Page:Weird Tales Volume 27 Issue 01 (1936-01).djvu/117

"Wouldn't be stayin' in this here canyon if I was you, Mister," the old man said.

I locked at him curiously. His face was strange.

"Why not?" I asked. "Is there danger?"

The old man spat over his beard.

"Some'd say so," he said.

"But danger of what?" I pressed him. "I didn't know you had wild animals in these parts."

The old man sighed. "'Pends on what you'd call animals," he said softly. "B'ars now, an' catamounts—why, they're all gone long ago. Clem Hawkes he shot the last deer more'n twenty years back. But nobody ain't never shot what's in this here canyon, Mister. I don't reckon nobody ever tried."

Best humor him, I mused. I'd heard that lunatics were violent if you crossed them.

"Aren't you afraid to stay here, then?" I suggested.

The old man grimaced at his long shadow on the grass. "The sun's still up, Mister," he said. "'Long as it's light, there's no safer place in these mountains than Dead Man's Canyon. It’s only after dark that They come out. Some say the sun hurts Their eyes. But I say it's Holy Writ that they only got power in the night. 'The pestilence that walketh in darkness,' Mister. That's what the Writ says. And anyhow. They don't never come out. That's why no one knows what They look like."

I lit a cigarette. The trembling of my hands annoyed me. Altitude, of course! I wasn't being taken in by this old nut with his wild story. . . .

"If you don't know what these things look like," I sought to reason with him, "how do you know they're here?"

The old man spat. "How do I know the moon's over beyond them hills?" his voice intoned. "I can't see it, can I? But I know it's there. It'll come up when the sun goes down. And They'll come out. They'll come out like they done the night Roy Timmons got lost here. We found Roy in the morning, what there was left of him. Over on that slab yonder."

I looked at the slab. It was huge and dark, with a vague suggestion of having been quarried. An altar, that was what it looked like: some sort of prehistoric stone altar, set against the background of the towering trees and the slope.

"Then there was little Sue," the old man went on. "We never dared let Sue's mother know what shape we found her in. We buried her over there under the trees. Told everybody we hadn't located her. Her mother's still believin' that the kid will come back home. Sometimes, to see her settin' there and hopin'—why, it'd jest break your heart, Mister. But she mustn't ever know."

I looked apprehensively at the sun. It was very near the horizon. Six o'clock it must be, I decided—or perhaps nearer seven. But the month was July; the days would be very long.

"Oh, They're in here all right," the