6. Return
It was spring again, the warm, bright spring of the year 1866, when Kane Lanark rode again into the Fearful Rock country.
His horse was a roan gray this time; the bay gelding had been shot under him, along with two other horses, during the hard-fought three days at Westport, the "Gettysburg of the West," when a few regulars and the Kansas militia turned back General Sterling Price's raid through Missouri. Lanark had been a captain then, and a major thereafter, leading a cavalry expedition into Kentucky. He narrowly missed being in at the finish of Quantrill, whose death by the hand of another he bitterly resented. Early in 1865 he was badly wounded in a skirmish with Confederate horsemen under General Basil Duke. Thereafter he could ride as well as ever, but when he walked he limped.
Lanark's uniform had been replaced by a soft hat and black frock coat, his face was browner and his mustache thicker, and his cheek bore the jaggedly healed scar of the guerrilla pistol-bullet. He was richer, too; the death of his older brother, Captain Douglas Lanark of the Confederate artillery, at Chancellorsville, had left him his father's only heir. Yet he was recognizable as the young lieutenant who had ridden into this district four years gone.
Approaching from the east instead of the north, he came upon the plain with its grass-levels, its clumps of bushes and trees, from another and lower point. Far away on the northward horizon rose a sharp little finger; that would be Fearful Rock, on top of which Trooper Newton had once died, horrified and unwounded. Now, then, which way would lie the house he sought for? He idled his roan along the trail, and encountered at last an aged, ragged Negro on a mule.
"Hello, uncle," Lanark greeted him, and they both reined up. "Which way is the Mandifer place?"
"Mandifuh?" repeated the slow, high voice of the old man. "Mandifuh, suh, cap'n? Ah doan know no Mandifuh."
"Nonsense, uncle," said Lanark, but without sharpness, for he liked Negroes. "The Mandifer family has lived around here for years. Didn't you ever know Mr. Persil Mandifer and his step-daughter, Miss Enid?"
"Puhsil Mandifuh?" It was plain that the old fellow had heard and spoken the name before, else he would have stumbled over its unfamiliarities. "No, suh, cap'n. Ah doan nevah heah tella such gemman."
Lanark gazed past the mule and its tattered rider. "Isn't that a little house among those willows?"
The kinky head turned and peered. "Yes, suh, cap'n. Dat place b'long to Pahson Jaguh."
"Who?" demanded Lanark, almost standing up in his stirrups in his sudden interest. "Did you say Jager? What kind of man is he?"
"He jes a pahson—Yankee pahson," replied the Negro, a trifle nervous at this display of excitement. "Big man, suh, got red face. He Yankee. You ain' no Yankee, cap'n, suh. Whaffo you want Pahson Jaguh?"
"Never mind," said Lanark, and thrust a silver quarter into the withered brown palm. He also handed over one of his long, fragrant cheroots. "Thanks, uncle," he added briskly, then spurred his horse and rode on past.
Reaching the patch of willows, he found that the trees formed an open curve that faced the road, and that within this curve stood a rough but snug-looking cabin, built of sawn, unpainted planks and home-split shingles. Among the brush to the rear stood a smaller shed, apparently a stable, and a pen for chickens or a pig. Lanark reined up in front, swung out of his saddle, and tethered his horse to a thorny shrub at the trail-side. As he drew tight the knot of the halter-rope, the door of heavy boards opened with a creak. His old sergeant stepped into view.
Jager was a few pounds heavier, if anything, than when Lanark had last seen him. His hair was longer, and his beard had grown to the center of his broad chest. He wore blue jeans tucked into worn old cavalry boots, a collarless checked shirt fastened with big brass studs, and leather suspenders. He stared somewhat blankly as Lanark called him by name and walked up to the doorstep, favoring his injured leg.
"It's Captain Lanark, isn't it?" Jager hazarded. "My eyes——" He paused, fished in a hip pocket and produced steel-rimmed spectacles. When he donned them, they appeared to aid his vision. "Indeed it is Captain Lanark! Or Major Lanark—yes, you were promoted——"
"I'm Mr. Lanark now," smiled back the visitor. "The war's over, Jager. Only this minute did I hear of you in the country. How does it happen that you settled in this place?"
"Come in, sir." Jager pushed the door wide open, and ushered Lanark into an unfinished front room, well lighted by windows on three sides. "It's not a strange story," he went on as he brought forward a well-mended wooden chair for the guest, and himself sat on a small keg. "You will remember, sir, that the land hereabouts is under a most unhallowed influence. When the war came to an end, I felt strong upon me the call to another conflict—a crusade against evil." He turned up his eyes, as though to subpoena the powers of heaven as witnesses to his devotion. "I preach here, the gospels and the true godly life."
"What is your denomination?" asked Lanark.
Jager coughed, as though abashed. "To my sorrow, I am ordained of no church; yet might this not be part of heaven's plan? I may be here to lead a strong new movement against hell's legions."
