Page:Weird Tales Volume 29 Number 1 (1937-01).djvu/25

him to the altar-stone on which the Bat-Woman was poised, he sank back on his heels, threw back his head and held his hands, drooped at the wrists, before him in simulation of a begging dog. At a kick from his keeper he sank down at the altar's base, drew up his knees and folded arms around them. His depth of degradation reached, he crouched in canine imitation at his mistress' feet.

"Corbleu, I think that we three chose the better part, n'est-ce-pas, my friends?" de Grandin asked.

The hot breath rising in my throat choked off my answer. Four men were staggering from the shadows with a cross, a monstrous thing of mortised timbers, and despite myself I felt my knees grow weak as I saw the red stains which disfigured it. "Mine will be there soon," a voice seemed dinning in my ears. "They'll stretch my limbs and drive the great spikes through my hands and feet; they'll hang me there——"

"La Traidora—la Traidora—the Traitress!" came a great shout from the crowd, as three masked women struggled forward with a fourth. All were garbed identically, but we knew before they stripped her mask and gown and sandals off that the captive was poor Nancy Meigs.

There was no pretense of a trial. "Á la muerte—á la muerte!" screamed the congregation, and the executioners leapt forward to their task.

Birth-nude, they stretched her on the blood-stained cross and I saw a hulking ruffian poise a great nail over her left palm while in his free hand he drew back a heavy hammer.

Costello started it. Hands joined, he dropped upon his knees and in a firm, strong voice began:

"Hail, Mary, full of grace, blesséd art Thou among women. . ."

De Grandin and I followed suit, and in chorus we repeated that petition of the motherless to Heaven's Queen. ". . . Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and in the hour of death."

"Amen," concluded Jules de Grandin, and, in the next breath: "Sang de Dieu, my friends, they come! Observe them!"

Their motor roars drowned by the screaming of the crowd, three planes zoomed down above the square, and a sudden squall of bullets spewed its deadly rain upon the close-packed ranks which lined the quadrangle.

I saw the executioner fall forward on his victim's body, a spate of life-blood gushing from his mouth; saw the Commandant leap up, then clutch his breast and topple drunkenly against the altar-stone; saw La Murciélaga's outspread wings in tatters as the steel-sheathed slugs ripped through them and cut a bloody kerf across her bosom; then de Grandin and Costello pulled me down, and we lay upon the stones while gusts of bullets spattered round us or ricocheted with high, thin, irritable whines.

The carnage was complete. Close-packed, illuminated by their own torch-flares, and taken wholly by surprize, the bat-men fell before the planes' machine-gun fire like grain before the reaper. That the three of us escaped annihilation was at least a minor miracle, but when the squadron leader gave the signal for the fire to cease, and, sub-machine guns held alertly, the aviators clambered from their planes, we rose unharmed, though far from steady on our feet.

"Muchas gracias, Señor Capitan," de Grandin greeted as he halted fifteen paces from the flight commander and executed a meticulous salute. "I assure you that you did not come one little minute in advance of urgent need.

"Come, let us see to Mademoiselle Nancy," he urged Costello and me. "Perchance she still survives."