Page:Weird tales v36n07 1942-09.djvu/34

even ground. It was apparent to me that the girl carried a lantern only half opened. Quite natural, for a young person wandering around the woods at night. Could it be possible, after all, that Hank Walters had good foundations for his belief in his attraction for women? It looked that way, for this strange young woman had evidently forgotten her momentary anger at his rudeness of the afternoon, and had actually come, like Diogenes, hunting for him with her lantern. It was ridiculous, and I really didn't like to believe that a girl could fall so easily for a man like Hank. Surely she wouldn't have gone to such lengths merely to retrieve her cap?

"God!" ejaculated Peter Murray again. And then: "Listen!" he warned me.

I stood motionless, hardly breathing, and then I heard Hank's voice, and the crashing of his heavy body pushing its way through tangled undergrowth and over dry, crackling, fallen limbs and sere autumn leaves.

"Yes that's Hank," I whispered.

"I know. Listen!"

Like the modulated voice that speaks behind the wings at the theater, purporting to be momentarily speeding away, came these broken, breathless outbursts of speech:

"Wait, you little devil!"

A crash into the undergrowth.

"I'm coming right along, you red-headed beauty. Want your cap, don't you? Well, I'll give it to you—maybe—for a kiss."

Another crash.

"Where's that lantern of yours, girl? Hold it this way. I can't see a thing."

Much tumbling and noise. Puffing. Blowing.

"Struck a tree that time . . . a-a-a-r-r-r-r-gh."

A mighty impact it must have been to have jerked that grunt out of Hank's heavy body.

"I'll catch up with you yet! Where's that light? Turn it this way, you she-devil!"

There was a moment's silence, broken only by the dreary, ominous whistle of a wind that came leaping down from the northwest, bearing on its sweeping pinions a biting foretaste of winter. And then such a scream as I hope never again to hear in all my life, so freighted was it with horror and—something more—. Followed, while I was still numbed, a laugh as sharply tinkling as silver bells shaken together in a crystal globe.

"She's done it! I knew she would!" cried out Peter frantically, and that gripping hand of his began to draw me forward through the woods recklessly.

I was colliding as I went with trees and bushes that seemed to spring out of the ground to form obstacles to our mad onrush. Once I fell over a huge rock that almost appeared to have reared itself against us directly out of the bosom of Mother Earth.

"Are you mad?" I gasped, trying in vain to pull my arm from Peter's frenzied grip. "We'll both be killed, running like this in the dark among these trees and rocks.'

"Idiot that I am!" shouted Peter in reply. "I forgot the flashlight. It's right here in my pocket."

He pulled it out, let go my arm and then turned it on. turned it on. Blessed light! It was time we had it. I knew my face was bleeding where a dry branch had neatly skinned one cheek as we flashed past it, and I'd barked both shins; I rather imagined they were bleeding, too. Peter ran ahead after that, throwing the light of the torch here and there.

We had been going uphill gradually, and it dawned upon me all at once what had happened, for a ghastly kind of silence reigned, broken only by the wind's sullen whine and our own trampling feet among dried leaves and broken twigs.