Lanark nodded as though to agree with this surmise, and studied Jager anew. There was nothing left in manner or speech to suggest that here had been a fierce fighter and model soldier, but the old rude power was not gone. Lanark then asked about the community, and learned that there were but seven white families within a twenty-mile radius. To these Jager habitually preached of a Sunday morning, at one farm home or another, and in the afternoon he was wont to exhort the more numerous Negroes.
Lanark had by now the opening for his important question. "What about the Mandifer place? Remember the girl we met, and her stepfather?"
"Enid Mandifer!" breathed Jager huskily, and his right hand fluttered up. Lanark remembered that Jager had once assured him that not only Catholics warded off evil with the sign of the cross.
"Yes, Enid Mandifer." Lanark leaned forward. "Long ago, Jager, I made a promise that I would come and make sure that she prospered. Just now I met an old Negro who swore that he had never heard the name."
Jager began to talk, steadily but with a sort of breathless awe, about what went on in the Fearful Rock country. It was not merely that men died—the death of men was not sufficient to horrify folk around whom a war had raged. But corpses, when found, held grimaces that nobody cared to look upon, and no blood remained in their bodies. Cattle, too, had been slain, mangled dreadfully—perhaps by the strange, unidentifiable creatures that prowled by moonlight and chattered in voices that sounded human. One farmer of the vicinity, who had ridden with Quantrill, had twice met strollers after dusk, and had recognized them for comrades whom he knew to be dead.
"And the center of this devil's business," concluded Jager, "is the farm that belonged to Persil Mandifer." He drew a deep, tired-sounding breath. "As the desert is the habitation of dragons, so is it with that farm. No trees live, and no grass. From a distance, one can see a woman. It is Enid Mandifer."
"Where is the place?" asked Lanark directly.
Jager looked at him for long moments without answering. When he did speak, it was an effort to change the subject. "You will eat here with me at noon," he said. "I have a Negro servant, and he is a good cook."
"I ate a very late breakfast at a farmhouse east of here," Lanark put him off. Then he repeated, "Where is the Mandifer place?"
"Let me speak this once," Jager temporized. "As you have said, we are no longer at war—no longer officer and man. We are equals, and I am able to refuse to guide you."
Lanark got up from his chair. "That is true, but you will not be acting the part of a friend."
"I will tell you the way, on one condition." Jager's eyes and voice pleaded. "Say that you will return to this house for supper and a bed, and that you will be within my door by sundown."
"All right," said Lanark. "I agree. Now, which way does that farm lie?"
Jager led him to the door. He pointed. "This trail joins a road beyond, an old road that is seldom used. Turn north upon it, and you will come to a part which is grown up in weeds. Nobody passes that way. Follow on until you find an old house, built low, with the earth dry and bare around it. That is the dwelling-place of Enid Mandifer."
Lanark found himself biting his lip. He started to step across the threshold, but Jager put a detaining hand on his arm. "Carry this as you go."
He was holding out a little book with a gray paper cover. It had seen usage and trouble since last Lanark had noticed it in Jager's hands; its back was mended with a pasted strip of dark cloth, and its edges were frayed and gnawed-looking, as though rats had been at it. But the front cover still said plainly:
John George Hohman'sPOW-WOWSOrLONG LOST FRIEND
"Carry this," said Jager again, and then quoted glibly: "'Whoever carries this book with him is safe from all his enemies, visible or invisible; and whoever has this book with him cannot die without the holy corpse of Jesus Christ, nor drown in any water, nor burn up in any fire, nor can any unjust sentence be passed upon him.'"
Lanark grinned in spite of himself and his new concern. "Is this the kind of a protection that a minister of God should offer me?" he inquired, half jokingly.
"I have told you long ago that theLong Lost Friendis a good book, and a blessed one." Jager thrust it into Lanark's right-hand coat pocket. His guest let it remain, and held out his own hand in friendly termination of the visit.
"Good-bye," said Lanark. "I'll come back before sundown, if that will please you."
He limped out to his horse, untied it and mounted. Then, following Jager's instructions, he rode forward until he reached the old road, turned north and proceeded past the point where weeds had covered the unused surface. Before the sun had fallen far in the sky, he was come to his destination.
It was a squat, spacious house, the bricks of its trimming weathered and the dark brown paint of its timbers beginning to crack. Behind it stood unrepaired stables, seemingly empty. In the yard stood what had been wide-branched trees, now leafless and lean as skeleton paws held up to a relentless heaven. And there was no grass. The earth was utterly sterile and hard, as though rain had not fallen since the beginning of time.
Enid Mandifer had been watching him from the open door. When she saw that his eyes had found her, she called him by name.
