Start of Part 2 (April, 1928Weird Talesmagazine)
start part 2“Rebellion was in every line of her figure.”
“Rebellion was in every line of her figure.”
9
With a face like death Cunningham flung through the door. He sped down the steps with his heart, it seemed, stopped dead. There were sounds behind him and angry voices. Gray roaring at Vladimir, perhaps. But Cunningham could think of nothing but Maria.
The darkness smote his eyes like a blow. He stumbled and fell, then started up, crying out wildly.
A figure flitted up to him and put a soft hand over his mouth.
“Hush! Hush! I am safe,” she whispered breathlessly. “He saw us about the sheriff, and fired. When he saw the sheriff fall he thought I was killed. Hush!”
Cunningham’s arms were about her and he kissed her in an ecstasy of relief.
“If he’d killed you!” he gasped. “If he’d killed you!”
Feet thundered indoors.
“I must go!” she whispered swiftly. “Please!”
She thrust him away and fled. Figures were waiting for her. She joined them, and all melted into nothingness beneath the trees. Then Gray stumbled outside with his hand in Vladimir’s collar.
“Did he get her, Cunningham?” he cried shakenly. “If he did, I swear I’ll fling him to them! Did he get her?”
“N-no,” said Cunningham unevenly. He wiped the sweat off his forehead. “They’re all gone. But——”
He knelt beside a dark bundle on the ground. A groan came to his ears, curiously muffled. He struck a match and found the sheriff securely trussed up and blinking at the match-flame with panic-stricken eyes.
“It’s the sheriff,” said Cunningham. “Maybe he’s hurt.”
But a babble of words that began before the gag was completely out of his mouth proved that the sheriff was only scared.
“Scared green, that’s all,” said Gray curtly. He shook Vladimir as a terrier might shake a rat. “You thought there were burglars?” he roared. “Try to get away with that again! You aimed for that girl!”
He tossed Vladimir to the ground, wrathfully.
“What girl?” purred Vladimir, as he scrambled to his feet. “Was there a girl? Are you in communication with my brother’s murderers? And helping them to escape, too? I think you will go to jail, my friend.”
But Gray went indoors with Cunningham, laughing.
When day came again Cunningham awoke with the conviction that something very pleasant had happened. He puzzled vaguely over it for a long time. And then he realized that it was a thing that had come to him just before he slept and had made his heart pump faster and more loudly. When he kissed Maria, she had not struggled nor been angry. On the contrary she had lifted her lips to his. And yet it had been no practised gesture, but the response of sheer instinct to one man only.
Cunningham’s heart pounded a little and he got up with a serene contentment filling him. The route to romance had led him to happiness, he was sure.
He went downstairs and went out on the porch just to look up at the hills in which he would find her presently.
Vladimir was there, talking to a newcomer whose clothing and air confirmed the guess that he was a servant. But not an ordinary servant. His face was gross and stupid where Vladimir’s was keen and cruel, but his features had no less of instinctive arrogance, though veiled by servility at the moment.
Vladimir’s lips twitched into a snarl of hatred when he saw Cunningham, and he spoke to his servant. The man looked at Cunningham and scowled.
But Cunningham went indoors and had breakfast joyously. Then he started out to find Maria. Technically, as he reflected, he was compounding a felony in going to the Strange People to advise them how to keep out of the clutches of the law. Some of them had been involved in the killing of Vladimir’s brother. But Cunningham beamed as he clambered up the steep hillside toward those mysterious thickets in which the Strange People lurked.
He had gone up perhaps half the way when he heard a faint rustling behind him. He turned and shouted, thinking it a Stranger who would lead him to Stephan and Maria. But the rustling stopped. After a little while he went on, frowning. Later the rustling began again, somewhat nearer.
And then Cunningham heard whistles far off in the thickets. He heard other rustlings, as if men were moving swiftly through the undergrowth. These last sounds came from both sides of him. And then he came suddenly upon a young Stranger, running headlong toward him with his hand on his knife-hilt. The Stranger lifted his hand, unsmilingly, and ran on.
“Stephan,” cried Cunningham; “where is he?”
The runner waved for Cunningham to continue as he was going and disappeared. The mysterious sounds continued, to right and to left. Then everything was abruptly very still.
Cunningham halted uncertainly. There was no trace of a path anywhere. The earth fell away sharply at one side but he had lost all sense of direction and did not know which way to go. Then he heard a thrashing below him as if someone were moving rapidly to cut him off.
Then there was the sound of panting near by and a small boy ran into view. He was a young Stranger, an aquiline-nosed, brown-eyed youngster with the legs of a race-horse.
“Hi, there,” shouted Cunningham. “Where’s Stephan?”
The boy gasped in relief and flew toward him. He thrust a bit of paper into Cunningham’s hand and stood panting. Cunningham unrolled the scrap. On it was written in awkward letters:
“Someone follows to kill you. What will happen if we kill him?”
Cunningham started. Vladimir! He’d sent his servant to bushwhack him.
“They’ll hang,” he said grimly. “Tell them not to do it.”
The boy nodded and started off.
“Wait!” called Cunningham. “Will they stop, since I’ve said so?”
“No,” panted the boy. “They kill him already, I think.”
He sped away, down toward the spot where the thrashing in the bushes sounded as if someone were trying to head Cunningham off. Cunningham clenched his fists and ran after him, determined to stop the foolishness.
