Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 1 (1925-07).djvu/78

they'd be red this time; he was sure of it. Red!

The little room with the copper switch seemed smaller than usual. Creighton had difficulty in breathing; there was not enough air. His fingers trembled violently as they wrapped themselves around the black handle. There was extra current on; it crackled across the closing gap. He thought he heard some one cry. . . . .

The events of the next night in Birndale have long been a matter of horrified discussion in the town. It was a horrible thing, you know, to tear Creighton's wild shouts and fanatical ravings, reverberating through the streets, cutting the darkness. They grew louder as the night wore on. Now and then he screamed, a high-pitched, blood-curdling yell, that set people shivering at their windows. The peculiar part of it was that no one saw him; they could only hear those fiendish cries, as lie raved from one street to another. By their sound he seemed to be walking in a wide circumference, which gradually narrowed in radius, always toward the center of town.

A posse was routed from their beds to hunt him down and overpower him, but they could not find him. Follow as they would in the wake of his screams, ho always eluded them. Nobody in Bimdale slept that night. Children cowered terrified in the arms of equally frightened fathers and mothers. The screams grew in volume, echoing and re-echoing, until just before dawn, when they ceased with the muffled report of a shot.

They found him dead in the morning, stretched out beneath the weather-beaten honor roll in the center of the square, a small, shriveled, lifeless form, a bullet through his head, put there by the revolver which lay a little way from his gnarled hand. Tightly clutched in his other hand was the torn and crumpled section of a newspaper. When they pried it from the cold fingers, viselike in their grip of death, they read of the execution of a certain well-known criminal and murderer, that had taken place the preceding morning, a certain John "Knife" Dolan.

But the face in the picture above the headlines was not that of John "Knife" Dolan—they who lived in Birndale knew that—they remembered. The picture showed the unmistakable features of James Creighton, Jr.—young Jim Creighton, whose gold-starred name was on the tablet above them. Evidently he had not fallen in France. Perhaps, with memory gone from shell-shock, he had returned to find no employment—an old story, no employment but crime and murder. Perhaps he had drifted to the underworld as Birndale always said he would, naturally, and with a sane mind. Nobody ever knew.

But old Jim Creighton had grown a red lily.

It lay crushed under one weazened arm, and the crimson flow from the gray temple dripped down upon its petals, once the whiteness of virgin snow, but now dyed a deep red—a deep, dripping red.