7. The Rock Again
Then there was silence. Lanark sat his tired roan and gazed at Enid, rather hungrily, but only a segment of his attention was for her. The silence crowded in upon him. His unconscious awareness grew conscious—conscious of that blunt, pure absence of sound. There was no twitter of birds, no hum of insects. Not a breath of wind stirred in the leafless branches of the trees. Not even echoes came from afar. The air was dead, as water is dead in a still, stale pond.
He dismounted then, and the creak of his saddle and the scrape of his boot-sole upon the bald earth came sharp and shocking to his quiet-filled ears. A hitching-rail stood there, old-seeming to be in so new a country as this. Lanark tethered his horse, pausing to touch its nose reassuringly—it, too, felt uneasy in the thick silence. Then he limped up a gravel-faced path and stepped upon a porch that rang to his feet like a great drum.
Enid Mandifer came through the door and closed it behind her. Plainly she did not want him to come inside. She was dressed in brown alpaca, high-necked, long-sleeved, tight above the waist and voluminous below. Otherwise she looked exactly as she had looked when she bade him good-bye beside the ravine, even to the strained, sleepless look that made sorrowful her fine oval face.
"Here I am," said Lanark. "I promised that I'd come, you remember."
She was gazing into his eyes, as though she hoped to discover something there. "You came," she replied, "because you could not rest in another part of the country."
"That's right," he nodded, and smiled, but she did not smile back.
"We are doomed, all of us," she went on, in a low voice. "Mr. Jager—the big man who was one of your soldiers——"
"I know. He lives not far from here."
"Yes. He, too, had to return. And I live—here." She lifted her hands a trifle, in hopeless inclusion of the dreary scene. "I wonder why I do not run away, or why, remaining, I do not go mad. But I do neither."
"Tell me," he urged, and touched her elbow. She let him take her arm and lead her from the porch into the yard that was like a surface of tile. The spring sun comforted them, and he knew that it had been cold, so near to the closed front door of Persil Mandifer's old house.
She moved with him to a little rustic bench under one of the dead trees. Still holding her by the arm, he could feel at the tips of his fingers the shock of her footfalls, as though she trod stiffly. She, in turn, quite evidently was aware of his limp, and felt distress; but, tactfully, she did not inquire about it. When they sat down together, she spoke.
"When I came home that day," she began, "I made a hunt through all of my stepfather's desks and cupboards. I found many papers, but nothing that told me of the things that so shocked us both. I did find money, a small chest filled with French and American gold coins. In the evening I called the slaves together and told them that their master and his son were dead.
"Next morning, when I wakened, I found that every slave had run off, except one old woman. She, nearly a hundred years old and very feeble, told me that fear had come to them in the night, and that they had run like rabbits. With them had gone the horses, and all but one cow."
"They deserted you!" cried Lanark hotly.
"If they truly felt the fear that came here to make its dwelling-place!" Enid Mandifer smiled sadly, as if in forgiveness of the fugitives. "But to resume; the old aunty and I made out here somehow. The war went on, but it seemed far away; and indeed it was far away. We watched the grass die before June, the leaves fall, the beauty of this place vanish."
"I am wondering about that death of grass and leaves," put in Lanark. "You connect it, somehow, with the unholiness at Fearful Rock; yet things grow there."
"Nobody is being punished there," she reminded succinctly. "Well, we had the chickens and the cow, but no crops would grow. If they had, we needed hands to farm them. Last winter aunty died, too. I buried her myself, in the back yard."
"With nobody to help you?"
"I found out that nobody cared or dared to help." Enid said that very slowly, and did not elaborate upon it. "One Negro, who lives down the road a mile, has had some mercy. When I need anything, I carry one of my gold pieces to him. He buys for me, and in a day or so I seek him out and get whatever it is. He keeps the change for his trouble."
Lanark, who had thought it cold upon the porch of the house, now mopped his brow as though it were a day in August. "You must leave here," he said.
"I have no place to go," she replied, "and if I had I would not dare."
"You would not dare?" he echoed uncomprehendingly.
"I must tell you something else. It is that my stepfather and Larue—his son—are still here."
"What do you mean? They were killed," Lanark protested. "I saw them fall. I myself examined their bodies."
"They were killed, yes. But they are here, perhaps within earshot."
It was his turn to gaze searchingly into her eyes. He looked for madness, but he found none. She was apparently sane and truthful.
"I do not see them," she was saying, "or, at most, I see only their sliding shadows in the evening. But I know of them, just around a corner or behind a chair. Have you never known and recognized someone just behind you, before you looked? Sometimes they sneer or smile. Have you," she asked, "ever felt someone smiling at you, even though you could not see him?"
Lanark knew what she meant. "But stop and think," he urged, trying to hearten her, "that nothing has happened to you—nothing too dreadful—although so much was promised when you failed to go through with that ceremony."
She smiled, very thinly. "You think that nothing has happened to me? You do not know the curse of living here, alone and haunted. You do not understand the sense I have of something tightening and thickening about me; tightening and thickening inside of me, too." Her hand touched her breast, and trembled. "I have said that I have not gone mad. That does not mean that I shall never go mad."