The boy vanished suddenly. A figure started up.
“Wait! He lives yet! Wait!”
But Cunningham plunged on, not understanding. He only hoped to be in time to keep the Strangers from worse trouble than they were already in.
He burst through a thicket as warning cries sounded suddenly from all sides. And there was Vladimir’s servant, staring stupidly about him in sudden fright at the sound of many voices. He was waist-high in brushwood. He swerved in panic at the sound of Cunningham’s rush; then his face lighted with ferocity. With lightning quickness he had leveled a weapon and fired.
Cunningham’s life was due to the fact that he had just tripped upon one of the innumerable small boulders strewn all over the slopes. He was falling as the bullet left the gun. He felt a searing pain in his left shoulder and crashed to the ground. Maria’s voice shrilled in anguish.
“Dead! He is killed!”
The breath was knocked out of Cunningham, but he struggled to shout that he was all right, and was afraid to because the servant might pot at him again.
But then he heard half a dozen little metallic clangings, like the rattle of steel knife-blades on rock. The air was full of minor whirrings. And then he heard a sudden agonized bellow, like the roaring of a wounded bull. And then a man screaming in horrible terror.
There was an air of formality, even of solemnity, in the gathering that faced Cunningham several hours later. A full two hundred Strangers were gathered in a little glade with slanting sides that formed a sort of amphitheater. Scouts were hidden in the woods beyond.
And Maria was there, with a white and stricken face which dashed Cunningham’s joyous mood. Vladimir’s servant was there too, ashen with dread and with a crude bandage about his arm where a throwing-knife had gone through his muscles as he tried to shoot Cunningham a second time. And Stephan, Maria’s father, with his features worn and very weary.
Cunningham’s shoulder had been dressed with crushed plantain-leaves. It was a tiny wound at best, hardly worth more than adhesive plaster. The bullet had barely nicked the skin, but Maria had wept over it as she bound it up.
Cunningham had felt that this was no time for common sense. He knew.
“I love you,” he whispered as she bent down above him.
Brimming eyes met his for an instant.
“And I love you,” she said with a queer soft fierceness. “I tell you, because I will never see you again. I love you!”
Cunningham felt a nameless dread. Stephan looked at him with dreary, resolute eyes. Maria’s lips were pinched and bloodless. The Strangers regarded him with somber faces which were not unfriendly, but perturbingly sympathetic.
The gathering seemed to be something like a court. The women were gathered around the outer edges. The men stood about a rock on which Stephan had seated himself. Maria stood beside him. Cunningham found himself thrust gently forward.
“My friend,” said Stephan wearily, “you find us gathered in council. Men say that you kissed my daughter, Maria.”
Cunningham flushed, then stood straight.
“I did,” he said evenly. “I ask your permission to marry her. Is it a crime for me to speak to her first and have her answer?”
Stephan shook his head wearily.
“No. No crime. And if you were one of us I would be glad. I think you are a man. I would join your hands myself. But you are not of our people.”
“And who are you,” demanded Cunningham, “that I am not fit to marry into?”
Stephan’s voice was gentle and quaintly sympathetic.
“We have killed one man who knew the answer to that question,” he said in the teasing soft unfamiliar accent that all the Strange People had. “We do not wish to kill you. And you are not unfit to marry my daughter. My daughter, or any of us, is not fit to marry you.”
Cunningham shook his head.
“Let me be the judge of that.”
Again Stephan made a gesture of negation.
“I think you are our friend,” he said heavily. “We need a friend of those who are not like us. We may die because we have not such a friend. But you must come here no more. What says the council?”
A murmur went up about the amphitheater—a murmur of agreement. Cunningham whirled with clenched fists, expecting to see hostile faces. Instead, he saw friendly sorry ones.
“He must not come again,” ran the murmur all about the crowd, in the faint and fascinating dialect that could not ever be identified. Men gazed at Cunningham with a perturbing sympathy while they banished him.
“But why?” demanded Cunningham fiercely. “I am your friend. I came hundreds of miles because the picture of Maria drew me. I refused offers of bribes. That man”—he pointed at Vladimir’s servant—“tried to kill me only today, only because I am your friend. And what have I asked of you? If Maria tells me to go, I will go. But otherwise——”
Stephan put his hand on Cunningham’s shoulder.
“You must not come again,” he said quietly, “because Maria loves you also. Our people know such things quickly. She has said that she loves you. And we dare not let our women marry any man but one of ourselves. It is not that we hate you. We kept that man from killing you today, and we would have killed him if you said so. We will kill him for you now, if you tell us. But we dare not let one of our women marry you. So you must go.”
“Will Maria tell me to go?” demanded Cunningham fiercely.
“Yes,” said Maria, dry-lipped. “Go! Oh-h-h-h. Go, if you love me!”
She flung herself down upon the grass and sobbed. Some of the women murmured to each other and one or two moved forward and patted her shoulders comfortingly.
“She tells you to go,” said Stephan wearily, “because we would have to kill you otherwise.”
“But why? Why?” demanded Cunningham desperately.
Stephan rose from his seat and spread out his hands.
“Because no woman can ever keep a secret from the man she loves,” he said wearily. “Some day she would tell you who we are. And then you would hate her and hate us. You would turn from her in horror, and you would denounce us. And we would die, swiftly. I am not happy, my son. Maria is my daughter and I would see her happy. But some day she would tell you who we are——”
Cunningham found himself being crowded gently away from Maria. He thrust himself fiercely against the pressure.
