*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79055 ***




  THE PLACE CALLED DAGON

  Herbert Gorman




BOOKS BY HERBERT GORMAN


  GOLD BY GOLD
  THE FOOL OF LOVE
  THE TWO VIRGINITIES
  THE PLACE CALLED DAGON
  THE PROCESSION OF MASKS
  NOTATIONS FOR A CHIMAERA
  THE PETERBOROUGH ANTHOLOGY
  THE BARCAROLE OF JAMES SMITH
  HAWTHORNE: A STUDY IN SOLITUDE
  JAMES JOYCE: HIS FIRST FORTY YEARS
  A VICTORIAN AMERICAN: HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW




  The Place Called
  Dagon

  By Herbert Gorman


  NEW YORK

  George H. Doran Company




  COPYRIGHT, 1927,
  BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY




  THE PLACE CALLED DAGON

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




  TO
  MARTHA
  a mystery among
  mysteries




TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE
  CHAPTER TWO
  CHAPTER THREE
  CHAPTER FOUR
  CHAPTER FIVE
  CHAPTER SIX
  CHAPTER SEVEN
  CHAPTER EIGHT
  CHAPTER NINE
  CHAPTER TEN
  CHAPTER ELEVEN




THE PLACE CALLED DAGON




Chapter One


I

Doctor Dreeme, turning sleepily on his pillow, heard the clatter of a
horse’s hoofs coming down the steep Leeminster Road. The steely clash
on the rock-path tore abruptly through his semi-trance and he opened
his eyes, scowling vaguely at the milky blur of ceiling. The horse
stopped with a rough grating of hoofs below the window and the doctor
sighed. Marlborough was like that. It was undoubtedly another farmer
with a pain in his back who might just as well wait until morning.
It was at night that his taciturn neighbors were most obsessed with
the somber consequences of their lonely ailments. In daylight they
would bear them with the dumb equanimity of animals, sitting behind
drawn curtains or plodding painfully over their stony fields. But they
were horribly afraid of dying at night. The bell clanked feebly. The
doctor threw back his quilted coverlet of great square patches, rose
in the darkness of the room, and strode over to the window. He leaned
out, straining his eyes to see who stood in the gray mist of the moon
outside his door.

“Who is it?” he called sharply. “Who, in the name of Heaven ... at this
time of night....”

A boyish treble answered him.

“Doctor Dreeme? I’m Miles, Jeffrey Westcott’s hired boy. Mr. Westcott’s
taken something awful. He wants for you to come and help him right
away. He’s shot himself and....”

“I’ll be right down,” snapped the doctor.

He fumbled about the room, lit a kerosene oil-lamp, and hastily dressed
himself, drawing his trousers on over his rumpled pyjamas. Pausing an
instant before the cracked mirror he smoothed back his tousled hair and
dashed some cold water from the china bowl upon his sleep-warm face.
It was a square-cut visage, young, thin-lipped, and with long narrow
eyes that stared back briefly at him. Two years’ arduous practice in
Marlborough, a relentless precision of deaths and births and ailments,
had etched tiny lines about his mouth and eyes and forehead, lines of
watchfulness and concentration, but he was still surprisingly youthful
in appearance and alert in action. He grasped his black bag and hurried
down the stairs, slipping the bolt and stepping into the dim lane where
the huge farm-horse pawed impatiently at the ground. The blank windows
of the Slater house stared down at him gloomily as he turned to the
boy, Miles, who perched like a small monkey on his mount.

“Are you sure that Jeffrey Westcott wants me to come?” asked Dreeme as
he climbed to a seat on the blanket that served for a saddle. There was
a minor note of amazement in his voice.

The boy said nothing but chirped to his horse and the huge beast swung
in the lane and mounted the hill, slowly at first and then at a smart
canter as the ascent eased its sharp angle. The blurred moon flew
with them, trailing long bat-like wings of milky opacity across the
crumbling stone walls and the buildings with their lurching outhouses.
Beside them swept their broad shadow, a two-torsoed centaur, indistinct
and formidable in outline. Looking back Dreeme could see the little
town of Marlborough stretched out like a conglomeration of dark tombs.
A cool air tingling with the freshness of impending rain flowed by his
face. Low trees flung chunky green arms across the twisting fences
at him. They were black in the dimmed moonlight. The shaggy hoofs of
the horse thudded heavily on the sand-road. Suddenly the boy answered
Dreeme’s question.

“He told me to fetch you, anyway,” he remarked to the darkness before
him.

The doctor said nothing and the boy, turning his head, observed him
fleetingly. Dreeme caught the flash of a small, dark, imp-like face and
two dull-green eyes.

So far as the doctor knew nobody ever called at the Westcott farm. It
was avoided territory, forbidden to children wandering through the
byways between Marlborough and Leeminster and skirted hastily by
the taciturn farmers who dwelt in its vicinity. Dreeme had observed
the rambling white-washed buildings from the road often enough as
he had passed on his way to various patients and occasionally he
had seen Jeffrey Westcott ride into town for supplies, but that was
all. The Westcotts took no part in the life of Marlborough. Indeed,
they seemed frankly to court an ostracism that had long ago been
willingly granted them by the unusual breed of natives who dwelt in
this part of New England. Dreeme, curious and observant when he first
arrived in Marlborough and took up the practice of his father’s old
friend, Humphrey Lathrop, had asked questions about the Westcotts,
as, indeed, he had about all the farmers in the neighbourhood, for
he believed in mixing as much psychological insight as possible with
his medicinal treatments, but he soon discovered that questions were
not welcome in the town. An excessive reticence possessed these
leather-skinned delvers in the soil, these small-shopkeepers, and even
the brief scattering of professional men who conducted the affairs
of Marlborough. Therefore, as Dreeme was an astute and adaptable
young man, he speedily learned to keep his mouth shut and, at least
outwardly, to suppress his curiosity. It was enough to serve as well as
he could when he was called upon and to expend whatever mental energies
he might have in the study of various profound books on medicine
and psychology. Although time passed slowly it passed agreeably for
loneliness did not obsess Dreeme. He was New England enough himself to
slip naturally into a rut of reticence and to occupy himself with his
own thoughts. Still there were many times when of all the curious folk
in his environment he let his cogitations wander to the Westcotts.

They were unusual in their abandonment of the common intercourse of
daily life. Apparently they had no friends, not even those cursory
friends who met in the Post Office and General Store and discussed in
brief bursts of monosyllables the politics and phenomena of the day.
They were decidedly sufficient unto themselves. Dreeme always thought
of the Westcotts as a plural number although he had never laid eyes
on Mrs. Westcott. He knew that she existed and that was all. This,
of course, was extraordinary in a small New England town where every
individual might be supposed to know intimately the smallest details of
a neighbor’s life; where, as a rule, the women, at least, maintained a
sharp and malicious watch on one another. But this, after all, was an
unusual New England town as Humphrey Lathrop had insisted to the young
man when Dreeme first ventured upon Marlborough.

