Page:Weird Tales Volume 7 Number 4 (1926-04).djvu/85

The searching party, brave with lanterns and numbers, found him in a crumpled heap beside the window, his dark hair matted and sticky with blood. He was just regaining consciousness as they arrived.

Two burning eyes, blazing in a gray, cadaverous face, gazed through one of the windows into the room, but the light of the half-dozen lanterns on the floor prevented anyone from noticing. After a few minutes a tall, stoop-shouldered figure in flapping clothes moved silently away from the window and started crawling through the thick underbrush that had encroached upon the dooryard.

On all fours tho figure crept, pushing through the tangled branches, crawling over decaying logs that sometimes glowed with the phosphorescent light of the fox-fire, stumbling over stones and out-cropping ledges. Chuckling in an excited, high-pitched voice the figure hastened on.

“Thought you’d ketch me, didn’t ye? Not that time!” The shrill undertone sounded like the speaking of some great night-prowling rat.

The man came at length to the stream that flowed at the bottom of the ravine. He stood erect and gaged the width as carefully as he could in the darkness and the mist, his eyes gleaming with the light of madness, his whole demeanor accented by the weird surrounding and the uncanny glowing of the fox-fire that had rubbed on to his clothes and from his clothes to his face and hands.

He gave a sudden leap, out over the murky, sluggish stream. His feet landed in splashing mud. He struggled wildly to regain his balance, but his muck-trapped feet hindered him.

With a sodden splash he fell backward. The back of his head struck a submerged boulder, just under the surface of the water. He shuddered, as though the water had chilled him, and raised one hand as if in protest. Then his hand dropped to his side and his head slid from the rock to the bottom of the stream. Open-eyed, staring, the pale white face looked up from the bottom of the stream, up through the brackish, polluted water and the floating gray mist . . . . up at the cloudy sky . . . .

The Morning Sentinel the next day ran this item:

While being taken from Thomaston to the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Burton Lathrop escaped from his guard, leaped from the train, and at this writing is still at liberty.

Posses are scouring the country and it seems likely that the escaped maniac’s capture is only a matter of a few hours. From what little information the police have been able to obtain it seems certain that Lathrop is heading in the direction of his old home, and authorities there are being warned to be on the lookout for him.