“But who are you?” he cried savagely. “Dammit, I don’t care who you are! You’re making her cry! Let me pass! Let me get——”
Stephan made a gesture. With the quickness of lightning Cunningham was seized by a hundred hands. He fought like a fiend against the innumerable grips that clasped his hands, his arms, his feet. But they were too many. He stopped his struggling, panting, and stared raging at Stephan.
“We give you a gift,” said Stephan quietly. “Gold, my son. Much gold. Because if Vladimir tells our secrets we will all be killed, and he threatens to tell.”
“I don’t want your money,” panted Cunningham savagely. “I want this silly mystery ended! I want Maria! I want——”
“Go in peace,” said Stephan drearily.
Cunningham was laid upon the ground and tied fast. He struggled with every ounce of his strength, but in vain. The Strange People were too many and too resolute. But they seemed to take pains not to injure him. Indeed, when they put him in a litter and started off with him, there seemed to be a consistent effort by the bearers not to make him even uncomfortable.
Cunningham raged and tore at his bonds. Then he subsided into a savage silence. His lips were set into a grim firmness. Maria sobbing upon the grass ... this abominable sympathy for him....
The litter stopped. They took him out and cut his bonds. They offered him the bags of hammered gold-pieces again.
“I don’t want them,” he said with grim politeness. “I warn you, I’m coming back.”
The leader of his escort was the young man who had first come out of the woods the first time Cunningham had seen the Strangers. He nodded gravely.
“I know,” he said quietly. “I loved a girl not of our people, last year.”
The litter-bearers had vanished into the woods. Cunningham matched at a straw of hope. Perhaps here was a friend, or even a source of help.
“You understand,” he said in a hurried, eager undertone. “Perhaps we can——”
“I gave her up,” said the young Stranger quietly. “My people would have killed her if I had married her. You see, I might have told her.”
He shrugged and pointed off through the woods.
“Coulters is there,” he said gravely. “You would not take gold. I am sorry. But we think you are a man.”
“I’m coming back,” said Cunningham grimly.
The Stranger nodded and touched the hilt of his knife regretfully. He swung away and vanished in the underbrush.
Cunningham started toward Coulters. He knew they would be watching him. But perhaps a quarter of a mile on the way he stopped. He heard nothing and saw nothing. He slipped aside into the woods. And he had gone no more than a dozen paces before there was a little golden glitter in a ray of the dying sun. A knife had flashed past his face not two feet away. He turned back, raging.
Later he tried again. And again a warning knife swept across the path before him.
Cunningham had nearly reached the valley in which the hotel was built when he saw Gray below him, climbing sturdily up into the eyrie of the Strange People. Gray had a rifle slung over his shoulder.
“Gray!” shouted Cunningham.
Gray stared and abruptly sat down and mopped his forehead. He waited for Cunningham to reach him.
“Damn you, Cunningham,” he said expressionlessly, “I like you, you know, for all I think we may be working against each other. And word’s just gone in to Bendale that you’ve been killed by the Strangers. I was going up in hopes of getting to you before they wiped you out. And I already had cold chills down my back, thinking of the knife that nearly went into it yesterday.”
“I’m safe enough,” said Cunningham bitterly, “but I’m run out of the hills.”
“Best thing, maybe,” said Gray. “I’m hoping, but I think there’ll be fighting there tonight. A posse’s going to raid the Strangers after dark.”
“I’mgoing to raid the hills tonight,” said Cunningham fiercely, “and bring Maria away with me. I’ll marry her in spite of all the Strangers in creation.”
Gray grunted as he heaved to his feet. “You’re a fool, Cunningham, and I’m another. If you go, I go too. I might learn something, anyhow.”
Cunningham poured out the story of what had happened to him during the day, as they made their way down to the hotel. The sole objection to him lay in the fact that if Maria loved him, some day she would tell him who the Strangers were. And she did love him. Vladimir was the only outsider who knew their secret and he was threatening to disclose it, on what penalty Cunningham did not know.
“Maybe,” said Gray quietly, “it would be a good thing if Vladimir did tell what he knows. But I suspect he won’t, and for your sake I’d like to see you safely married to that girl you’re so keen about before he did start to talk. I’m with you tonight, Cunningham.”
“Better stay behind,” said Cunningham curtly. “They’ll be watching for me.”
“No,” said Gray quietly. “I sent some wires today and they may not be strong enough. Two of us might get her out where one wouldn’t. And I’m thinking that if you do marry her and she does tell you the secret of the Strangers, it might avert a tragedy. I’ve done all I can without certain knowledge. Now, watch your tongue when we reach the hotel.”
Cunningham ignored the raging astonishment with which Vladimir saw him, and was savagely amused at the worriment the man showed. Vladimir had sent his servant after Cunningham to kill him, and had been so certain of the attainment of that object that he had already broadcast a tale of Cunningham’s death which laid it at the Strangers’ door.
Cunningham waited for darkness. He was sure he had been watched back to the hotel. But after darkness was complete and before the moon rose he and Gray slipped secretly out of the house. They struck off down the valley, and when the monstrous ball of the full moon floated over the hills to the east, they made their way beneath thick trees, lest the moonlight show them to hidden watchers. They had gone perhaps a mile when Gray pointed suddenly upward.