“You have seen New Englanders all your life,” the older doctor had
said, “and you know their usual characteristics, reticence tinged with
curiosity, religious fervor jaundiced with personal hypocrisy, an old
pride bolstered by a stony soil, a nasal twang possibly induced by
generations of psalm-singing through the nose, a stubborn zeal in labor
and an inborn stinginess. You have seen that type of New Englander
and I do not go so far as to say that you will not find it here; but
there is a type of New Englander in this place that you have never seen
before and of which I knew nothing until I came here. Marlborough and,
to a lesser degree, Leeminster are cul-de-sacs into which an ancient
backwash of old blood has flowed. It has been unrelieved by any new
influx for two hundred years or more. It is not easy to get up here,
you know, and once here there is little to hold an ambitious man. That
is why you will go away some day. These people have dwelt here in this
valley so opportunely surrounded by the Florida mountains and have
intermarried for generations. Some day, perhaps the day when you leave
for ever, I will tell you what curious breed of Puritan drifted into
this valley and established these communities. You will be amazed, for
they are a breed of which you catch but furtive glances and hints in
Pilgrim and Puritan chronicles. A curious intermixture of ethical and
Dionysiac madness produced the forefathers of these people to whom
you must administer as wisely as you can and with a minimum of words
and questions.” The old doctor cleared his throat with a tremendous
harrumph, his elephantine body quivering like a great jelly-fish, and
Dreeme decided that he had been told nothing at all. If he was to solve
the mystery of Marlborough--and there _was_ a mystery, for he
felt it like two huge dark wings hovering over the entire community--he
must do it all by himself.

For two years now the mystery had stood just outside his door, a
dark and disquieting impalpability that teased him into fruitless
suppositions, that revealed itself fleetingly in the swift side-long
glitter of cautious eyes, that threaded the valley and the town with
a dim muffled sense of something unearthly. And yet the sun shone
brightly enough, the farmers went about their business with the usual
grim doggedness of men who scrape a difficult living from miserly soil,
and the thin-faced women, scrawny-armed and bowed in the shoulders,
existed as women do in a small world of ceaseless irritating tasks.
There were moments when Dreeme decided that there was no mystery at
all, that his imagination was playing tricks with him, and that his
intuitions were the idle outgrowths of a mind too much concerned with
itself and revolving inwardly and creating vague bogies for lack of
other occupations. But after such moments of doubt would come still
days when the lurching houses seemed to watch him maliciously and when
the still trees, flinging their black shadows across the yellow glitter
of deserted roads, would stand as symbols of some invisible prowling
specter that patrolled the valley and observed him with blank lidless
eyes. His flesh crawled on his bones and it was only by an effort that
he put the obsession from him. He would say to himself that it was
ennui, that it was a morbid reaction to his existence in a small world
where, in spite of his ministrations, he was an outsider, that it was
nerves, but, considering the matter deliberately, he knew that it was
none of these likely causes. He possessed no nerves; he was not weary
of his loneliness; his mind was not too idle. It was something outside
of him pushing gently against his mind.


II

The horse thudded ponderously up the road.

“How did Westcott shoot himself?” asked Dreeme suddenly.

The boy turned his thin face and green eyes over his small hunched
shoulder, opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it firmly.

“I calculate that he’ll tell you that,” he finally answered. He kicked
ferociously at the horse’s ribs with his small bare feet.

A few drops of rain dashed against Dreeme’s face. It was
extraordinarily dark now for the moon had disappeared, swallowed up in
the soundless rain-cloud that stretched across the sky like a monstrous
sable circus-tent. More by sense than anything else the young doctor
knew that he had passed the old burned mill and an instant later the
horse clattered across the small wooden bridge which spanned the narrow
Saccarac River. He was now on the final stretch of dirt-road leading
to the Westcott farm. This route was exceedingly familiar to Dreeme
for he traversed it often, going either to some farm or to the larger
town of Leeminster where there was a bank, a stone school-house, a
deserted gin-distillery crumbling to ruin, and a small court-house. The
road turned in a great slow arc and was bordered by low stone fences,
dejected and wrecked by weather into wide breaches at intervals.
Between the roadway and the feeble barriers grew occasional clumps of
birch trees and beneath them in season bloomed the dusty black-eyed
Susans and asthma-compelling golden-rod. Behind the fences stretched
the ploughed fields and grass meadows of the various small farms, all
of them sloping downward for the Marlborough-Leeminster road progressed
along a ridge. A faint mingled smell of piled dung, rotting hay and
skinny poultry permeated the air. Dreeme knew the territory well enough
by day. The white-washed houses, set well back from the road and a
story more in the rear than they were in front because of the ground
slope, lifted tilted smoking chimneys. Dogs, cursed with legions of
perpetually active fleas, barked from sagging porches and blear-eyed
cocks crowed in the wire-enclosures behind the long lurching kitchens
that seemed to have been added as afterthoughts to the dispirited
houses. Some of these dwellings were astonishingly old and even the
white-wash failed to conceal their dejected venerability. The doors
and windows, sunken by the years as though Time had leaned on the
lintels and sills with a heavy elbow, leered like the features of a
twisted face. All this was in the daytime. At night a profound darkness
enveloped these staggering structures. There were no lights in the
small opaque windows, nothing but the blank glow of the moon and stars.
The farmers of Marlborough sought their beds at an early hour, and the
candles and kerosene oil which still sufficed for illumination cost
money. Only when the moon was at its brightest did the houses step
somewhat out of their brooding night shadow and turn the incurious
eyes of their windows toward the curving road. Then they seemed to
squat like an unfriendly array of old crones in soiled white wrappers,
watching the highway along which so many strange figures had passed
since the first mysterious settlers arrived in the valley and found
it a likely place wherein to raise their hewn log-houses and their
solitary mill.

The horse stopped suddenly and Dreeme, surmising that he had reached
his journey’s end, slipped to the ground, his feet clattering on
loose pebbles as he maintained his balance. A long ominous growl
immediately before him greeted his footsteps and he drew back with some
trepidation. He knew all about the half-savage dogs that patrolled
the farm-yards at night. The boy hurried by him and there was a sound
of poles being pulled out of their sockets at a gateway. A cold damp
snout thrust itself against Dreeme’s hand just as the boy hissed an
unintelligible phrase and an instant later there was the sound of
a heavy body forcing its way through the bushes which lined the
road. Dreeme knew that the dog was watching him from a distance with
savage curiosity. The boy came back and grasped the rope that served
for bridle on the horse. “This is the way, doctor,” he said. “Don’t
be afraid of the dog.” They stumbled through what was apparently an
aperture in the fence and followed a twisted and hummocky path. Dreeme
tripped over unsuspected hollows and small jutting boulders until they
circled the dark bulk of the house and were at a rear door. A few
drops of rain pattered against his face as he looked up at the rear
windows. It was curious that he could perceive no least vestige of
light emanating from the blank panes. The building stood morosely in
a pool of high trees and this intensified the darkness about it. At
the door the boy knocked delicately, his thin knuckles playing upon
the splintered woodwork, and, after a moment, while Dreeme felt very
foolish and slightly startled, there were a few whispered words with
some invisible personage who had shot back a series of bolts. The brief
beam of a candle leaped across the doctor’s face and he felt himself
urged forward and into a room where the shadows fled sluggishly before
the feeble whiplash of light from the cylinder of wax. There was a
rattling sound as the bolts were shot and Dreeme knew that he was
locked in the Westcott farm-house.

Clutching his black bag, he stared curiously about him but all that he
could perceive was a simply furnished room, the usual “sitting room”
of a farm-house with its few stuffed chairs, its wax flowers under
glass on a side table, its faded family pictures, a framed silver
plate from a coffin, and an antiquated spinning wheel that squatted
forlornly in a corner. Before him stood a stocky figure holding a fat
candle in one hand and directing him toward an opposite door with the
other. The meager flame from the candle slanted back and illuminated
a deep red beard and two glassy eyes. Dreeme, his vision clearing in
the feeble glow, noted that his companion was evidently the hired man,
a burly figure absurdly short for his girth and garmented in dejected
looking blue overalls and a faded woolen shirt. This apparition was in
his stocking feet and he made no sound as he padded across the floor.
The hired man said nothing but cleared his throat with a choking sound
as though he were endeavoring to loosen unused vocal chords, and then,
apparently giving it up as something beyond his powers, proceeded
toward the door which he had indicated with an awkward flourish of a
square hairy hand. He rapped timidly at the door.

