Page:Weird tales v36n07 1942-09.djvu/33

"What's up, boy?"

"Judge, I'm—afraid."

Husky, fearless, Peter is, to use such a word.

"Of what, lad?"

"That strange girl," whispered Peter, and over the pallor of his perplexed young face a grayness stole. "I tell you, her hair—"

"Oh, it is the girl who troubles you? Nothing strange in that," I laughed. "And as for her hair, Peter?"

"I tell you, she isn't—she isn't—one of us," said Peter with that distaste for the unusual that most normal men display. "She isn't—well, right. The erl King's daughters," he muttered irrelevantly.

"Why should that disturb you, my boy? If she isn't, we'll have our deeply disappointed friend back again in a short time, and I think, perhaps, you'd better arrange to be asleep in bed when he comes in, to avoid any further quarreling."

He shook his blond head slowly. Then with a sudden ejaculation he snatched for his cap and thrust it down upon his head. He pulled down a lumber jacket and began hurriedly pushing his arms through the sleeves.

"Why, Peter! You're not going out?" I asked inanely. "See here, Peter, he's right when he says it's none of your business. And the girl followed him here."

"That girl means to hurt him if she can," whispered Peter, his blue eyes looking wild in the fire's smoldering flicker.

"Poppycock!" I retorted tartly, for I saw where Peter's mood was leading us both, and the fire looked and felt good to me, that cold night.

"Just the same, I'm going to follow him. He said I might, didn't he?"

"You know perfectly well he didn't mean it," I objected lamely.

"Are you coming or not?" demanded Peter. "I'd like to have you along, Judge," and in his anxiety he began helping me into my sheepskin coat with unnecessary enthusiasm.

It certainly looked as if I were in for it, so I shrugged my shoulders, knocked out my pipe and tucked it into my pocket, got my cap from a peg and followed that frantic boy. He led me a chase for a few minutes, for of course there was no way to locate Hank or the girl as long as they kept quiet. They might have been lurking about the cabin. If they had gone, in which direction had they disappeared?

There was no sound of voices to guide me, but all at once Peter uttered a smothered cry, and his hand closed about my arm like an iron band. He jerked me right-about-face, and then I saw what he'd seen, a kind of flickering, glowing light, off in the woods ahead of us.

"That's her," said Peter ungrammatically, and his voice was actually trembling with some emotion I had neither time nor inclination to analyze at that moment.

"What do you mean, That's her?" I echoed.

"Judge, don't you understand? I mean, it's her hair."

At that, I did give way to laughter that surged upward, shaking my diaphragm uncontrollably.

"Peter," I choked, when I could at least get out a word, "the lady's Titian hair has certainly turned your head. It must be luminous, if that's it. Boy, boy, you are absurd."

"God!" groaned Peter. His hand closed tighter than ever about my arm. "Judge, it's so horrible that I can hardly believe it myself. "I—I daren't say it—now. Look! Look!"

That reddish luminosity was bobbing unevenly up and down, as if it came from a lamp borne upon the head of a person walking rapidly, swimmingly, across un-