Far, far up, where a tree-grown peak ended in a bald and rocky knob, fires were burning. Plainly visible in the clear night air, it could be seen that there were many fires and many people about them. Through the stillness, too, there came half-determinate sounds which might have been singing, or chanting, or some long-continued musical wailing.
The moon was shining down upon the valley, with its tidy New England farmhouses—upon Coulters, where uncomfortable rural police officers tried to convince themselves that they would be quite safe in dealing with the Strange People—upon Bendale, with its electric lights and once-a-week motion picture theater. And the same moonlight struck upon a ring of fires high up in the mountains where the Strangers moved and crouched. Old women gave voice to the shrill lament that was floating thinly through the air.
Gray glanced once at Cunningham’s face and if he had been about to speak, he refrained. Cunningham was making grimly for the hills.
The woods were dark. The two men crept through long tunnels of blackness, where little speckles of moonlight filtered through unexpectedly and painted the tree-trunks in leopard-spots. The valley had been calm, but as they climbed, the wind began to roar over their heads, rushing among the tree-branches with a growling sound. That noise masked the sound of their movements. Once they saw one of the Strangers cross a patch of clear moonlight before them. He was moving softly, listening as he half trotted, half walked.
“Sentry,” whispered Gray.
Cunningham said nothing. They went on, and heard voices murmuring before them in a foreign tongue. They halted and swung to the right. Perhaps two hundred yards on they tried again to continue up toward the heights. A crashing in the underbrush made them freeze. A Stranger trotted within five paces of them, peering about him cautiously. Only their immobility saved them from detection.
When he had gone they made for the spot from which he had come. It was breathless work because at any instant a liquid little glitter in the moonlight—a throwing-knife—might be the only herald of a silent and desperate attack.
But they made their way on and upward. It seemed as if they had passed through the ring of sentries. The trees grew thinner. The wind roared more loudly above their heads. And suddenly they saw the glow of many fires before them.
If they had gone carefully before, now they moved with infinite pains to make no noise. A single voice was chanting above the wind’s screaming. Gray listened and shook his head.
“I thought I knew most languages by the sound of them,” he whispered, “or could guess at the family anyhow. I worked on Ellis Island once. But I never heard that one.”
They went down on their hands and knees for the last hundred yards. Then they could see. And Cunningham stared with wide eyes, while Gray swore in whispers, shaking with excitement.
There were a dozen huge bonfires placed in a monster circle twenty yards across. They roared fiercely as the flames licked at the great logs they fed upon. And the wind was sweeping up from the valley and roaring through them and around them and among them.
The rushing of the wind and the roaring of the fires made a steady, throbbing note that was queerly hypnotic. The flames cast a lurid light all around, upon the trees, and the rocks, and the Strange People, and the vast empty spaces where the earth fell away precipitously.
A single aged man chanted in the center of the twelve huge beacons. He was clad in a strange, barbaric fashion such as Cunningham had never seen before. And the Strange People had clasped hands in a great circle that went all about the blazes, and as the old man chanted they trotted steadily around and around without a pause or sound.
The old man halted his chant and cried a single sentence in that unknown tongue. From the men in the circle came a booming shout, as they sped with gathering speed about the flames. Again he cried out, and again the booming, resonant shout came from the men.
“The sunwise turn,” panted Gray. “Widdershins!It’s magic, Cunningham, magic! In New Hampshire, in these days!”
But Cunningham was thinking of no such things as magic, white or black. He was searching among the running figures for Maria. But he did not see her. The barbaric garb of the Strangers confused his eyes. That costume was rich and splendid and strange and utterly beyond belief in any group of people only eight miles from a New England mill-town with an accommodation train once a day.
“Magic!” cried Gray again in a whisper. “Cunningham, nobody’ll believe it! They won’t, they daren’t believe it! It’s impossible!”
But Cunningham was lifting himself up to search fiercely for a sight of the girl he had found at the end of the route to romance and to high adventure. Here were strange sights that matched any of the imaginative novels on which aforetime he had fed his hunger for romance. Here was a scene such as he had imagined in the midst of posting ledgers and day-books in a stuffy office on Canal Street. And Cunningham did not notice it at all, because he was no longer concerned with adventure. He had found that. He was fiercely resolved now to find the girl who loved him and whose love had been forbidden by the laws of the strange folk of the hills.
He saw her. Not in the circle. She was crouched down on the grass amid a group of women. Rebellion was in every line of her figure. Cunningham loosened his revolver. It was madness, but——
A shout rang out sharply. And the running line of men broke and milled. Cunningham saw a hundred hands flash to as many knife-hilts. He saw the sheriff and four frightened-looking constables come plunging out of the brushwood, shouting something inane about halting in the name of the law. There was a shout and a scream, and then a man’s voice raised itself in a wild yell of command and entreaty. Cunningham’s own name was blended in a sentence in that unintelligible language.
The Strangers darted for the encircling woods. The women vanished, Maria among them. There was only a blank space in the open lighted by monster flames, and the sheriff and two constables struggling with a single figure of the Strangers.
“Go git ’em!” roared the sheriff, holding fast to the captive. “Git ’em! They’re scared. Ketch as many as ye kin!”
Cunningham felt Gray holding him down in an iron grasp.
“Don’t be a fool!” rasped Gray in a whisper. “It’s too late! The Strangers got away, all but one.”