"Do not be resigned to any such idea," said Lanark, almost roughly, so earnest was he in trying to win her from the thought.
"Madness may come—in the good time of those who may wish it. My mind will die. And things will feed upon it, as buzzards would feed upon my dead body."
Her thin smile faded away. Lanark felt his throat growing as dry as lime, and cleared it noisily. Silence was still dense around them. He asked her, quite formally, what she found to do.
"My stepfather had many books, most of them old," was her answer. "At night I light one lamp—I must husband my oil—and sit well within its circle of light. Nothing ever comes into that circle. And I read books. Every night I read also a chapter from a Bible that belonged to my old aunty. When I sleep, I hold that Bible against my heart."
He rose nervously, and she rose with him. "Must you go so soon?" she asked, like a courteous hostess.
Lanark bit his mustache. "Enid Mandifer, come out of here with me."
"I can't."
"You can. You shall. My horse will carry both of us."
She shook her head, and the smile was back, sad and tender this time. "Perhaps you cannot understand, and I know that I cannot tell you. But if I stay here, the evil stays here with me. If I go, it will follow and infect the world. Go away alone."
She meant it, and he did not know what to say or do.
"I shall go," he agreed finally, with an air of bafflement, "but I shall be back."
Suddenly he kissed her. Then he turned and limped rapidly away, raging at the feeling of defeat that had him by the back of the neck. Then, as he reached his horse he found himself glad to be leaving the spot, even though Enid Mandifer remained behind, alone. He cursed with a vehemence that made the roan flinch, untied the halter and mounted. Away he rode, to the magnified clatter of hoofs. He looked back, not once but several times. Each time he saw Enid Mandifer, smaller and smaller, standing beside the bench under the naked tree. She was gazing, not along the road after him, but at the spot where he had mounted his horse. It was as though he had vanished from her sight at that point.
Lanark damned himself as one who retreated before an enemy, but he felt that it was not as simple as that. Helplessness, not fear, had routed him. He was leaving Enid Mandifer, but again he promised in his heart to return.
"He was leaving Enid Mandifer, but he promised in his heart to return."
"He was leaving Enid Mandifer, but he promised in his heart to return."
"He was leaving Enid Mandifer, but he promised in his heart to return."
Somewhere along the weed-teemed road, the silence fell from him like a heavy garment slipping away, and the world hummed and sighed again.
After some time he drew rein and fumbled in his saddlebag. He had lied to Jager about his late breakfast, and now he was grown hungry. His fingers touched and drew out two hardtacks—they were plentiful and cheap, so recently was the war finished and the army demobilized—and a bit of raw bacon. He sandwiched the streaky smoked flesh between the big square crackers and ate without dismounting. Often, he considered, he had been content with worse fare. Then his thoughts went to the place he had quitted, the girl he had left there. Finally he skimmed the horizon with his eye.
To north and east he saw the spire of Fearful Rock, like a dark threatening finger lifted against him. The challenge of it was too much to ignore.
He turned his horse off the road and headed in that direction. It was a longer journey than he had thought, perhaps because he had to ride slowly through some dark swamp-ground with a smell of rotten grass about it. When he came near enough, he slanted his course to the east, and so came to the point from which he first approached the rock and the house that had then stood in its shadow.
A crow flapped overhead, cawing lonesomely. Lanark's horse seemed to falter in its stride, as though it had seen a snake on the path, and he had to spur it along toward its destination. He could make out the inequalities of the rock, as clearly as though they had been sketched in with a pen, and the new spring greenery of the brush and trees in the gulley beyond to the westward; but the tumbledown ruins of the house were somehow blurred, as though a gray mist or cloud hung there.
Lanark wished that his old command rode with him, at least that he had coaxed Jager along; but he was close to the spot now, and would go in, however uneasily, for a closer look.
The roan stopped suddenly, and Lanark's spur made it sidle without advancing. He scolded it in an undertone, slid out of the saddle and threaded his left arm through the reins. Pulling the beast along, he limped toward the spot where the house had once stood.
The sun seemed to be going down.
8. The Grapple by the Grave
Lanark stumped for a furlong or more, to the yard of the old house, and the horse followed unwillingly—so unwillingly that had there been a tree or a stump at hand, Lanark would have tethered and left it. When he paused at last, under the lee of the great natural obelisk that was Fearful Rock, the twilight was upon him. Yet he could see pretty plainly the collapsed, blackened ruins of the dwelling that four years gone had burned before his eyes in devil-blue flame.
