Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 4 (1925-10).djvu/85
neglect, that was all! But the memory tortured. As she buried her head under the covers, it seemed as if her head was on fire and her heart burned in her body. Something, like a bright ray, pierced her, searching out her soul.
"I didn't! You d———, I didn't!" she screamed, sitting bolt upright, and throwing back the bedclothes. Her fascinated stare through the open window was held by a huge hunched-up object on the limb of a tree that nearly touched the wall—a giant owl, with luminous eyes that fixed a hideous gaze upon her. With a scream both of fear and rage, the doomed woman sprang from her bed and hurled herself at the monster bird. But there was no impact of bodies; instead she hurtled through space, through the form of the owl itself, which dissolved in shadows, and crashed through the light branches to the rocky ground below. In the distance a barred owl hooted three times, exultantly.
"N'hau, grandfather! It is I, He-comes-rumbling, of the Feathered Name, and I come riding another four-legged animal as a gift to you, according to my promise! Hau, n'dabokinan, I give it to you."
"Kanwinna! No indeed, grandson! I cannot take it! Instead there are four horses tied behind the lodge waiting as a gift for you! Yes, take them, you have indeed earned them! It is true that I have a little mysterious power, but, when I had my sacred dream of the Horned Serpent, as a young man, it was vouchsafed to me that I might never use it on my own behalf, no, not unless someone else asked me to use it for him would I loose the evil things I hold. Four winters I have waited for this! Yes, perhaps you did not know, but Flows-swiftly, the girl who died and left all her property to the one who fell from the window, was my grandchild!
"Listen, grandson of mine, you did well to come to me. But it was by my will that you came. I called you in spirit. That I can do easily. You are a modern young man, you have had the benefits of a white man's education, and you and I are together in this, so I will tell you something about how it was done. But some of it I can not explain. That part is mysterious, and comes from the Horned Snake, my dream guardian. I have power to make people—yes, even you—see things that do not exist. I made that woman see a ball of fire and a fox. Oh, yes, the Indian girl who was with her saw them too. It was easy. I stared them both in the face at the agency, and I thought, hard: you will see thus and so, tonight! I made her see a snake that struck without warning. I made her see an owl (ha ha! an owl that looked like me!) in the tree, and when she tried to throttle it, it was not there, and she fell to the rocks! But I was the bear that came into her room. Yes, even I, Owl Man, dressed in an old black bear skin, came in and stood over her, and she cried out aloud in her sleep and told me that she had done away with my granddaughter. She had tormented and neglected her to death. Yes, and all the wrongs she had ever done to my people and hers came out that night, and never again did she forget them, even for a single moment. She could only remember a vision of a bear who sucked her breath, and she and her husband saw only fiery tracks across the floor. But I knew, ho ho! Listen, grandson, I am the last sorcerer among the tribe, and I am an old man. Yet I have power! When you hear from Indians again about the things that they have seen, do not believe what you hear they saw, but believe that back of it all there is a mysterious power, such as I have from the Horned Snake, that makes them think they have seen things that do not exist!"