“Wagner?” cried a sharp voice from within.

Wagner opened the door a trifle, thrust in his shaggy red head, and
seemed to croak hoarsely.

“All right! All right!” the voice snapped immediately, and Wagner stood
back and motioned Doctor Dreeme toward the patch of yellow light that
poured through the half-opened door.


III

It was a small room into which Dreeme ventured and one in which the
walls seemed to push forward, an aspect intensified, perhaps, by the
tall lurching cases of books which surrounded the square table at
which Jeffrey Westcott sat. There were books everywhere, in the cases,
scattered over the table, and piled in slumping heaps on the floor.
The greater portion of them were huge tomes, bound in old buckrams,
in worm-eaten moroccos, or in yellow vellum. The dull gold lettering,
subdued in the glow of Westcott’s kerosene-lamp, seemed like the sleepy
half-shut eyes of somnolent beasts waiting patiently for the word of
the master who should bring them to life. But there was no word now.
They rested, these mysterious beasts of ancient knowledge, holding
their secrets close to their muted hearts. Dreeme paused just inside
the door staring about him in amazement.

An impatient exclamation roused him to his professional duties and he
turned toward Jeffrey Westcott, observing him closely for the first
time.

“Good evening or good morning,” remarked the man seated by the table.
“I have lost count of the hours, doctor.”

Westcott was a heavily-built man, smooth-faced, and with a shaven
head. This round skull, blue with an incipient growth of dark hair,
reminded Dreeme irresistibly of the tonsured cranium of some medieval
friar. It was curiously ridged in the center, as though the two sides
of the skull had been pressed together while molten and so joined,
leaving a cloven line where the bone had bulged upward on either side.
The ears were long and rose thin and prominent on either side of this
curious head. The broad brow slanted back at an obvious angle and the
chin, blue also with incipient hair, thrust forward aggressively,
the ensemble giving the impression of semi-malignant imperiousness.
Westcott’s nose was broken and this accident accentuated the curious
profile which he presented when he turned his head, a profile almost
ape-like but redeemed by a certain vitality of knowledge. His eyes,
large, coal-black and motionless, glittered dully, but it was not the
dull glitter of stupidity. Rather was it a repressed but unceasing
watchfulness that was somehow mocking in its semblance of indifference.
Dreeme was reminded of the eyes of a cat when it permits a bird to
flutter within a few feet of its curved claws.

“It is a very fine library, I assure you,” continued the farmer with a
casual flutter of one sun-burned hand toward the lurching cases. Dreeme
sensed a purring irony in the man’s voice. “I should like to show it
to you but just now I am somewhat inconvenienced by this cursed bullet
wound.”

Dreeme with a muttered apology, hurried forward fumbling at the catch
to his black bag.

“It is not often--at least in this part of the world--that one sees so
many books,” he said. “You must excuse me.”

His amazement was frank and he made no attempt to conceal it.

“You are freely pardoned,” replied the ironic voice.

The doctor knelt and began to remove the bloodstained bandage that
swathed the plump calf of the farmer.

“How did this happen?” he inquired as the wrapping slipped away and he
saw the black bullet-hole surrounded by a crusted clot of blood.

“Experiment,” returned Westcott shortly.

“Experiment?” echoed Dreeme questioningly, glancing up into the still
black eyes. Westcott reached deliberately for a cigar, drawing one from
the large box that stood on the table at his elbow. He said nothing but
stared blandly at the doctor as he lighted the long dark weed. Dreeme,
flushed and feeling foolish, turned back to his labor. He decided that
Westcott was an offensive brute.

“I want a pan of hot water,” he said, after inspecting the wound. “I
shall have to probe for the bullet. It may pain you a bit.”

He felt a moment’s elation at the idea of giving Westcott pain.

The farmer turned his head and shouted toward the door.

“Wagner!” he cried. “Wagner!”

In the short pause that ensued, Dreeme, still kneeling before the
stocky Westcott, studied the worn backs of the books in the case
opposite him. They seemed to emanate an atmosphere that was ominous.
There was something dark and forbidding about them, an intangible
suggestion of an evil culture. The crowding walls advanced stealthily,
bringing an aura of suffocation with them.

The farmer cursed softly and pleasantly to himself.

“My dear doctor,” he began, “I am afraid you will have to....”

“What is it, Jeff?” inquired a feminine voice, low and husky, behind
them.

Both men turned at this unexpected sound. Westcott was plainly put out
and for a moment his large eyes glittered angrily. Dreeme gazed upward
at the woman who had so quietly entered the room with a curiosity
which almost instantly merged into amazement. There are women who at a
first glance arrest the attention not so much by any ulterior beauty
or unique qualities of bearing as by an inward spirit which seems to
beat fiercely against the thin walls of flesh and strive vehemently
to liberate itself from its entangling disguises. These women may
not be beautiful in the fleshy sense of the word, but somehow they
achieve more than the semblance of beauty in the eyes of the sensitive
observer. Dreeme saw such a woman before him and knew instantly and
instinctively that it was not alone the comeliness of her features that
so casually and indifferently subdued and betrayed the deliberate
impartiality of his reason. He saw immediately an extraordinary
inward impulse that climbed in her bosom and all but trembled on her
blood-red mouth. It was her eyes and mouth that first seized his
imagination. These eyes were dark and they glowed beneath large white
lids that drooped somewhat as with the ennui of identical days. They
seemed endless in depth like half-concealed forest springs and yet a
quickening spark glimmered in these unfathomable lakes of hushed amber
fire. The mouth was full with curling lips almost archaic in their
contour, and Dreeme was vaguely reminded of his adolescent ideas of the
snaky-haired Medusa. There was a subtle cruelty in this mouth.

“I told you to stay in your own room, my dear helpful Martha,” said
Westcott, his chin thrusting forward, “but since you are here, permit
me to present my invaluable friend, Doctor--er--Dreeme, I think. This
is my wife, doctor.”

She did not glance toward Dreeme.

“Wagner has gone to the----” She left the sentence unfinished. “I
thought you would need hot water.”

“Your mind is always acute, Martha,” remarked Westcott, giving her a
malicious look. “And who sent Wagner to the----”

“I did,” she responded coolly, placing the basin of hot water on the
floor close by Dreeme who still remained on one knee gazing at her.
Westcott smiled sourly and turned to the doctor.

“Come, doctor,” he said. “You must be wanting to get back to your
comfortable bed.”

Dreeme flushed and turned confusedly to his labors.

For a moment there was silence.

“The age of amazement,” said Westcott softly to the air, “is worthy of
a study in itself. There are so many ways of considering it.”

He winced as the probe touched the raw flesh.

“Softly, doctor, softly,” he begged. “Now take the age of amazement as
it affects the individual. Is it not true, my dear doctor, that if we
knew why a man was amazed and each time that he was amazed we should
know a great deal about him?”

Dreeme, intent on his work, said nothing.

“The question is merely theoretical,” proceeded Westcott. “I do not
expect an answer. I, for my own part, mingle so seldom in the world of
men that I have but small opportunity to put my theory in practice but
whenever I do see a man I strive to observe his surprised reactions to
things. It tells me something about him.”

