let out a yell and rushed him; but he saw
me coming and streaked it across the hill."
"What'd he look like?" asked Carew.
"Darned if I know," Frank admitted.
"It was raining so hard I couldn't get a good look at him at first, and he
made off so fast when I yelled that I didn't get much of a line on him then.
All I can say for sure is that he's about a head taller than any of us, and
thin as Job's turkey-hen. His clothes looked skintight on him, and he was
wearing a cap, I think—something with a long peak that stuck out in front of
his face—and man, oh, man, he surely could run."
"Which way did he go?" I asked.
"That's the funny part of it," Frank
shook his head doubtfully. "I'd have sworn he ran right for our back door,
but I lost sight of him by that little bunch of scrub down the path. Don't
suppose either of you heard anything of him?"
We talked the mystery over for half an hour, then
went to bed for want of something more exciting.
Oct. 21, 19—
Carew is dead. Murdered.
It seems incredible that this horror should have
come upon us; yet as I write, the poor fellow's body "lies by the
wall"—what a beastly gruesome way of expressing themselves these Welsh
have!
Last night, after supper, Frank departed for the
Jones cottage as usual; and Carew and I settled ourselves for a quiet game and
a smoke, The tobacco canister went empty before we'd dealt half a dozen hands,
so we cut to see who should go to the village for a fresh supply. I drew an
ace, Carew a ten spot.
"Be back in half an hour," he promised,
pulling on his cap and jacket; "and if I catch that chap who’s been
meddling with our diggings it'll go hard with one of us."
Poor Carew! It certainly went hard with him.
Ten o'clock came. No sign of Carew. I played
sullenly with my cold pipe and cursed his delay. Frank came in; midnight
struck; still no Carew.
"Hanged if I can stand this any longer,"
I said irritably. "I'm going to see what's keeping him."
"I'll go with you," Frank volunteered.
"This place is too all-fired spooky to stay in alone."
We set off briskly through the chilly moonlight,
keeping a sharp lookout for any signs of Carew and our tobacco. Fifteen
minutes' walk brought us to the village tavern, where the sleepy boniface
paused long enough in ejecting a gin-soaked farmhand from the tap room to
assure us Carew had not been there. Several interested spectators of the
eviction proceedings corroborated him profanely. Here was a poser. Carew had
been gone almost long enough to walk to Chatsworth, yet no one had seen him.
Buying a couple of tins of tobacco, we hurried back along the trail.
Out in the hills, we gave several long halloos,
and the barren mounds shouted back our calls mockingly.
"D'ye suppose he could have gone over to the
works, and turned his ankle, or something?" Frank hazarded.
"H'm, not likely; but we'll have a
look," I answered as we left the path and struck across the hill for the
quarry.
"That's where I saw that fellow scratching in
the sand." Frank indicated the head of white earth beside our trench.
"He was down on his knees, making his hands go like a pair of—hello,
what's that?"
He pointed to a dark object lying on the sand
pile.
I broke into a run without answering, for I had a
presentiment of what we'd find.
Carew sprawled upon his back, his outstretched
hands clutching at the yielding sand, one knee slightly flexed, the other leg
hanging limply over the lip of the trench. His throat and chest were horribly
lacerated, as though he had been worried by some animal of incomparable
ferocity. Across his cheeks and brow several hideous gashes wrote the story of
his death-struggle. But the most appalling thing was the expression of
unspeakable horror stamped on his features. It was as if he had looked one
awful moment on the bareboned grisliness of death before the spirit was rent
from his body.
"My God!" Frank shrank against me,
shivering with panic terror. "His face, man; look at his face!"
I dropped my handkerchief over my poor friend's
head. I had no wish to look again.
"We'd best notify the coroner," I said,
half leading, half carrying Frank away. The boy was done in with fear; never
have I seen a man's nerve fail him so completely.
The fussy, fat little coroner performed his duties
with all the punctilio of a rural official today. Strangers in a strange land,
we were more than half suspected of our friend's murder, and might have been
held for the assizes but for a bit of evidence the post-mortem disclosed.