He came close to the brink of the foundation-hollow, and gazed narrowly into it. Part of the chimney still stood, broken off at about a level with the surface of the ground, the rubbish that had been its upper part lying in jagged heaps about its base. Chill seemed to rise from that littered depression, something like the chill he had guessed at rather than felt when he had faced Enid Mandifer upon her porch. The chill came slowly, almost stealthily, about his legs and thighs, creeping snake-like under his clothing to tingle the skin upon his belly. He shuddered despite himself, and the roan nuzzled his shoulder in sympathy. Lanark lifted a hand and stroked the beast's cheek, then moved back from where the house had stood.
He gazed westward, in the direction of the gulley. There, midway between the foundation-hollow and the natural one, was a much smaller opening in the earth, a pit filled with shadow. He remembered ordering a grave dug there, a grave for twelve men. Well, it seemed to be open now, or partially open.
He plodded toward it, reached it and gazed down in the fading light. He judged that the dead of his own command still lay where their comrades had put them, in a close row of six toward the east. It was the westward end of the trench that had been dug up, the place where the guerrillas had been laid. Perhaps the burial had been spied upon, and the Southerners had returned to recover their fallen friends.
Yet there was something below there, something pallid and flabby-looking. Lanark had come to make sure of things, and he stooped, then climbed down, favoring his old wound. It was darker in the ditch than above; yet he judged by the looseness of earth under his feet that in one spot, at least, there had been fresh digging—or, perhaps, some other person walking and examining. And the pallid patch was in reality two pallid patches, like discarded cloaks or jackets. Still holding the end of his horse's bridle, he put down his free hand to investigate.
Human hair tickled his fingers, and he snatched them back with an exclamation. Then he dug in his pocket, brought out a match, and snapped it aglow on the edge of his thumbnail.
He gazed downward for a full second before he dropped the light. It went out before it touched the bottom of the hole. But Lanark had seen enough.
Two human skins lay there—white, empty human skins. The legs of them sprawled like discarded court stockings, the hands of them like forgotten gauntlets. And tousled hair covered the collapsed heads of them....
He felt light-headed and sick. Frantically he struggled up out of that grave, and barely had he come to his knees on the ground above, when his horse snorted and jerked its bridle free from his grasp. Lanark sprang up, tingling all over. Across the trench, black and broad, stood a human—or semi-human—figure.
Lanark felt a certain draining cold at cheek and brow. Yet his voice was steady as he spoke, challengingly:
"What do you want?"
The creature opposite stooped, then bent its thick legs. It was going to jump across the ditch. Lanark took a quick backward step toward his horse—an old Colt's revolver was tucked into his right saddlebag.
But the sudden move on his part was too much for the jangled nerves of the beast. It whickered, squealed, and jerked around. A moment later it bolted away toward the east.
At the same time, the form on the other side of the open grave lunged forward, cleared the space, and came at Lanark.
But it was attacking one who had been in close fights before, and emerged the victor. Lanark, though partially a cripple, had lost nothing of a cavalryman's toughness and resolution. He sprang backward, let his assailant's charge slow before it reached him, then lashed out with his left fist. His gloved knuckles touched soft flesh at what seemed to be the side of the face, flesh that gave under them. Lanark brought over his right, missed with it, and fell violently against the body of the other. For a moment he smelled corruption, and then found his feet and retreated again.
The black shape drew itself stoopingly down, as though to muster and concentrate its volume of vigor. It launched itself at Lanark's legs, with two arms extended. The veteran tried to dodge again, this time sidewise, but his lameness made him slow. Hands reached and fastened upon him, one clutching his thigh, the other clawing at the left-hand pocket of his coat.
But in the moment of capture, the foul-smelling thing seemed to shudder and snatch itself away, as though the touch of Lanark had burned it. A moan came from somewhere in its direction. The crouched body straightened, the arms lifted in cringing protection of the face. Lanark, mystified but desperately glad, himself advanced to the attack. As he came close he threw his weight. It bowled the other backward and over, and he fell hard upon it. His own hands, sinewy and sure, groped quickly upon dank, sticky-seeming garments, found a rumpled collar and then a throat.
That throat appeared to be muddy, or at any rate slippery and foul. With an effort Lanark sank his fingertips into it, throttling grimly and with honest intention to kill. There was no resistance, only a quivering of the body under his knee. The arms that screened the face fell quivering away to either side. At that moment a bright moon shimmered from behind a passing veil of cloud. Lanark gazed down into the face of his enemy.
A puffy, livid, filth-clotted face—but he knew it. Those spiked mustaches, those bulging eyes, the shape, contour and complexion....
"You're one of Quantrill's——" accused Lanark between clenched teeth. Then his voice blocked itself, and his hands jerked away from their strangle hold. His mouth gaped open.
"I killed you once!" he cried.
Between him and the body he had pinned down there drifted a wild whirl of vision. He saw again the fight in the blue fireglow, the assailant who spurred against him, the flash of his own revolver, the limp collapse of the other. He saw, too, the burial next morning—blue-coated troopers shoveling loam down upon a silent row of figures; and, ere clods hid it, a face peeping through a disarranged blanket, a face with staring eyes and mustaches like twin knife-points.