The other men were racing about here and there. They found nothing but a bit of cloth here, and a woman’s embroidered cap there, left behind in the sudden flight.
The struggle in the open space ceased abruptly. The sheriff triumphantly called to the others.
“I got one now! Dun’t be scared! We got a hostage!” He reared up and yelled to the surrounding forest: “Dun’t ye try any o’ your knife-throwin’ tricks! This feller we got, if we dun’t get down safe, he dun’t neither! Dun’t ye try any rescuin’!”
He bent down to jerk his prisoner upright. And Cunningham heard him gasp. He chattered in sudden stillness and the others huddled about him.
“Dead!” gasped one of them.
“He stabbed hisself, I tell ye,” shrilled the sheriff. “He stuck his own knife in hisself!”
The five ungainly figures stared at each other, there amidst the roaring, deserted bonfires. One of them began to whimper suddenly.
“They—they’ll be throwin’ their knives all the way down to the valley!” he gasped. “They’ll be hidin’ behind trees an’ a-stabbin’ at us.”
The sheriff’s teeth began to chatter. The others clutched their weapons and gazed affrightedly at the woods encircling them.
“We—we got to try it,” gulped the sheriff, shivering. “We got to! Else they’ll get guns an’ kill us here. If—if ye see anything movin’, shoot it! Dun’t wait! If ye see anything, shoot....”
With staring, panic-stricken eyes, they made for the woods. Cunningham heard them crashing through the undergrowth in the darkness, whimpering and gasping in terror at every fancied sound.
They left behind them nothing but twelve great fires that began slowly to burn low, and a crumpled figure in barbaric finery lying with his face upturned toward the sky. It was the young Stranger who only that afternoon had told Cunningham of the girl he had loved and lost because she was not of the Strange People. He had stabbed himself when captured, rather than be taken out of the hills and forced to tell the secret of the Strangers.
By morning the outside valleys were up in arms. One man—the foreigner of the train—had been killed by the Strange People, and a servant of Vladimir’s had disappeared among them. And witchcraft had been believed in not too long ago in those parts. The wild ceremony of the Strangers among their blazing fires was told and retold, and with one known killing to their discredit and the long-smoldering hatred they had inspired, at the end it was related as devil-worship undiluted. Something out of Scripture came to be put in it and men told each other—and firmly believed—that children were being kidnaped and sacrificed to the Moloch out of the Old Testament. The single Stranger who had been killed became another human sacrifice, confusingly intermingled with the other and more horrible tale, and there was no doubt in the mind of any of the local farmers that the Strangers planned unspeakable things to all not of their own kind.
Had any Stranger been seen without the hills, he would have been mobbed by an hysterical populace. Sober, God-fearing men huddled their families together and stood guard over them. Women watched their children with their husbands’ shotguns in their hands. Wilder and ever wilder rumors sped with lightning speed from homestead to homestead in the valleys.
And all this was done without malice. The native-born people had distrusted the Strange People because they were strange. They disliked them because they were aloof. And they came to hate them because they were mysterious. It is always dangerous to be a mystery. The story of what the sheriff and his four constables had seen among the fires on the heights became enlarged to a tale of unspeakable things. It would have required no more than a leader with a loud voice to mobilize a mob of farmers who would have invaded the hills with pitchforks and shotguns to wipe out the Strange People entirely.
They did not fear the Strangers as witches, but as human beings. They feared them as possible kidnapers of children to be killed in the inhuman orgies the fire-ceremony had become in the telling. They had no evidence of such crimes committed by the Strangers. But there is no evidence of kidnaping against the gipsies, yet many people suspect them of the same crime. Had any man spoken the truth about the Strangers, he would have been suspected of horrible designs—of being in sympathy with them. And because of the totally false tales that sprang up like magic about their name, to be suspected of sympathy with the Strangers was to court death.
Cunningham’s rage grew. Gray shrugged and rode furiously to Bendale to send more telegrams. Vladimir went about softly, purring to himself, and passed out bribes lavishly to those who could be bribed, and told lies to those who preferred to be suborned in that way.
He was holding back the plans of mobbing. The sheriff, acting on his orders, broke up every group of wild-talking men as soon as it formed. But Vladimir held the Strange People in the hollow of his palm. Half a dozen murmured words, and the men who had taken his lavished money would stand aside and let the simmering terror of the countryside burst out into the frenzy of a mob. And then the hills would be invaded by Christian men who would ferret out the Strangers and kill them one by one in the firm belief that they were exterminating the agents of Satan and the killers of innumerable children.
It did not matter that Vladimir’s hold was based on lies. The lies were much more exciting than the truth. The truth was dull and bare. The Strangers had been dancing about the fires. The constables had rushed out and they had fled, without attempting to resist or harm their attackers. One of them had stabbed himself when caught. And the truth was mysterious enough, and inexplicable enough, but it did not compare with the highly colored tales of human sacrifice and heathen orgies that had been embroidered upon the original tale.
Cunningham was inevitably in the thick of all these rumors. Men came rushing with news. A Stranger had been seen lurking about where children were playing. He was instantly suspected of planning to kidnap one of them. He had been shot at and now was being chased by dogs. A Stranger had stopped a doctor in the road and asked for bandaging for an injured arm. He had been shot by one of the constables the night before. Other Strangers guarded him lest the doctor try to arrest him while he dressed the wound.
