Page:Weird Tales Volume 13 Number 1 (1929-01).djvu/116

Laveen—big, broad, bearded and grim—striding down from the place where we had buried him.

Not one of us could speak. A queer chill, that froze us where we stood, crept down our spines. I could feel the hair rise at the nape of my neck, and my tongue curl, dry, at the back of my mouth. If Laveen had had a mind to, he could have killed every man-jack of us where we stood and we wouldn’t have been able to raise a hand to save ourselves.

On came the big Russian, striding calmly toward the blazing shack, paying no heed to us at all. He came round the side of the house and made for the doorway. At the entrance he turned. His eyes opened wide and seemed to flash with exultation. Then he grinned at us in a good matured way, showing his great white teeth. He raised his hand in a motion of farewell, tumbled backward and disappeared in the blaze.

The moment he did so, the fire shot to the sky as if the very fiends of hell were at play inside. Then, as we stood gaping, the walls fell inward with a crash and a shower of sparks, and gradually the flames subsided until nothing was left but smoldering ashes and black char.

We were a silent crowd that traveled back to camp that night, and it was not until next morning that the boys opened up.

“Hallucination!” “Hypnotism!” Most of them agreed on that. Yet every man there had seen the same thing.

“All right, boys,” I said at last, “let’s go down and dig him up; then we’ll be sure. No use leaving this thing unsettled in our minds for all time.”

And down we went with picks and shovels.

Laveen’s grave was slick and neat, just as we had left it the evening before. Even the little heap of stones that Andy had set on top was still sitting pretty.

As I told you, we had buried Laveen four feet deep. Well—we dug and shoveled for ten feet deep and in a ten-feet square, right on the spot where we had laid him, but devil a hide or hair did we find of Mad Laveen.