Then his eyes were clear again, and he was on his feet and running. His stiff leg gave him pain, but he slackened speed no whit. Once he looked back. A strange blueness, like a dim reflection of the fire long ago, hung around the base of Fearful Rock. In the midst of it, he saw not one but several figures. They were not moving—not walking, anyway—but he could swear that they gazed after him.
Something tripped him, a root or a fallen branch. He rose, neither quickly nor confidently, aching in all his limbs. The moon had come up, he took time to realize. Then he suddenly turned dizzy and faint all over, as never in any battle he had seen, not even Pea Ridge and Westport; for something bulky and dark was moving toward and against him.
Then it whinnied softly, and his heart stole down from his throat—it was his runaway horse.
Lanark was fain to stand for long seconds, with his arm across the saddle, before he mounted. Then he turned the animal's head southward and shook the bridle to make it walk. At last he was able to examine himself for injuries.
Though winded, he was not bruised or hurt, but he was covered with earth and mold, and his side pocket had been almost ripped from his coat. That had happened when the—the creature yonder had tried to grapple him. He wondered how it had been forced to retreat so suddenly. He put his hand in the pocket.
He touched a little book there, and drew it forth.
It was Jager'sLong Lost Friend.
A good hour later, Lanark rode into the yard of his ex-sergeant. The moon was high, and Jager was sitting upon the front stoop.
Silently the owner of the little house rose, took Lanark's bridle rein and held the horse while Lanark dismounted. Then he led the beast around to the rear yard, where the little shed stood. In front of this he helped Lanark unbridle and unsaddle the roan.
A Negro boy appeared, diffident in his mute offer of help, and Jager directed him to rub the beast down with a wisp of hay before giving it water or grain. Then he led Lanark to the front of the house.
Jager spoke at the threshold: "I thank God you are come back safely."
9. Debate and Decision
Jager's Negro servant was quite as good a cook as promised. Lanark, eating chicken stew and biscuits, reflected that only twice before had he been so ravenous—upon receiving the news of Lee's surrender at Appomatox, and after the funeral of his mother. When he had finished, he drew forth a cheroot. His hand shook as he lighted it. Jager gave him one of the old looks of respectful disapproval, but did not comment. Instead he led Lanark to the most comfortable chair in the parlor and seated himself upon the keg. Then he said: "Tell me."
Lanark told him, rather less coherently than here set down, the adventures of the evening. Again and again he groped in his mind for explanations, but not once found any to offer.
"It is fit for the devil," pronounced Jager when his old commander had finished. "Did I not say that you should have stayed away from that woman? You're well out of the business."
"I'm well into it, you mean," Lanark fairly snapped back. "What can you think of me, Jager, when you suggest that I might let things stand as they are?"
The frontier preacher massaged his shaggy jowl with thoughtful knuckles. "You have been a man of war and an officer of death," he said heavily. "God taught your hands to fight. Yet your enemies are not those who perish by the sword." He held out his hand. "You say you still have the book I lent you?"
From his torn pocket Lanark drew Hohman'sLong Lost Friend. Jager took it and stared at the cover. "The marks of fingers," he muttered, in something like awe. He examined the smudges closely, putting on his spectacles to do so, then lifted the book to his nose. His nostrils wrinkled, as if in distaste, and he passed the thing back. "Smell it," he directed.
Lanark did so. About the slimy-looking prints on the cover hung a sickening odor of decayed flesh.
"The demon that attacked you, that touched this book, died long ago," went on Jager. "You know as much—you killed him with your own hand. Yet he fights you this very night."
"Maybe you have a suggestion," Lanark flung out, impatient at the assured and almost snobbish air of mystery that colored the manner of his old comrade in arms. "If this is a piece of hell broke loose, perhaps you did the breaking. Remember that image—that idol-thing with horns—that you smashed in the cellar? You probably freed all the evil upon the world when you did that."
Jager frowned, but pursued his lecture. "This very book, thisLong Lost Friend, saved you from the demon's clutch," he said. "It is a notable talisman and shield. But with the shield one must have a sword, with which to attack in turn."
"All right," challenged Lanark. "Where is your sword?"
"It is a product of a mighty pen," Jager informed him sententiously. He turned in his seat and drew from a box against the wall a book. Like theLong Lost Friend, it was bound in paper, but of a cream color. Its title stood forth in bold black letters:
THE SECRETSOFALBERTUS MAGNUS
"A translation from the German and the Latin," explained Jager. "Printed, I think, in New York. This book is full of wisdom, although I wonder if it is evil, unlawful wisdom."
"I don't care if it is." Lanark almost snatched the book. "Any weapon must be used. And I doubt if Albertus Magnus was evil. Wasn't he a churchman, and didn't he teach Saint Thomas Aquinas?" He leafed through the beginning of the book. "Here's a charm, Jager, to be spoken in the name of God. That doesn't sound unholy."