That was in the morning. As the day went on the reports became more horrible. It became clear that if any Stranger showed his face he would be shot at as if he were a mad dog.
Word came from one place. Two Strangers had been seen and fired on. They vanished, leaving a trail of blood. From another place came another report. An old Strange woman had come out of the hills, to beg for medicines for their wounded. Dogs were set on her as she screamed her errand. She fled, and knives came hurtling from the brushwood, killing or wounding the dogs that were in pursuit.
Gray had promised much. With a drawn and anxious face he had told Cunningham that this day help must come. His telegrams must have produced results. They must have had some effect! He had long since dropped his pretense that his only mission in the hills was the study of the Strange People’s dialect. He was off in Bendale, struggling with a telephone, pleading with a long-distance operator to give him a connection to somewhere—anywhere outside.
Noon came and passed. The afternoon waned, with the inhabitants of the valley growing more and more hysterical in their hatred of the Strange People, and more and more detailed and convinced about the horrors they ascribed to them. The wholly imaginary menace of the Strangers was making it more and more difficult to prevent the formation of a mob. Men raved, wanting to protect their children by wiping out the hill folk. Women grew hysterical, demanding their annihilation.
Cunningham went to Vladimir. Vladimir blinked at him and licked his lips.
“Your servant is a prisoner among the Strange People,” said Cunningham, coldly. “I’m authorized to say he’ll be killed if a mob enters the hills.”
Vladimir smiled, and all his cruelty showed when he smiled.
“How are you authorized to speak for them?”
“Let that go,” said Cunningham grimly. “He’s alive and safe, but he won’t be if that mob goes in.”
The sheriff came in hurriedly.
“Mr. Vladimir——” he began.
Cunningham cut into his report with some sharpness.
“Sheriff, the Strange People are holding Vladimir’s servant prisoner, as a hostage. They’ll kill him if you raid the hills again.”
Vladimir laughed.
“He is vastly mistaken, sheriff. I had a servant here, it is true. But I sent him to Boston, on a mission. And I had word from him yesterday that he was quite safe and attending to my orders.”
He blinked at Cunningham and moved close to him.
“Fool,” he murmured gently, so that the sheriff could not hear, “do you think his life counts any more than yours?”
The sheriff glared at Cunningham hatefully.
“Tryin’ to scare me, eh?” he rumbled. “I got enough on you to arrest you. You’re in thick with them Strangers, you are. I reckon jail’s the best place for you. You won’t get no chance to talk about bribes there.”
Cunningham felt himself growing white with fury. His threat to Vladimir had been a bluff, and Vladimir had shown complete indifference to the fate of the man he had sent to murder Cunningham. But there was one thing he would not be indifferent to.
“You try to arrest me,” he said softly to the sheriff, “and I’ll blow your head off. And as for you, Vladimir”—he made his tone as convincing as he could—“I just tell you that you’d better call that mob off or I’ll tell them who the Strangers are and where they came from!”
Vladimir’s eyes flamed close to madness, while his cheeks went ashen.
“So they told you!” he purred. “Sheriff, go to the door. I wish to speak to this man privately.”
The sheriff, rumbling, moved away.
“My friend,” murmured Vladimir softly, “now I shall have to kill you. Not myself, of course, because that would be illegal. And dangerous. But I give you news. Today, while you and Gray were outside, a little note was tossed into your window. I heard the breaking glass and found it. It was from a girl, who signed, ‘Maria.’ She said that she loved you and would wait for you at a certain spot to flee with you.”
Cunningham’s heart stopped. Vladimir laughed at his expression.
“Oh, she was met,” murmured Vladimir. “She was met—and arrested. She is held fast. And tonight a story will go about and the women of the neighborhood will learn where she is. She is in the hotel here, safely bound. With such a tale as will be spread about, do you not think the women will pull down the whole hotel to tear her in bits? Now do you go and tell the secret of the Strangers! No one will believe you. But you believe me!”
He tossed a scrap of paper to Cunningham. And Cunningham knew that the story was true.
“Now,” said Vladimir, purring, “I shall give orders that you be arrested. If you are taken, she will be torn to bits. And that is how I kill you, my friend. That is how I kill you! For I do not want anyone to live who will remember or believe the secret of the Strangers.”
Then the news took a definitely dangerous turn. A farmer who was hastening to Coulters was stopped by a band of Strangers. They had taken his shotgun and shells from him, contemptuously tossing him half a dozen of the square lumps of gold. The gold would pay for the gun ten times over, but men raged. Another man came in foaming at the mouth, with a similar tale. He had seen a Stranger and raised his gun to fire as at a wild beast. A knife had flicked at him and gone through the fleshy part of his arm. They took his gun and shells, leaving gold to pay for them.
No one saw anything odd in firing on the Strangers at sight. But everyone grew hysterically excited at the thought of the Strangers taking guns with which to shoot back. Then a man rode up on a lathered horse, shouting hoarsely that twenty Strangers had raided a country store some six miles away. They had appeared suddenly. When they left they took half a dozen shotguns—the whole stock—three rifles, and all the ammunition in the store. They left gold to pay for the lot.
Cunningham heard all this as one would hear outside sounds during a nightmare. He was like a madman. He would have gone rushing through the place in search of Maria but that it was still broad daylight and there were twenty or more armed men in the place, all mad with excitement and fury. As it was, Cunningham was in a cold, clear-headed rage. He went to his own room and packed his pockets with cartridges.
