Page:Weird Tales Volume 30 Number 02 (1937-08).djvu/106

That is what his neighbors still call him. But Gica Lacilu, a big, plump old citizen of seventy, who lives comfortably with his placid old wife under the fragrant acacias in the outskirts of the little village of Jalomitza, in southern Romania, does not look like a man with a mysterious past. Still, when I asked him about the tales which the admiring villagers told me of his youth, he was flattered and confirmed them, adding details which made nearly complete the incident which earned him his title of Magician. Nearly complete, I say; for he was notably reticent about one part of it, and left the story, so to speak, without its key. A mystery story without its clue is always exasperating; but I will set down all I know of the case, and the reader's imagination may be able to give it a certain completeness.

Even as late as when Romania won her independence of Turkey, a date still within the memory of Gica Lacilu and of some of the rest of us, the country was barbarous and lawless to a degree that western Europe and America can scarcely conceive. Men were born, lived precariously and died without benefit of clergy, physicians or police. The population was three-fourths illiterate, and superstitions were rife. The brutal feudal landlord Gioranii de Joos tyrannized over the Jaromitza peasants with a mad violence that would have been impossible if the country had had any real organization, or the population any real information as to their rights and the strength of their united arms.

Gioranii de Joos had had a wife, but she had died of terror and heart-break years before. He had never had any children except illegitimate children of whose existence he was as ignorant and as careless as a drunken auto-driver might be of the dogs and chickens he leaves maimed and helpless in his wake. He had a way of riding through one of his villages and scanning with his sharp black eyes the face of every woman he passed. If his glance fell on a particularly appetizing young matron or a fresh and graceful maiden, he would pull up his horse, call the terrified woman to his side, and order her to bring to his castle, at such and such a time, some contribution in kind, eggs or vegetables or the wonderful, juicy melons for which the region is famous. This, short of death, was the most horrible disaster that could befall a countrywoman of the Wallachian hill country, but the universal fear of Gioranii was so cringingly abject that the order had never been disobeyed.

One day Gioranii de Joos rode rapidly around the hill along whose base straggled the long street of Jalomitza, and came without warning on a young girl who, when she saw him, turned red and then pale and tried to look in the other direction and seem oblivious of his presence. The rider with the ugly eagle-