The bullet slipped from the wound and Dreeme busied himself for a
moment in washing the torn flesh. At length he looked up for the
silence seemed to invite him to speak, to carry on a conversation that
was rather meaningless. He stared into Westcott’s dark expressionless
eyes.

“And me?” he said, smiling. “What have you learned about me in the few
minutes that I have been here?”

Westcott was obviously waiting for the question.

“Your reactions of surprise were obvious,” he answered, cocking his
head on one side. He began to count the points off on his fingers.

“Number one. You were amazed at finding so excellent and unexpected a
library here. I gather from that that your idea of the literacy of this
part of the world is not high. I agree with you in the main--but there
are exceptions everywhere, doctor. You were also amazed at finding
in me a man not wholly a stranger to the subtleties of the mind. I
may be flattering myself in this assumption but I do not think so. In
other words, you had thought of me as a mysterious, surly, country
clodhopper.”

There was a soft snarl in his voice. Before Dreeme could expostulate he
went on with his enumeration.

“Number two. You were amazed to hear that my little wound was the
result of an experiment. It piqued a curiosity which, unfortunately for
you, I shall not satisfy.”

“I assure you, I----” began Dreeme stiffly, but the soft voice
proceeded.

“Number three. You were amazed to see my wife. Well, I hardly blame
you. She amazes me at times.”

Again the soft snarl permeated his voice.

Dreeme instinctively glanced at Mrs. Westcott. She was standing by a
small window gazing out on the darkness and he could see no more than
the cool oval of her face. She seemed to be looking upward toward the
rainy sky with a strained attentiveness that suggested the listener.
It was, perhaps, the rain to which she was listening, for Dreeme could
hear the soft gurgle and suck of the water as it dripped outside the
window. With a final skillful twist he fastened the new bandage about
Westcott’s calf and stood upright. The farmer looked at him calmly, his
lips slightly apart, and Dreeme could see the man’s long yellow teeth.

“I should say from the casual glimpse I have had of you,” remarked
Westcott, “that you are a capable doctor, a painstaking man, a
sensitive person perhaps a little stiff in reactions to unexpected
things, and an individual who must fight against the impulse of
being--well, not a busybody but one who is driven too far sometimes by
the itch of curiosity.”

Dreeme laughed aloud and picked up his bag. Absurdly enough, he could
feel the presence of Mrs. Westcott behind him, a presence like the
soft invisible approach of some great feline through the impenetrable
darkness of a forest.

“Your analysis is amusing,” he said. “But must I take it too seriously?”

“You must take it for what it is worth,” replied Westcott, fastening
his yellow teeth upon his cigar and puffing meditatively. “Be good
enough, my dear doctor, to send your little bill by mail. I can dress
the wound myself or have it done for me by ... Wagner.”

He looked up sharply, removing his cigar as the hint of a smile died
from his face.

“Doctor Dreeme,” he said. “I am a peculiar man. I am a student who has
found a secluded harborage. I do not care to make acquaintances. They
are unpleasant responsibilities and they deprive me of that leisure
which I owe to my researches. I live my own life in my own way. I do
not want to be disturbed by the curiosity of--er--neighbors.”

Dreeme bowed silently, his face flushed, and turned to the door. Yes,
he decided, Westcott was an offensive brute. The farmer smiled faintly,
his cloven head bending forward in the lamp-light.

“You must pardon my abruptness,” he remarked. “I am a solitary
anchorite except for my little circle and am not, perhaps, as courteous
as I should be.”

Dreeme said nothing. He could sense the faint mockery in the farmer’s
stiff speech.

“Will you show the doctor to the door?” said Westcott gently to his
wife.

She started from her attitude of rapt listening and turned toward
Dreeme, her heavy-lidded casual eyes flitting coolly across his face.
Then she moved slowly toward the door. Dreeme’s last picture of
Westcott was of a curiously cloven head suddenly bowed above a huge
tome. He could hear the soft rustling of Mrs. Westcott’s skirt as
she crossed the sitting room floor. His heart pounded rapidly as he
moved through the closeness of the room after her. It was as though a
strange drug that affected his breathing filled the air. He heard her
unbar the door, and, as it opened, a rush of cool rain-washed air swept
across his face bringing instant relief from the choked sensation that
had overpowered him in the room. It was still raining, a desultory and
gloomy patter that rattled on the trees and the tiny roof of the back
porch. The wet air was filled with the fresh scent of water and soaked
grass. Dreeme drew in long breaths of it as he stepped bare-headed into
the rain, wondering somewhat vaguely how he was to be conducted back to
town. Just as he was about to bid Mrs. Westcott good-by and was turning
toward her he felt her arm fall sharply against his shoulder.

“Do you hear anything?” she asked in her low husky voice.

He strained his ears in some surprise and for a moment in the patter
of rain he seemed to hear a thin rushing overhead as though a flock of
heavy-winged birds were beating through the night air. The sound swept
into nothingness so suddenly that he decided it was no more than the
blood beating in his own ears or the upper whir of the rain. It was as
though a door had been suddenly closed.

“No,” he answered, “I don’t hear anything but the rain.”

Her hand pressed against him and he could sense in the darkness the
soft rise and fall of her bosom. The blood started to race through his
pulses again and the choked feeling that had persisted during the
short space of time while they had crossed the dark room to the door
filled him. He felt his lips trembling as though with a faint palsy.
As he strained his eyes violently toward her he could dimly note the
outline of her face turned toward his and he knew that her heavy-lidded
eyes were wide open and fixed with a disturbing intensity upon him. Her
full blood-red lips moved slowly. Then her hand dropped from his arm,
and it was as though a strange power had been removed from him.

“Good-night,” she said in her low muffled tones.

The door closed softly and he heard the bolts being shot into place.
Still he stood there, knowing that she, too, was standing just on the
other side of the bolted door. After a moment’s pause he heard her
footsteps passing slowly and evenly through the room. Dreeme turned
to the rain, a bewildered smile at his own impressionability creeping
to his lips. At the same moment he heard Miles clucking to the horse.
Blundering through the dark, he stumbled toward the road. Before he
reached the gate it began to rain furiously, a heavy roaring down-pour
that soaked him to the skin.




Chapter Two


I

A rainy night abdicated to a warm sun-shot day. Dreeme, who had slept
late after his disturbed rest, rose to a world that moved calmly and
soberly toward mid-day. From his window he could see the weather-beaten
sides of houses basking in the tranquil light and hear the deliberate
and heavy footsteps of occasional pedestrians drifting down to the
post office or the general store. This was his Marlborough as he knew
it best, a sober and silent community that clustered about the narrow
Saccarac River and occupied itself with the daily functions of a
somewhat abstemious living. Superficially Marlborough was uninteresting
although it was not without a certain suggested placidity that might
appeal strongly to the man in search of quietness, rest, and an escape
from the febrile business of that greater world of cities where life
was such a strenuous matter. There was little to see here and still
less to beguile one. It is true that occasional youngsters ventured
into the river but they did not make a habit of it. There were no halls
of entertainment, no motion pictures, no wandering tent shows to raise
their canvas on one of the surrounding meadows. Social intercourse was
limited to casual greetings and infrequent meals. Each Sunday witnessed
the crowding of the small white Congregational church and a dry and
unimpressive religious service. Thus for one day in the week the space
before the church was crowded with horses and small buggies and even
one or two rattling Fords which disappeared as swiftly as ghosts after
the service was completed. The reticent church-goers eddied from the
door of the house of worship, mumbled a few words to one another, and
then sped away toward their separate farms or strolled gloomily to
their houses in town, their new Sunday shoes creaking woefully under
the strain of unexpected use. Their voices seemed dry and rusty as
though with long disuse and an absurd self-consciousness emphasized
the natural awkwardness of their bearing. They plucked gingerly at
unaccustomed collars and viewed one another with dumbly diffident eyes.
Yet they possessed some bond in common, some link of connected life
that bound them together into a whole, something that arrayed them
against strangers and “furriners” although it was not evidenced in any
obvious camaraderie.