Vladimir was right in one respect. The natives were in no mood to listen to the truth. They would believe nothing that he told them. He was suspect, in any event. They classed him with the Strangers, and they classed the Strangers with the beasts. Fighting such men was not fighting law and order. The sheriff was bribed. The rest were wild with rage and terror. They did not know they were catspaws for Vladimir. Even the sheriff probably knew but little of Vladimir’s plans.
He went into Gray’s room and searched for a possible second revolver. As he pawed grimly among Gray’s possessions he heard the sheriff speaking, through a partition. Gray’s room was next to that occupied by Vladimir, and Cunningham abruptly realized how Gray had obtained much information.
“I’m doin’ my best to hold ’em,” the sheriff was saying anxiously, “but it’s gettin’ to be a tough job. I’d better send for militia——”
“Fool!” snarled Vladimir. “What do I give you money for? There will be no fighting! We will march into the hills. We will pen up these folk—surround them. If your mob kills a few, what harm? Afterward you shall pick out your murderers—as many as you choose! They will confess to anything you choose, after I have spoken to them. And then the rest of the Strangers will move away. They will go away forever, with me! I will take them!”
“But it looks bad——”
“They will lick my boots,” rasped Viadimir. “They will crawl upon their knees and beg me for mercy. And I will give you four men to hang. They will confess to their crime. And I will take the rest away.”
Cunningham nodded grimly. At least this clarified the situation a little. Vladimir was afraid of the Strangers’ secret becoming known. He only wanted to get them away. If he could find Maria and she would tell him, and Gray brought the help he had promised——
Cunningham was not thinking for himself, except as his liberty meant safety for Maria, and secondarily for the Strange People. But he would have to go into every room in the hotel filled with armed and suspicious men. It was lucky he had two guns. There would surely be shooting. There would probably be a bullet or two for him.
“Now send your deputies to arrest Cunningham,” snapped Vladimir on the other side of the wall. “Tell them to shoot him if he resists. He was teaching the Strangers to shoot and advising them to resist arrest. That is enough.”
“I’ll send a bunch,” whined the sheriff uneasily. “He’s a desp’rit character. Talkin’ about accusin’ me of takin’ bribes....”
“You’ll be rich for life when this is over,” Vladimir purred. “Remember that!”
The door closed behind the sheriff. Cunningham grinned savagely. He was to have no chance at all. They had been sent to arrest him, after Vladimir had given him news that would ensure his resisting. He would resist, right enough! And then a wild and utterly reckless scheme sprang full-bodied into Cunningham’s head.
He swung the door to—and heard a squeaking on the other side of the partition as if a closet door had been opened. And then Vladimir spoke purringly in that unknown language of the Strangers!
There could be but one person to whom he would be speaking at such a time and in that language. Cunningham’s heart leaped violently. He heard voices downstairs—men coming up to arrest him in his own room.
He darted out in the hall and plunged into Vladimir’s room, a ready revolver upraised. Vladimir whirled and stared into its muzzle with ashen cheeks. For once there was no purred jibe upon his lips, because Cunningham’s face was the face of a killer after he had seen Maria in the clothes-closet, bound hand and foot and with a gag in her mouth. She had been staring at Vladimir in horror, but her eyes flamed at sight of Cunningham.
For the fraction of a second they gazed at each other. Then her eyes signaled frantic warning. Cunningham whirled and dashed his revolver blindly in Vladimir’s face as his hand came up with an automatic. Vladimir stumbled and crashed backward to the floor.
Footsteps crashed on the steps outside. Nearly all the men in the hotel, it seemed, were coming up in a body to see to the arrest of Cunningham. But he paid no attention. He was ripping away at the gag and tearing loose the bonds that held Maria fast.
“Vladimir told me you’d been captured,” he panted, “and said you’d be mobbed tonight. Now he’s sent a gang to arrest me, knowing I’d resist and get myself killed. We’ve got to make a break for it. All right?”
Maria’s eyes were like stars. Cunningham kissed her suddenly.
“My God!” he laughed shakily. “One can think of love-making even at a time like this! Listen!”
The crowd on the stairs had reached the top. They crowded down the hall before Cunningham’s own door. There they hesitated, shuffling uneasily. At last a voice called loudly, “Open in the name of the law!”
There was no answer from Cunningham’s empty room. They waited breathlessly. A man pounded cautiously on the panel of the door.
“Open in th’ name of th’ law!”
Still silence.
“M-maybe he j-jumped outer th’ window,” suggested someone uneasily.
“R-rush him,” urged a man safely in the rear.
Cunningham and Maria, two rooms away, heard a hand laid on the other room’s door. They heard it fling open with a crash and the scuttling of feet as the mob of hastily deputized men jumped to one side to be out of the way of possible bullets. Dead silence greeted them. And suddenly they crowded into the deserted place.
“Now!” said Cunningham sharply.
He darted out, Maria running with him. She fled to the stairs and down them, Cunningham two steps in the rear. A single straggler of the men who were to have arrested him remained in the hall. He turned his head stupidly at sound of their rush. His mouth dropped open, but before his shout they were half-way to the ground floor.
