Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 2 (1925-08).djvu/28

"Come here, then," said he, "and I will show you proof of the god's reward."

And she stood before him, hopeful that her prayer would be answered, yet unhappy because she had betrayed a secret of her lord. And the white man made a sudden movement, and a knife glinted momentarily in the dim light of the taper. She did not cry out save once, but the taper fell from her fingers and was extinguished. And then in the darkness there was no sound save the suddenly stealthy movements of the white man as he groped in the chest and hid things away in corners of his robe, and in his head-dress. He was suddenly very much afraid, because the rubies were his, now, and he was in a strange panic lest other men hear of it and kill him for them.

He made his way back through the damp and moldy passages, feeling the walls with his fingers. When he came to the place where there was a guard, the man was stirring drowzily beside his light, and the white man leaped upon him suddenly from behind.

He felt queerly secure, then, and wiped his knife carefully before he made his way unseen out into the ruined streets of the fallen city of Kosar.

My glass was empty, and I rapped on it as a signal for the waiter to bring another drink. The man with the too-bright eyes and the disheveled hair was leaning forward upon the table. His expression was curious—that of one who sees incredible things. I began to suspect that he had the horrors, but Gresham was listening intently. He yawned, however, when the man stopped.

"Beastly unpleasant yarn, this," he remarked casually."

"Which happened." I commented skeptically, "a hundred thousand years ago. And I still don't see why rubies are accurst."

"That was because the raja of Barowak laughed." The man with the disheveled hair shivered uncontrollably, and his eyes, which were too bright, began to look rather alarming. I was growing rather bored, and it began to be apparent to me that the man only had the horrors.

Certainly there was no other reason why one dressed so carefully and so well should have his hair in a tangled, matted mass on his head, as if no comb had been through it in weeks or months. And I guessed at the horrors because they are not infrequent in hot climates with strong liquors, and they often make a man have queer aversions to some small thing. I knew a man once, who would not cut his nails for a year and a half and could do no work in consequence until he sold his nails to a Chinaman who wanted to send evidence home that he had prospered. But that, after all. has nothing to do with this. It was Gresham who prodded on the stranger to the rest of his yarn.

"I know the raja of Barowak," he commented sympathetically. "He has an odd sense of humor. Had some pigs, once, put in china jars—"

He laughed. The stranger shivered again. "It was a hundred thousand years ago...."

The scents from the Guleh-Wat came over the wall as he went on, mingled odors of incense and stale flowers and cooked food and particularly unwashed humanity. A colossal temple bell clanged slowly, far over the city. Sunset was upon us, and the big moths that flutter in the tropics began to fly about, clumsily, because it was still light. The man with the disheveled hair clutched firmly at his glass. It was full of a green liquid.

The white man went swiftly away from Kosar (so he told us) only anxious to get beyond the reach of the raja's half-starved guard. He was