It was not alone the bond of environment although that was evident
enough. Men could not live year in and year out in the same tiny
circumscribed area, scraping at the same granite-pitted soil, walking
through the same tree-bordered streets, turning in at doors that were
white-washed or green-painted replicas of one another, enduring the
same biting winters when the surface of the river was a white plate of
steel and the same scorching summers when the locusts shrilled in the
brown stubble, witnessing the birth and death of the same flowers and
trees, talking the same monosyllabic language and praying in the same
manner to a far-away stone-faced God, without becoming infinitesimal
portions of something that was unified and progressing in a solitary
direction. Therefore the superficial characteristics of the men of
Marlborough were the same just as their harsh voices sounded the
same unlovely crow-like chord. But their similarity extended beyond
this outer covering of manners, gestures, and appearances. Their
humorlessness, their extraordinary seriousness, their unimpeachable
reticence, their thinly-disguised surliness, all these deplorable and
hermit-like traits seemed to point (at least in the young doctor’s
mind) toward an unhappy and despairing consciousness. It might be
that they were tired of living. They might be a weary race of ghostly
fatalists expressing tacitly their disapprobation of existence. It
was true, the young doctor realized, that a portion (and a goodly
portion, too,) of this desolate aspect of Marlborough might well be the
mirage of his own brooding nature. He was imaginative enough, he knew,
to see things in a colored guise. His own feelings rushed into his
eyes and his mind and shifted his perspective. And his feelings were
naturally morbid. Still, he was sure that the subterranean strangeness
of Marlborough was not alone due to his gloomy fancy. He might play
upon it and enlarge it far beyond its actual proportions but there
must be something there to begin with, something that was the core, so
to speak, about which the community had grown, covering it with layer
after layer of taciturn generations until it disappeared completely.
He strove to fix his mind upon these people in a rigidly impartial
historical survey. Perhaps in this way he might reach light, might,
through a series of logical and psychological deductions, define the
spirit of Marlborough to his own satisfaction, but he discovered,
after an intensive trial at such cerebration, that the results were
meager and dissatisfying. He was not an inspired analyst. He was only a
curious young man.

Here is a forgotten valley, he thought, a cul-de-sac in the hills of
western New England. Into this sequestered place came the sons of
Pilgrims and the Puritans and here they raised their first log-houses,
their mills, their trading stations with the Indians, and their
fortified church. They had no time for the lighter pleasures of living,
and, indeed, their ethical conception of existence forbade them. They
eschewed the colored ribbands of life. They were grim, therefore,
long-faced and unsmiling and their days were taken up with clearing
away virgin forests, struggling with the hordes of painted Indians,
raising houses and churches and mills and forts and armories. The
dark soil, spotted with boulders, fought with the Indians against
them and they subdued it by the might of their tenacious minds and
unresting arms. They had no time for love or laughter but they had
plenty of time for labor and a taciturn doggedness not always unbroken
by sighs. Surely the women must have sighed. Life was not a career but
an onerous duty. It was a profound struggle against formidable and
illimitable foes. What could such a people do but grow into a fierce,
silent, unsmiling, and unimaginative race? What became of their animal
natures in such a land of travail as this? Would they be diverted into
a fanatical zeal for their God who bore always in His right hand a
drawn sword? Or would the Dionysiac passions, the ancient inward pagan
urges, break forth at odd and unsuspected moments in bright flares of
malignant color? It was difficult to conceive of a complete suppression
of all the old zests of living and Dreeme could see no way out for them
but by a dark perversion that twisted them into sudden outbreaks or
secret and terrible channels.

Well, these were the ancestors of the farmers of Marlborough. They
had lived their drab lives and passed away and been buried in the
forgotten graveyards and their sons, carrying in their hearts and
brains this sullen heritage, had come after them and these sons had
been equally reticent, taciturn, somber, and forbidding. With the years
a slight leaven might have introduced itself, a gradual lightening of
the colors of living, but it had not been enough to erase the ancient
characteristics. Elsewhere in New England, in the busy manufacturing
districts now dotted with cities and towns where the clacking looms
and roaring machinery were never still, it was different. There the
old urges were indelibly dead, perished for want of an iron breed to
carry them on, overwhelmed by the great floods of foreign immigrations,
devoured by a materialistic lust that knew no bounds. And in other
places, in the agricultural corners of the land, a kindlier albeit
somewhat threadbare tradition manifested itself. Dreeme knew for he had
lived in those other portions of the old New England and had seen how
drastically the land had changed. An occasional Puritan strain, a brief
old-world courtesy--a trifle grim, to be sure, and a propped-up pride
still persisted, but for the most part it was as Humphrey Lathrop had
said--a land of curiosity, hypocrisy, labor, and stinginess. It was
true that in certain secluded corners, in sun-dappled village streets,
in twisted roads bordered by crumbling stone fences, in thinned
woodlands flashing with the slim-white trunks of swaying birches, a
hint of the old New England lingered for the pilgrim imaginative enough
to sense it, a hint of mellow days and grave silences. It glowed at its
brightest in the red cheeks of the apples and the gold and crimson of
the sumach. It was there like a wistful ghost roaming through deserted
roads. But it was not in Marlborough and no historical perspective
could satisfy Dreeme as to why the community emanated the atmosphere
which it undoubtedly did.

He might say that these farmers were the successors of the iron-willed
pioneers who had darkened the soil with their blood and sweat, but
that was not saying enough. They were all this, and they were something
more beside. Behind them was something secret and profound. Under the
layers of generations. Although they might be no more than vaguely
conscious of it, Dreeme was almost satisfied in his mind that the
nature of these natives was colored and subdued by a breed of ancestors
who had possessed some inexplicable outlet for their suppressed
madnesses. The young doctor could give no logical reasons for his
conviction, but there it was. Perhaps Humphrey Lathrop had hinted it to
him. These people differed from the other New Englanders, argued Dreeme
to himself, in that they had been diverted in some mysterious manner
from the obvious development of the New England temperament. Fortune
had strangely enough sequestered this community and kept it intact
through so many years and generations that the ancient characteristics
had persisted on. No influx of foreigners with their European schemes
of living had muddied it, for foreigners did not come here. No
manufacturing boom had smashed it to pieces and founded a new world
upon it. Marlborough stretched out beneath the summer sun and awaited
the investigation of the close student of ethnology. Although its
doors and windows might be open it seemed as though invisible skeins
of mystery swayed before these apertures and defeated the eyes of the
brain and intuitions. Dreeme seemed more conscious of this than ever as
he perfected his toilet and prepared for what the day might offer. His
dormant curiosity, which he had stilled so well, lifted a sluggish head
and peered curiously about.

The young doctor descended the stairs slowly for the breakfast which
had been prepared for him by his next-door neighbor, Mrs. Slater.