Cunningham stopped at the foot of the stairs to fire three times up at the ceiling of the second floor. A cloud of smoke filled the hall, and heads that had craned over the balustrade withdrew, in a panic. A dozen paces more and the fugitives were out in the roadway. Half a dozen horses were tethered there and Cunningham tore loose the reins and leaped on one. Maria sprang up lightly behind him and he kicked the animal madly with his heels. It sprang into a panic-stricken gallop and was off down the road.
They were nearly out of sight before the first of their pursuers had run out into the road behind them. Then half a dozen puffs of smoke showed that they were fired on, but an instant later they were out of sight around a bend in the road.
Cunningham laughed a little as the horse’s hoofs clattered beneath and the white road shot past. Maria was clinging to his shoulders.
“Safe so far,” he told her, “but now we have to take to the woods. The hand of every man is against us, Maria. Do you trust me to get you away?”
“Anywhere,” she said softly. “You know I do.”
A motorcar came racing toward them over the rough road. It was not fit going for an automobile and the car swayed and lurched from side to side with dangerous abandon. Cunningham swerved his horse out of the road. The car slowed and stopped with a screaming of brakes. Cunningham’s hand fell to his weapon.
Gray tumbled out of the cloud of dust that enveloped the machine.
“Cunningham,” he panted. “Just found—Vladimir had bribed the telegraph operator. None of my wires got through. Found an amateur radio fan and he sent my message. Relay League. Help’s coming. By airplane. Bendale is a town of lunatics. Wild yarns have gone into it and a mob is coming out to wipe out the Strangers. They think they’ve been burning children. You’ve got to get up to the Strangers. Tell ’em about planes. Tell them to get going and keep moving or there ’ll be a massacre. Help’s coming as fast as it can get here. But for God’s sake keep them away from the mob. They’ll be wiped out!”
“I’m going to get Maria away,” said Cunningham defiantly. “I’m going to get her out of this state and marry her. The Strangers and anybody else can go to the devil!”
Gray, choking upon the dust he had swallowed, gasped out a raging order.
“Don’t be a fool!” he cried. “Look at her clothes! She’s in the Strangers’ costume! You’ll be spotted if you’re seen, and three townships are raving crazy! A dog couldn’t get away from here like that! You’ll be shot at by every damned fool in three counties and arrested anywhere else you go! Get up in the hills and keep the Strangers moving! The planes may not get here until dark, and they can’t land in the hills in the darkness. I’m going to meet them at Hatton Junction and guide them here. You get up in the hills and keep the Strangers moving or there’ll be a massacre! That mob will even wipe out the children! Everybody’s crazy! You’ve got to save them, Cunningham! You’ve got to!”
And Cunningham knew that he was telling the truth. The Strange People might not fight, if he begged them not to. To desert them would mean a tragedy in the hills. The people about them were no more accountable than so many lunatics. But to ride among the Strange People with Maria upon his saddle! ... They would know that she loved him, and they would believe that she had told him their secret. They would never let him leave the hills again alive.
It was death either way, and probably for them both. He looked at Maria and found her eyes misty with tears.
“Let me go,” she said suddenly, with a sob in her throat. “You go away. I will go up to my people and tell them what this man has said. Without me, you can escape. My people will tell me to die, but you will not know who we are and you will never hate me or despise me....”
Cunningham caught her hand and laughed shortly.
“No, my dear,” he said grimly. “We won’t be separated. It’s a choice between being shot like mad dogs or facing your people. We’ll ride up into the hills. We’ll tell your people that help is coming to hold off the mob. Their lives will be safe and their secret too, for all of me. And if we die, it will be decently. I’ve two guns for the pair of us.”
He found himself laughing as he waved his hand at Gray and drove his horse at the steep slopes that led upward to the tree-clad heights in which the Strangers lurked.
As the trees closed over their heads he smiled again and swung Maria before him. He gave the horse its head and the animal dropped to a plodding walk. And they talked softly. They had but a little while to be alone and they had never talked the tender foolishness that lovers know. Now they were riding at a snail’s pace upward to the stern vengeance of the Strangers upon a woman of their number who had loved outside the clan.
They spoke in whispers, not to avoid detection but because there are some things that are too tender to be spoken aloud. And their eyes spoke other things for which nobody has ever found words. Maria’s arm was about Cunningham’s neck and her lips were never far from his own and it seemed as if all trouble and care were very far away, though they were riding up to death.
The trees rustled above them. Birds sang all about them. And they rode through an age-old forest upon a weary horse, a scarecrow of a man with a bandaged shoulder and a girl in barbaric finery, gazing at him with tear-misted eyes. And as they rode they talked softly, and now and then they smiled, and in every speech and glance and gesture there was an aching happiness and a wistful regret.
All this was very foolish, but it was the proper and authentic conclusion for a man who has followed the route to romance and adventure to its appointed ending.
But there came a little rustling in the undergrowth beside them as they went on climbing up to the heights. Then other rustlings. Far away there was a whistle as if someone signaled. And very suddenly an arm reached out from the thick brushwood and seized the horse’s bridle. One of the Strangers stepped into view and gazed steadily up into the muzzle of Cunningham’s revolver.
From all about them men materialized as if by magic. No man laid a hand on any weapon. They looked at the pair upon the horse gravely, without rancor but with infinite resolution.
And Stephan, Maria’s father, came into view and regarded them with weary, hopeless eyes.
“Why did you come back?” he asked in a queer and resolute despair. “You knew what we would have to do. Why did you come back?”