Page:Weird tales v36n07 1942-09.djvu/35

Hank had been following the girl blindly, and her lantern had not been powerful enough to discover to them their peril. They had gone running, directly to the verge of the old quarry.

"Here! Here!" shouted Peter.

The light from his torch shot across a wide space, all black below that brilliant beam.

It was a warning I received none too soon to save me from the fate that had befallen the two who had been running ahead of us. I caught desperately with one arm at a tree trunk and swung about it, just barely checking my momentum. As I swung, my eyes followed the beam of Peter's light, down—down—piercing the darkness below.

There was a huddled, motionless heap at the bottom of the quarry. I knew that would be Hank. Or what was left of Hank.

I knew, too, that Hank would never bellow curses again. How? I knew. Above him bent another figure that pulled at him now, turning him this way and that.

Glowing, shining, dulling the very light of the electric torch that was bent in a brilliant stream of radiance upon it, was another light that seemed a very flame, leaping with such fervency of life that it hurt the eyes to see. Believe me or not, I know what I saw, and it was the pulsing, living flame of the red hair piling about the head of that strange girl that put the electric light to shame. I cried out in amazement and, I confess, with a sudden access of shuddering dislike and fear. What hair!

"I told you!" cried out Peter, beside me, and where he had been fearful before, he became reckless now.

He pushed the torch into my free hand, for I was still clinging to the tree that had served to break my dashing momentum.

"Play it on him," he directed. "She—she won't like that. I'll manage to climb down somehow."

I could hear the scraping of his feet and the crumbling fall of pebbles as he climbed down into the quarry toward that gruesome two. Once I heard his exclamation as he slipped. In an access of anxiety for him, I swerved the torch to light his perilous way, and when I saw he needed it, held it upon him, but my eyes were drawn from him by the sudden spring upward into vivid, astounding brilliance, of that strange girl's leaping flames of red hair, as if they showed off more in the darkness than in the torch's light. It took me a moment to realize what that meant, and the torch trembled so in and the torch trembled so in my hand that I almost let it slip into the quarry.

Who was this creature, whose flaming locks carried the leaping light of living fire? I found myself shuddering. . . .

And then Peter shouted from below, and I turned the light in the direction of his voice. He was leaning over Hank's body. Then he straightened up.

The girl had moved away and stood a little distance, silent. She, it would appear, had not been injured, and I stupidly wondered why not, and how she had managed to escape Hank's untimely fate. A moment later I was to know.

"He's dead," I heard Peter declare. He was not speaking to me, for there was stern accusation in his voice. "You did it. Why?"

Her finger pointed downward.

I played the torch light where she was pointing, and saw Peter stoop. He drew a long, sinuous thing from Hank's dead fingers, and not easily at that. The girl swooped upon him, snatched at it, and then all at once the quarry went black except for the light of the torch, centered there on Peter standing by the dead man.

It was as if somebody had put an extinguisher over a torch!

I heard a tinkling, penetrating ripple of