"Satan can recite scripture to his own ends," misquoted Jager. "I don't remember who said that, but——"
"Shakespeare said it, or something very like it," Lanark informed him. "Look here, Jager, farther on. Here's a spell against witchcraft and evil spirits."
"I have counted at least thirty such in that book," responded the other. "Are you coming to believe in them, sir?"
Lanark looked up from the page. His face was earnest and, in a way, humble.
"I'm constrained to believe in many unbelievable things. If my experience tonight truly befell me, then I must believe in charms of safety. Supernatural evil like that must have its contrary supernatural good."
Jager pushed his spectacles up on his forehead and smiled in his beard. "I have heard it told," he said, "that charms and spells work only when one believes in them."
"You sound confident of that, at least," Lanark smiled back. "Maybe you will help me, after all."
"Maybe I will."
The two gazed into each other's eyes, and then their hands came out, at the same moment. Lanark's lean fingers crushed Jager's coarser ones.
"Let's be gone," urged Lanark at once, but the preacher shook his head emphatically.
"Slowly, slowly," he temporized. "Cool your spirit, and take council. He that ruleth his temper is greater than he that taketh a city." Once more he put out his hand for the cream-colored volume of Albertus Magnus, and began to search through it.
"Do you think to comfort me from that book?" asked Lanark.
"It has more than comfort," Jager assured him. "It has guidance." He found what he was looking for, pulled down his spectacles again, and read aloud:
"'Two wicked eyes have overshadowed me, but three other eyes are overshadowing me—the one of God the Father, the second of God the Son, the third of God the Holy Spirit; they watch my body and soul, my blood and bone; I shall be protected in the name of God.'"
His voice was that of a prayerful man reading Scripture, and Lanark felt moved despite himself. Jager closed the book gently and kept it in his hand.
"Albertus Magnus has many such charms and assurances," he volunteered. "In this small book, less than two hundred pages, I find a score and more of ways for punishing and thwarting evil spirits, or those who summon evil spirits." He shook his head, as if in sudden wrath, and turned up his spectacled eyes. "O Lord!" he muttered. "How long must devils plague us for our sins?"
Growing calmer once more, he read again from the book of Albertus Magnus. There was a recipe for invisibility, which involved the making of a thumbstall from the ear of a black cat boiled in the milk of a black cow; an invocation to "Bedgoblin and all ye evil spirits"; several strange rituals, similar to those Lanark remembered from theLong Lost Friend, to render one immune to wounds received in battle; and a rime to speak while cutting and preparing a forked stick of hazel to use in hunting for water or treasure. As a boy, Lanark had once seen water "witched," and now he wondered if the rod-bearer had gained his knowledge from Albertus Magnus.
"'Take an earthen pot, not glazed,'" Jager was reading on, "'and yarn spun by a girl not seven years old'——"
He broke off abruptly, with a little inarticulate gasp. The book slammed shut between his hands. His eyes were bright and hot, and his face pale to the roots of his beard. When he spoke, it was in a hoarse whisper:
"That was a spell to control witches, in the name of Lucifer, king of hell. Didn't I say that this book was evil?"
"You must forget that," Lanark counseled him soberly. "I will admit that the book might cause sorrow and wickedness, if it were in wicked hands; but I do not think that you are anything but a good man."
"Thank you," said Jager simply. He rose and went to his table, then returned with an iron inkpot and a stump of a pen. "Let me have your right hand."
Lanark held out his palm, as though to a fortune-teller. Upon the skin Jager traced slowly, in heavy capital letters, a square of five words:
S A T O RA R E P OT E N E TO P E R AR O T A S
Under this, very boldly, three crosses:
X X X
"A charm," the preacher told Lanark as he labored with the pen. "These mystic words and the crosses will defend you in your slumber, from all wicked spirits. So says Albertus Magnus, and Hohman as well."
"What do they mean?"
"I do not know that." Jager blew hotly upon Lanark's palm to dry the ink. "Will you now write the same thing for me, in my right hand?"
"If you wish." Lanark, in turn, dipped in the inkpot and began to copy the diagram. "Operais a word I know," he observed, "andtenetis another.Satormay be some form of the old pagan word,satyr—a kind of horned human monster——"
He finished the work in silence. Then he lighted another cigar. His hand was as steady as a gun-rest this time, and the match did not even flicker in his fingertips. He felt somehow stronger, better, more confident.
"You'll give me a place to sleep for the night?" he suggested.
"Yes. I have only pallets, but you and I have slept on harder couches before this."
Within half an hour both men were sound asleep.
10. Enid Mandifer Again
The silence was not so deadly the following noon as Lanark and Jager dismounted at the hitching-rack in front of Enid Mandifer's; perhaps this was because there were two horses to stamp and snort, two bridles to jingle, two saddles to creak, two pairs of boots to spurn the pathway toward the door.