Clinging to poor Carew's nails were a few small tufts of tawny-gray hair.
These, together with the terrible mangling of his throat, influenced the jury
to return their strange verdict: "That Morgan Carew came to his death at
the hands or teeth of some person or animal to your jurors unknown."
The village undertaker has just left. Embalming is
about as much a lost art here as it is in modern Egypt, so the coffin has been
put in the unused kitchen, where no heat will hasten dissolution. There, beside
the skeleton of the thing—man or devil—we dug from the sand last week, is all
that is mortal of my old friend. Tomorrow they ship the remains to England for
burial. Carew had no near relatives; Frank and I shall go with the body and see
it laid in the family vault at Mulbridge.
Oct. 22, 19—
What I saw last night simply could not have
happened. And yet it did.
Frank and I were sitting before the fire, watching
the reflection from the coals fuse with the afternoon sunbeams on the hearth,
each busy with his own thoughts, when a subdued clatter in the kitchen started
us up together. The tiniest noises are magnified a hundredfold in the house of
death.
The same thought was in both our minds as we made
for the back room. The rats were at their devilish work.
Frank took up a carving knife, big as a half-grown
cutlas, as I swung the door open. I smiled at the action in spite of myself.
The reflexes of elemental psychology are as unreasoning today as when our
ancestors slunk naked through the primeval forests. Nothing but a blind desire
to kill led to the seizure of that knife; a second's reflection would have told
him that a knife is well-nigh as useless against rats as a pointed finger.
We searched the little cell of a room quickly.
Nothing living, save a cricket which set up its mournful "ka-cheek"
from a cranny in the stones, was there. The chest with the dog-headed skeleton
lay by the cold, gaping fireplace. Carew's coffin rested starkly under its
black pall on a pair of saw-horses beside the wall. One of the candles
sputtering at its head leaned a little in its socket. I straightened it,
pressing the melting wax with my thumb to prevent its soiling the cloth. Frank
half seated himself on the rough deal table, gouging at the wood with the point
of his absurd knife.
A sudden current of air, icy cold, fluttered the
candle flame and shook the hem of the coffin-robe. Instinctively, I felt
another presence; some evil thing, that traveled in a chill of terror. Eyes
seemed boring me from behind, and I gripped the candelabrum savagely to
suppress the desire to turn.
Slowly, without moving my head, I turned my eyes
on Frank. He was frowning morosely at the table, chipping bits of wood from it,
as though intent on serious business.
"Rat, tat, tat!"
A sudden sharp clatter of knuckles against the
window pane. I wheeled in my tracks, my breath gone hot and sulfurous with
fear.
Staring through the glass was a great,
shaggy-haired wolf. Yet it was not a wolf. About the lupine jaws and cheeks
were lines hideously reminiscent of a human face, and the phosphorescent glow
of those monstrous eyes never shone in anything carnal. As I looked, the
monster raised its head, and strangling horror gripped me as I saw a human neck
beneath it. Very long and thin it was, corded and sinewed like the neck of a
thing long dead, and covered with thick, gray fur. Then a hand, hairy, like the
throat, and slender as a woman's, fingers tipped with blood-red nails, struck
the glass again. I went sick with fear as I speculated how long the fragile glass
would withstand it.
The thing must have seen my terror, for the
corners of its devilish eyes contracted in a malevolent smile, and a rim of
scarlet tongue flicked its black muzzle.
A moan behind me told Frank's abject terror.
"Oh, my God!" he quavered. "That's
the thing I saw the other night. That's the thing that killed Carew. Shela
Tague was right. We dug up one of them, and the other has come for us."
I swallowed at the dryness in my throat. Words
were beyond me.
"Professor—" Frank had crawled across
the floor and seized me by the knees—"don't let it get in; for God's sake,
don't let it in!"
I pressed the boy's shoulder, not so much to
comfort him as to have the feel of something human under my hand, Then my
fingers closed fiercely on him, as, high, and sweet, and very lovely, I heard
Alice Frasanet's voice rising from the trail at the base of the hill. She had
promised to look in on us before we left with Carew's body, and bring us a
plate of biscuit. Now she was coming blindly to meet this waiting horror.
