Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 4 (1925-10).djvu/84
woman's voice rose in a terrified scream: "John! John! Wake up! Those ——— ——— Injuns have witched me, John!"
"Nonsense, Flora! Wake up yourself, you're having a nightmare! There is no one here!"
"But there was, John! A bear was just in this room, sucking my breath away!"
"That's impossible, Flora, the doors are all locked and—" The agent's voice trailed away and ended in a choking gasp. On the floor, shining as if with phosphorescence, were plainly outlined the pad prints of a giant bear. Flora was in shrieking hysterics.
A pleasant spring day, and, with a party of white friends, Flora Dachs was gathering trailing arbutus along the banks of the Bear River. There was nothing to suggest evil. It was not a country frequented by uncanny creatures; and witches, among Indians as well as other races, prefer the dark for the practise of their craft. Yet, as the nerve-racked woman placed her hand among the ferns to seize a flower, there was a swift stroke, and a vicious triangular head shot past her hand, the rough sealed skin of the snake grazing her flesh like sandpaper. A rattlesnake had struck without the usual warning, and missed. From the gloomy depths of the pines across the river an owl hooted mournfully, and somewhere in the distance came a demoniac cackle of laughter from a loon. The woman, first livid with fear, fainted in the ferns.
A thousand memories troubled Flora Dachs. A bold, unscrupulous woman, she had spared no means to attain her ambitions. Again and again dead faces rose from the grave, pallid and cold, to torment her with the glare of set and gelid eyes, as she tossed on her bed. A woman of some education and pretensions to a mentality which she did not possess, a coarse-fibered creature, who believed she had no nerves, who tried to view the world and her associates with a cold austerity and skepticism, she was beginning to find out strange things about herself. And one was that fear, which she believed she had banished from among her emotions as a fraud, was beginning to dominate her. Among her troubled visions was Owl Man, the old sorcerer. Driven from the agency at her behest, somehow, and in the most unexpected places, he contrived to meet her, and always she felt her eyes drawn by his—those strange, fascinating eyes, so terrible, and yet so irresistible, which held the gaze and seemed to sear the flesh. She knew, and was ashamed. to say, that he seemed to terrorize her. And somewhere, subconsciously, she felt that there was a purpose behind it that she could sense but not understand. It was as if the old man sought vengeance for some forgotten wrong. And whenever they met there was a terrible vision that night for the tormented woman, or an untoward and nearly fatal accident. It seemed as if she were being drawn, by an inexorable power, into a tragic trap. Yet, while her primal self cried out in terror, her veneer of education laughed hollowly and said there was no such thing, and no white man would accept the evidence she had to offer as proof.
It was two hours past midnight. Her husband away, Flora was trying to sleep alone. Racked by her apprehensions, haggard and worn by memories and recent experiences, she tossed and rolled. There were memories that would not down, things she could not forget—things that no one living could know. There was the sick Indian girl whom she had cared for, and who died, leaving a great fortune in timber holdings to her. It was not murder—no, not that! A little