II

Mrs. Slater was methodical. It was her duty to run in during the
morning with Dreeme’s breakfast and the mail which she collected at the
post office when she did her early morning buying. She never called it
“shopping.” For his dinner (served at noon in Marlborough) and supper
Dreeme crossed over to Mrs. Slater’s house where he sat in the midst
of five pop-eyed children, speechless Walden Slater, the Reverend
George Burroughs--invariably called “Preacher” by the community, and
Mrs. Slater herself, a small, plump, dumpy woman, originally from
Leeminster, who was rather more officious than practical. Not being
“born Marlborough” she did not affect the complete reticence of her
neighbors. Still, she had lived in the community long enough to learn
to refrain from displaying curiosity about things. It was only by a
fluttering of her eyes and a somewhat cross-eyed inspection of things
in general that she revealed the fact that she was aware of matters
which puzzled her. It was this fluttering of the eyes that greeted
Dreeme as he entered the room back of his office on the ground-floor,
a room which served as a breakfast chamber and a study. He immediately
understood that she had heard the arrival of the horse in the night,
and he waited, a trifle maliciously, to see if she would refer to
it. He had never looked at her intently, and he did not intend to do
so now. Indeed, he had never looked at any of the Slater ménage with
enough curiosity to fix their features in his mind. He had a general
idea, of course, of Slater and the “Preacher,” one was slouchy and the
other was dark, but he could not tell the children apart. Indeed, he
was uncertain as to their sex. Were three of them boys and two girls,
or was it the other way around? He sat down at the table smiling to
himself.

Mrs. Slater scurried about the table, removing the blue china cover
from the platter of fried eggs and ham and pushing the three letters
closer to Dreeme’s plate. There was a highly symbolic dolphin on the
blue china cover. It served as a handle. It was a bad handle now for
its tail had been smashed off during some disastrous washing.

“It seems as though I would work myself to death,” Mrs. Slater said in
her peculiarly breathless voice. “I was out of bed at five-thirty this
morning getting Walden off to the field. That man sleeps like a log.
You have to shake him and shake him. And now it’s you. And then it will
be the boys.”

“You don’t have to shake me, anyway, Mrs. Slater,” said Dreeme, his
mouth full of toast.

A small woman shaking a huge man. Get up! Get up! A poodle snapping at
a somnolent St. Bernard. Mrs. Slater sighed, fluttered her eyes, and
gazed in a very cross-eyed manner at the design on the wall-paper. She
caught a wisp of her straw-colored hair and tucked it into the tight
knob on the back of her head. Her arms were covered with freckles and
her nails were blunted and broken. Dreeme slit his letters open and
looked at them briefly, letting them flutter to the floor. One was a
catalogue for medical goods. “Use our electric frictioneer; it enlivens
the blood.” Another was a subscription blank for an agricultural
magazine. How to mix a cheap fertilizer. The third announced a new
supply of seeds and bulbs at Williams’ Grain Shop, Main Street,
Leeminster.

“Did you sleep well last night, Mrs. Slater?” inquired Dreeme. This was
malice aforethought.

“If you worked as hard as I do _you’d_ sleep well,” she replied.
The design on the wall-paper enchanted her.

“Well,” said Dreeme, smiling broadly. “You’d better hurry along and get
the boys ready for school. It is later than usual, you know.”

Mrs. Slater walked slowly toward the door, small, plump, a bantam of a
woman, her eyes fluttering fiercely. When she reached the threshold she
paused and turned back.

“I hope you won’t be late for dinner,” she declared. “There’s corn-beef
and new cabbage.”

“I’ll be early, then,” announced Dreeme.

She hovered for a moment with fluttering eyes and then walked out,
slapping the door to behind her.

Dreeme smiled happily. He was getting to be quite a denizen of
Marlborough himself. He could keep his mouth shut and perhaps, after
all, it was a good thing. There was strength in silence. There was
an advantage in it, too. It was nobody’s business that he had been
called to the Westcott farm and he knew in his soul that the natives
were all banded together so far as he was concerned. They would tell
_him_ nothing. He was a stranger. Although he might live there
for fifty years he would still be a stranger. He could open his heart
as generously as he might, still he knew that there would be no
reciprocity from Marlborough. Even Mrs. Slater (and his daily presence
in her house created a sort of inescapable intimacy) kept her own
counsels. He was not on the “inside” with anybody.

Finishing his breakfast he rose to his feet and wandered about the
small room in a desultory fashion. There was nothing much to see there
except his shelves of books and nothing seemed farther away from him
at this moment than books or study. He was too restless to read and
yet he could hardly define his restlessness. Something spoke to him in
the back of his brain but it spoke with a small muffled voice, and he
could not understand the words. Without being conscious of it he was
brooding about some tangled mystery and he would have to wait until the
secret lifted boldly out of the dark waves of his subconsciousness
and he could see it in the bright sunshine of understanding. He sensed
something. Like a lean dog with dilated nostrils he was aware of a
dim carefully-concealed trail that led into the tenebrous gloom of
Marlborough. He would have to go to Humphrey Lathrop, he reflected, and
force that ancient intellect to divulge the secrets of the community.
Humphrey might not know all, but at least he could indicate the right
trail, a trail that could be followed to the very end, and at the end
of that trail would not be a pot of gold, perhaps, but assuredly a pot
of sulphur. It was true that Humphrey had warned him against curiosity,
but there were times when curiosity ceased to be a mere impertinence
and translated itself into a malady of the soul that could only be
cured by the frankest revelation. Dreeme smiled a bit at putting the
thought so solemnly to himself, but there it was, and he was forced to
admit that his curiosity was steadily developing into a huge monster
that would certainly devour him. It was no longer a titillation of the
mind, but an agony of the spirit. He had lived in Marlborough for two
years now, and he had rigorously caged this curiosity concerning the
community, but he had never killed it. It had been drugged by books and
the casual meditations of a New England mind, but it had never been
put out of the way entirely. There were moments when it had stirred
sluggishly behind its bars, rising slowly to its dark feet and peering
out into the light with vague green eyes. Now Dreeme felt the fragile
bars being snapped one after the other, and he knew that sooner or
later the beast would step forth and either destroy him or be destroyed
by him. All this, he imagined, was the result of a loneliness that had
not preyed too much upon him at first, but which had been there all the
time, gathering strength and biding its time. He had not been satisfied
all these quiet months. He had been drugged by his own weariness of
spirit. And now, at the touch of a hand, he was awake and conscious of
a problem looming before him that seemed as high as the Himalayas.

The touch of a hand! Dreeme had been forcing his mind away from the
thought that tugged at him, but now he gave way to it as he picked up
his hat and walked out of the house and up the lane toward the old
burned mill and the bridge over the Saccarac River. His feet fell
pleasantly on the dark soil as he strode along. He had been curious
before, but he could date the fierce restlessness of his curiosity to
that moment the night before when Mrs. Westcott had pressed against
him in the rain and listened to noises that were no noises, after
all, in the black clouds. As he walked along the narrow rising street
bordered with the unblinking windows of the clapboard houses, his
thoughts revolved about the Westcotts. He had seen the surly type of
New England farmer, the secret drunkard, the illiterate misogynist,
but none of them had been like Jeffrey Westcott. There was a curious
finish to Westcott, the evident marks of a culture that extended
far beyond Marlborough and which possessed something European in its
fleeting polish. It had not been manifested in words so much as in an
easy insolence of demeanor, a sureness of self that emanated from an
ugly but intelligent face. This man might have been reared among these
hills, but he had certainly not received his knowledge of the world
here. He had gone beyond the hills and the seas and into the most
curious places. And having done so it was all the more remarkable that
he should choose to settle in the intellectually-arid valley that could
boast no better civilization than the taciturn towns of Leeminster and
Marlborough. To think about the Westcotts at all meant to creep upon
them logically and deliberately. Dreeme realized that he would have
to adjust his thoughts in a precise manner if he was to arrive at any
reasonable deductions regarding them.