Enid Mandifer, with a home-sewn sunbonnet of calico upon her head, came around the side of the house just as the two men were about to step upon the porch. She called out to them, anxiously polite, and stood with one hand clutched upon her wide skirt of brown alpaca.
"Mr. Lanark," she ventured, "I hoped that you would come again. I have something to show you."
It was Jager who spoke in reply: "Miss Mandifer, perhaps you may remember me. I'm Parson Jager, I live south of here. Look." He held out something—theLong Lost Friendbook. "Did you ever see anything of this sort?"
She took it without hesitation, gazing interestedly at the cover. Lanark saw her soft pink lips move, silently framing the odd words of the title. Then she opened it and studied the first page. After a moment she turned several leaves, and a little frown of perplexity touched her bonnet-shaded brow. "These are receipts—recipes—of some kind," she said slowly. "Why do you show them to me, Mr. Jager?"
The ex-sergeant had been watching her closely, his hands upon his heavy hips, his beard thrust forward and his head tilted back. He put forth his hand and received back theLong Lost Friend.
"Excuse me, Miss Mandifer, if I have suspected you unjustly," he said, handsomely if cryptically. Then he glanced sidewise at Lanark, as though to refresh a memory that needed no refreshing—a memory of a living-dead horror that had recoiled at very touch of the little volume.
Enid Mandifer was speaking once more: "Mr. Lanark, I had a dreadful night after you left. Dreams ... or maybe not dreams. I felt things come and stand by my bed. This morning, on a bit of paper that lay on the floor——"
From a pocket in the folds of her skirt, she produced a white scrap. Lanark accepted it from her. Jager came close to look.
"Writing," growled Jager. "In what language is that?"
"It's English," pronounced Lanark, "but set down backward—from right to left, as Leonardo da Vinci wrote."
The young woman nodded eagerly at this, as though to say that she had already seen as much.
"Have you a mirror?" Jager asked her, then came to a simpler solution. He took the paper and held it up to the light, written side away from him. "Now it shows through," he announced. "Will one of you try to read? I haven't my glasses with me."
Lanark squinted and made shift to read:
"'Any man may look lightly into heaven, to the highest star; but who dares require of the bowels of Earth their abysmal secrets?'"
"That is my stepfather's handwriting," whispered Enid, her head close to Lanark's shoulder.
He read on: "'The rewards of Good are unproven; but the revenges of Evil are great, and manifest on all sides. Fear will always vanquish love.'"
He grinned slightly, harshly. Jager remembered having seen that grin in the old army days, before a battle.
"I think we're being warned," Lanark said to his old sergeant. "It's a challenge, meant to frighten us. But challenges have always drawn me."
"I can't believe," said Enid, "that fear will vanquish love." She blushed suddenly and rosily, as if embarrassed by her own words. "That is probably beside the point," she resumed. "What I began to say was that the sight of my stepfather's writing—why is it reversed like that?—the sight, anyway, has brought things back into my mind."
"What things?" Jager demanded eagerly. "Come into the house, Miss Mandifer, and tell us."
"Oh, not into the house," she demurred at once. "It's dark in there—damp and cold. Let's go out here, to the seat under the tree."
She conducted them to the bench whither Lanark had accompanied her the day before.
"Now," Jager prompted her, and she began:
"I remember of hearing him, when I was a child, as he talked to his son Larue and they thought I did not listen or did not comprehend. He told of these very things, these views he has written. He said, as if teaching Larue, 'Fear is stronger than love; where love can but plead, fear can command.'"
"A devil's doctrine!" grunted Jager, and Lanark nodded agreement.
"He said more," went on Enid. "He spoke of 'Those Below,' and of how they 'rule by fear, and therefore are stronger than Those on High, who rule by weak love.'"
"Blasphemy," commented Jager, in his beard.
"Those statements fit what I remember of his talk," Lanark put in. "He spoke, just before we fought the guerrillas, of some great evil to come from flouting Those Below."
"I remember," nodded Jager. "Go on, young woman."
"Then there was the box."
"The box?" repeated both men quickly.
"Yes. It was a small case, of dark gray metal, or stone—or something. This, too, was when I was little. He offered it to Larue, and laughed when Larue could not open it."
Jager and Lanark darted looks at each other. They were remembering such a box.
"My stepfather then took it back," Enid related, "and said that it held his fate and fortune; that he would live and prosper until the secret writing within it should be taken forth and destroyed."
"I remember where that box is," Lanark said breathlessly to Jager. "In the old oven, at——"
"We could not open it, either," interrupted the preacher.
"He spoke of that, too," Enid told them. "It would never open, he told Larue, save in the 'place of the Nameless One'—that must be where the house burned—and at midnight under a full moon."
"A full moon!" exclaimed Lanark.
"There is a full moon tonight," said Jager.