Page:Weird Tales Volume 13 Number 06 (1929-06).djvu/97

dead at Naika's grave. It is not too far across the marsh. Come and I will show you that I am telling the truth. Come and you will hear the creaking of the sails of the Greta; you will hear the lowering boats, and the landing; you will hear all I have said you would hear, but you will see nothing! No man is privileged to see save me! I alone must bear the horror of the sight."

I made feeble protest but he only stared into my eyes and placed his hands on my shoulders in entreaty.

"I will go," I said at last.

He went then into the kitchen and prepared a supper of bacon and milk with a hard bread he had made of cornmeal. We washed this coarse fare down with great cups of hot coffee. When we had finished he went into a cupboard and fetched an old ship's lantern, lighted it and set it down near the door. He delved into the trunk, or chest of black wood, and brought forth a silk scarf of blue and an old curved simitar.

"We will go now," he said. He led the way along a path that curved around the house toward the sea. For an hour I walked behind him. We passed no word between us. The lightning had passed around us, and now made futile yellow glares in the southwest. The wind still swept in gusts over the wet brown grass of the savannah. I began to suspect something of the foolishness of the night's affair. Why should I be here with this crazed old man? What would my friends at the camp four miles up the stream think of my absence? They perhaps might set out to search for me. I was just on the point of stopping the old sailor when he turned off the path and sat down in the sand behind a clump of willows. I could hear the rushing of the waves along the beach that could not be very far away. His hand touched my shoulder. He extinguished the lantern.

"There is the place. You can see the ribs of the old boat half-buried in the sand of the beach. It is beneath the bow of that rotting old boat that Naika is buried. The stream enters the bay just there—the stream you came down this afternoon. Our way was shorter, that is all."

I settled myself into the sand beside him and waited.

"What is the time?" he asked.

"Almost 9 o'clock," I replied.

"I will know when 9 comes," he said. "I will hear the flapping of the sails of the Greta as they pull her inshore."

I will make no effort here to say what I heard that night; I can only say what I, under the recurring monotone of his voice, thought he made me hear. The space before us was possibly fifty yards wide, running to the right into a dark clump of willows and large grasses; to our left the same. Between were the lapping wavelets of the sea and the sand of the beach, in the center of which I could just distinguish the black ribs of a ship's boat buried quite more than half its depth in the sand. The willows nodded and shifted in the wind. Complete silence pervaded this deserted strip of beach, except for the heavy wheezy breathing of Sailor Jack; that was the only sound.

I did not hear the first sound, but I knew that Sailor Jack did. His skinny, clawlike hand almost cut into my flesh with the tenacity and the fear with which he gripped my arm. He sat half erect.

"The sails! The Greta is pulling inshore!"

I listened intently. The sound was of bellying sails, booming low, but quite audible, down the wind. There was then a clanking, a creaking, a sound so tiny that I feared for an instant that I was only imagining I heard. Sailor Jack had not released his grip upon my arm.