As he sauntered along the road and nodded vaguely to the few tanned
expressionless faces which passed him he sought to place his thoughts
in order and achieve a sort of deductive acumen so far as the Westcotts
were concerned. He would consider Jeffrey Westcott first of all. Or,
no, he would take the farm first and its occupants last. What had
he known about Westcott before he had been called to the farm the
preceding night? Practically nothing at all. He had been aware of a
farm, however, because he had passed it numberless times. It was a
large farm for it ran all the way to the profitless soil of Briony
Wood. And Dreeme sought to fix the farm firmly in his mind, for, after
all, the soil played its part in the development of any man. It was the
soil that counted, the soil that colored the mind. Well, the farm faced
on the Leeminster Road and it boasted the usual sprawling building
with a number of ells built on like afterthoughts. There were several
outhouses that faced the reddish dirt of the road and the untidy yard.
Then there were the fields in back of the white-washed structures.
Dreeme had never walked through them, but he imagined they were, for
the most part, uncultivated. Except for occasional patches of ploughed
land, small squares of fecundity in a neglected expanse, they stretched
sere and yellow in the parching sun or green and unkempt through the
heavy rains to the slightly elevated territory upon which grew the acre
or so of closely set trees which were called Briony Wood. This wood
was a gloomy and deserted place, deserted, perhaps, because one could
not reach it without first passing through Westcott’s land, and there
were good reasons for not taking this weed-choked road. Behind Briony
Wood was Nigger Swamp or perhaps it would be better to say that Briony
Wood degenerated into Nigger Swamp. Dreeme had never been near Nigger
Swamp, but he had heard of it as a miasmic stretch of sunken land into
which the Saccarac River seeped through subterranean channels. It was
an unhealthy spot, the home of buzzing insects and slimy reptiles. As
to why it was called Nigger Swamp, Dreeme possessed no idea. Perhaps
negroes had been secreted there during the pre-Civil War days of the
Underground Railroad, those feverish times when the escaped slaves
were rushed through to the Canadian border. Anyway, it was obvious
that black men had had something to do with the swamp in the past. Or,
perhaps again, it was merely the darkness and desolation of the place
that occasioned the cognomen. These things, however, threw no light
on Jeffrey Westcott. He could hardly be connected with Nigger Swamp.
Indeed, it was difficult to associate him with the farm. It was true
that he lived there constantly and that he cultivated a corner of his
extensive holding, but that was all. He was not primarily a farmer.

Having disposed of the land and having reached no conclusions
whatsoever, Dreeme, who had reached the ruins of the old burned mill,
a black gaping maw of crumbling bricks and beams, paused to look back
and down at Marlborough. It seemed a pleasant enough town in the
bright sunlight with its white and yellow houses, its gonfalons of
thin smoke waving from the chimneys, and its shade trees rising in the
narrow streets. From this distance it was New England to the backbone,
marked by that sweet austerity and pleasant simplicity that is the
aspect of the older communities. There was nothing gothic or strained
or unearthly about it, and yet, looking back so, Dreeme was more than
ever convinced of the mystery that hovered over the town. It was an
obsession with him now. The houses were masks and their true features
were never turned to the light of the day. Beside him the destroyed
mill gloomed, and gazing into its gutted walls through the wide square
of doorway he could see the black cell of the interior and the broken
embrasure of a crumbling window that over-looked the mill-pond.
Proceeding on his way to the faint music of crunching footsteps, Dreeme
reached the small wooden bridge that crossed the Saccarac River,
and here he paused to lean on the worn railing and gaze down on the
sparkling stream that wandered on at so sedate and silent a pace. It
was pleasant to watch the water while the warm sun caressed the back of
his head. The river ran like a dream, like something seen in a trance.
He must go on with his surmises now, for his unquiet mind pricked him
constantly forward and along the Leeminster Road. Well, he had disposed
of the land and learned nothing from it. There remained the human
beings who occupied that land. He would take them in order, considering
the less important first.

There was the boy Miles. What was there about Miles that was unusual?
He was small, warped in body, large-headed, and obviously older than
his size suggested. His face was twisted, his eyes were of a greenish
hue, and he had a disconcerting way of answering questions. That was
all. The queerness of Miles might be attributed to incipient epilepsy.
And then Dreeme recalled Humphrey Lathrop’s remark about these people
intermarrying from generation to generation. Did he mean incest?
Dreeme had heard of such practices in the lonelier quarters of New
England where the deserted farms were far from communal centers and a
savage ingrowth, physical and spiritual, persisted. But Marlborough
was a fairly good-sized community and it was difficult to imagine
that Lathrop really meant that. What he undoubtedly meant was that
the original families (and there might have been dozens of them to
start with) intermarried and did not welcome unions with strangers who
wandered by chance into the valley. Miles was possibly of an old breed
that had worn thin. He was just an eccentric and stupid boy who knew
no more than the loneliness of hard labor on an avoided farm and who,
therefore, was a stranger in a strange land when he discoursed with
strangers. Dreeme decided that there was nothing to be gotten out of
an analysis of Miles. Well, there was Wagner, the shaggy, red-bearded
hired man. Wagner was obviously the hard-worker on the Westcott farm.
It was he who developed the soil and raised the few crops and tore
the boulders up and did all the excessive heart-breaking manual labor
that warped the shoulders, lengthened the arms, bowed the legs, and
tanned the red leathery skin. He was the pack-horse, the human brute
in action. He could be dismissed, after all, as a grown-up Miles, a
laboring animal of excessive stupidity who talked so seldom that his
voice had rusted in his throat. There was little to glean from these
lesser figures and Dreeme’s thoughts, held rigorously back, now turned
to the Westcotts themselves.

Of course there was Jeffrey Westcott to start with. Dreeme drew a long
breath as he turned from his inspection of the water and proceeded
along the bridge to the Leeminster Road, walking slowly and gazing
casually at the flickering glimpses of houses through the trees on
either side of him. It was not enough to say that Westcott avoided and
was avoided. That was merely the beginning. Now that Dreeme had seen
the farmer in his house and heard his voice he suspected that there
was much more behind this, much, perhaps, that might be explained
easily if the answers were forthcoming but much again for which there
was no answer. Westcott, first of all, was a cultured man, apparently
a scholar. He spent less time tilling the soil than he did poring
through his huge books. He was an unlikeable person. There was no
doubt of that in Dreeme’s mind. There was an oily menace in him, a
soft snarl in his speech, a barely-concealed cruelty of demeanor that
was emphasized by the superficial polish of the man. His whole being
was dominated by an unclean spirit. As Dreeme thought of Westcott’s
appearance, his cloven head and black sparkless eyes, a slow wave of
fear, impossible to restrain, crept up his flesh. Yet there was nothing
that the young doctor could actually adduce as evidence of any evil
on the farmer’s part. Considered logically Westcott was no more than
a man who desired to be left alone with his books. He troubled no
one and he wanted no one to trouble him. That was reasonable enough.
But logic meant little so far as Westcott was concerned. There are
bodies out of which souls speak without words and Dreeme had seen one
of them in Westcott. He had sensed an unclean atmosphere about the
farmer just as he had sensed an atmosphere of evil emanating from the
huge volumes that lined the farmer’s room. These things were matters
of instinct and intuition and Dreeme could not dismiss them by any
logical explanations or deductions. Something fierce and fanatic and
commanding lurked inside Westcott’s sturdy body and watched the world
with a slow maliciousness. What this spirit was could not be deduced
by any casual study of the man. It had a purpose, Dreeme was sure, and
that purpose was monstrous in its intent and merciless in the steps
which it took toward its ordained objective. So much bespoke a fanatic
and Dreeme was sure that if he could ferret out the reason for this
fanaticism he would be well on the way toward solving the mystery of
Marlborough. The young doctor was not conscious of any logical chain of
reasoning by which he tied the secret purpose of Jeffrey Westcott up
with Marlborough but was convinced that the tie between the community
and the man was close and unbreakable. There were moments when all this
seemed like the wildest reasoning of an imaginative boy to him and he
strove, even in the midst of his revery, to laugh at his assumptions
but something stifled the ridicule in his throat. Though he might
brood about secret objectives and fanatical purposes and buried evils
and unclean spirits without the slightest proof to bolster them up he
found himself incapable of raising his head and scattering all these
thoughts as the misgivings of a neurotic romanticism that was the
result of a too lonely living among dour people. No, there _was_
something there. And Dreeme, unable to restrain himself, proceeded with
his thoughts even as he proceeded with his stroll up the Leeminster
Road.