From the land of the sky-blue water
They brought a captive maid—
Perpetuating her old jest at Frank's Indian
ancestry, she came singing up the path. The thing outside turned at the sound,
its pointed ears cocked forward, the white of its teeth showing as its lips
parted in anticipation of easy prey. Slowly, bending nearly double, it crept
from the window, making for the clump of withered brush at the turn of the
path, crouching to spring as Alice rounded the bend.
I looked, horror-frozen in my place, waiting the
tragedy as the Christian martyrs must have watched the gratings lift from the
lions' dens.
Balancing the tray daintily, Alice approached the
knot of shrubs. Silently as a shadow the gray thing slipped into the path,
barring her way with gaping jaws and red tongue lolling from its mouth. Slowly,
jaws working with a horrible, chewing motion, it advanced its hellish face
nearer and nearer her throat.
I tried to speak, to shriek my horror to the
evening sky; but a paralyzing dust seemed to have gathered in my throat, and
only a hoarse, inarticulate whisper came. Summoning all my strength, I took a
step toward the window; next instant I went reeling against the wall as a dark
object hurtled past me.
Dashing panes and sash to splinters, Frank took
the window at a bound. The crash of falling glass was drowned in the yell he
set up as he cleared the intervening distance with long, loose-limbed strides.
It was Frank who charged that gray horror; yet it
was not Frank. As Jekyll metamorphosed to Hyde, so a subtile physical change
was wrought in him. It was a man no one in ten generations had seen who rushed
down the hillside. It was a cry no living white man had ever heard that he
raised as he brandished his great knife.
"Aie, aie, tehn-yoh-yeh-roh-noh!"
Twice he repeated the blood-freezing yell, ending
the second time with a crescendoed "Aie, aie, YAH!"
It was the Mohawk war whoop—the battle cry of the
people of the bear.
It was a miracle of heredity I beheld; an atavism,
a throwback, a reversion to type. Sleeping, but never dead, the long-forgotten
character of his redskin ancester had awakened in Frank Seabring at the
challenge of danger to his beloved.
Before us lived and breathed the personality of a
Mohawk sachem—some warrior of the totem of the bear, whose moving passion was a
hatred of the wolf people.
"Aie, yah! Aie, yah!" the battle whoop
rang out again.
There was something horribly comic in the
wolf-thing's expression as it turned. Such a look of astonished rage the Evil
One might give at defiance from a lost soul.
They sprang together, meeting in mid-air. The
man-wolf struck swiftly, seeking to bury its fangs in Frank's throat. Frank's
free hand sank in the coarse fur at the creature's gullet; the great knife
described a half-circle, disappeared; rose and sank again, and again, and
again. Stumbling, reeling, spewing blood, the bug-wolf staggered from the
clinch, the light of battle fading in its eyes.
"Aie, tehn-yoh-yeh-roh-noh, YAH!"
The bear had tasted blood; but not his fill.
Again they closed; once more the wolf-thing sought
to worry at Frank's throat. Again the huge knife rose and fell, blood dripping
from its point and edge. And ever, as the murderous work went on, the war whoop
of the Mohawk rent the mountain quiet.
Taller by a head than Frank, the wolf-thing began
to sink. Slowly it went to its knees, to its side; to its back.
"Aie, aie, YAH!"
Like an executioner's simitar the great knife
descended, traversing the bugwolf's throat, a dye of rusty-red staining the fur
in its wake.
Once more the blade circled the man-brute's head,
and Frank Seabring, product of effete New England, college man and instructor
in anthropology, rose and contemplated the scalp of his slain foe.
Tucking the patch of fur in his belt, he seemed to
notice Alice for the first time, where she stood ash-white, beside the path. An
instant he regarded her wonderingly, then abruptly tore his Norfolk jacket
apart, spreading the open edges between his outstretched hands. It was the
blanket-holding, the age-old invitation of the Indian brave to his squaw.
And Alice Frasanet, fox-trotting, bridge-playing,
tea-drinking Alice Frasanet, laid her fluffy, empty little head against his
breast.