There was Martha Westcott to be considered. Even as her name thrust
itself into Dreeme’s consciousness a slight giddiness took him and he
experienced a brief choking sensation in his throat. It was as though
a thin vapor had suddenly risen in the air beside him and drifted
across his face. At least, _she_ was unexplainable. She was a
walking mystery, a veiled being whose veil was flesh, a detached
spirit wandering in a commonplace world. Dreeme thought of her as he
saw her standing at the window and listening and it seemed to him now
that she was like a person standing at a door she hesitated to open
and yet must open. It was impossible to analyze her in any way, to
say that her heavy-lidded eyes were the result of too much sunlight
or too much snow, that her blood-red mouth had grown so weary from an
endless loneliness, that her quietness was the quietness of a shunned
person. She existed beyond her flesh and yet her flesh, too, so cool
and yet so stirred with a still life, existed beyond the flesh of
other people. How she had become Jeffrey Westcott’s wife and who she
was, from what family in the valley she had sprung, were mysteries as
yet, mysteries that, perhaps, Humphrey Lathrop, if he were goaded hard
enough, might solve, but even the solution of these temporal gestures
would hardly clarify her. Dreeme was amazed at his reactions to Martha
Westcott and a small voice of reason kept thrusting into his thoughts
and arguing a sudden fascination. But Dreeme knew that this fascination
was not the usual type of blind worship. He had not fallen in love at
first sight and there was no question of his ever falling in love with
Martha Westcott. It was something else altogether that compelled him
to surmise in such mystical terms about the farmer’s wife. There was
a power in her mere presence that unsettled him and he did not strive
too arduously to make it clear to himself for he knew that it would be
impossible.

His mind was growing into a hungry octopus now and it stretched
out a dozen and one tentacles that grasped feebly to right and
left, adventuring weakly in search of enlightenment. But the clear
illumination for which he sought was not to be found. Vague lights
like indistinct marsh-lights glittered wanly for a moment and then
were enveloped by the tenebrosities of a sheer ignorance that was
maddening in itself. He was seeking for something that was hardly to
be found without the most obvious clews. And there were no clews.
Nothing but endless speculation, surmises, unreasonable intuitions,
objectless guesses. Though he might ponder on the Westcotts and the
life they followed it all led to nothing. For a moment he doubted his
own rationality, pointing out to himself with a mocking elaboration of
mental gesture that he was spinning mysteries out of the imbroglio of
his disconcerted mind. There was really nothing to go on, no abrupt
transitions from the normalities of existence, no vindictive flashes
of evil lighting up this valley as lightning might illuminate it, no
ominous gestures revealing the unsuspected. There was nothing about
the Westcotts to suggest the uncleanness of being which he associated
with them. It was all in his own mind, in his restless intuitions. He
_felt_ these things and feeling them he could do no more than give
full vent to his morbid fancies. He might be a fool ... it was very
possible that he was ... but even this humiliating reflection failed to
subdue that uneasiness of spirit that shook him when he brooded upon
Marlborough and the Westcotts. It was as though a far-off and forgotten
voice was speaking somewhere in the jungle of his intelligence telling
him the most terrible things in the most deliberate manner. He could
not gather the sense of the message. He could not even hear the voice.
But somehow he knew that it was there and speaking. It was like a small
obsession making itself more and more evident as he brooded more and
more about it. There was no escape from it now. He would have to make
up his mind to _that_, at least. No escape....

Dreeme lifted his head, rising like a swimmer from the turbid waters
of his thoughts, and saw half-concealed in the trees ahead of him
the shapeless mass of the Westcott farm-house. He stopped instantly
and stood indecisively in the road meditating whether to go on or to
turn in his tracks and retrace his steps to Marlborough. Even as he
meditated he knew that he had wandered along this road with only one
purpose and that he would not achieve any ease of mind, if, indeed, he
did then, until he had fulfilled it. Turning aside he left the road
and strode through the bushes into the field, Bidwell’s meadow, that
bordered on Westcott’s property. The dry grass crackled beneath his
feet and great grasshoppers leaped industriously about the crushed
growth. He could hear a locust grinding its rasping note. Otherwise
it was still ... a hot windless stillness that caused him to pant
slightly as he forced his way toward the twisting stone-fence that
guarded Westcott’s land. Reaching it he sank in the tall dry grass by a
crumbling breach where the stone had pitched forward into the farmer’s
yard. From this vantage point he could see the blank side of the house,
once a dirty white but now a streaked colorlessness. A thin curl of
smoke rose from the chimney of the built-on kitchen. The curtains of
the windows were drawn against the sun. A solitary rooster crooked
sleepily as he turned a glassy side-long eye at the stone-fence and
the man concealed behind it. Dreeme could see the uneven rocky path by
which he had circled the house the night before. He was surprised to
discover that it was much shorter than he had thought it to be in the
darkness. Darkness was like that. It lengthened things and translated
them. For fifteen minutes or so the young doctor squatted in the grass
and spied upon the house and the empty yard. He could feel the hot
press of the sun on the back of his head and the sharp thrusts of the
dry stalks beneath him. He would wait now. Until....

The door at the rear of the house opened slowly and Martha Westcott
walked down the steps, a white china pitcher in her hand.

Dreeme lowered his head quickly and peered between the uneven stones
of the fence. He saw her traverse the yard slowly and pause by the
wooden square of the well. She lowered the bucket, running it downward
with long even thrusts of her arm. As she turned her head the sun
glistened upon her blue-black hair and the dead white nape of her
neck. The curving sweep of her broad shoulders and arm was a beautiful
thing to watch. She was like some fatal goddess in action, in sleepy
action. Astarte Syriaca. The name sprang suddenly into Dreeme’s mind.
He had not sought for it. It came of its own volition. Well ... Astarte
Syriaca, then ... an evil goddess. She drew the brimming bucket up to
the shelf of the well, and, tipping it, filled the white china pitcher
with a curving arc of water that glittered like silver in the sun.
Then she hooked the bucket and turned toward the house. As she did
so her eyes swept along the stone wall and the expanse of sun-parched
field beyond. They traveled steadily, large and still and dark under
the heavy lids. Dreeme, crouched in the grass, felt his heart beat
furiously and a slow color crept up his face. It would be ridiculous
to.... Her eyes hesitated an instant at the very spot through which
the young doctor was peering at her. He could see the great motionless
pupils as fixed as the stare of some huge cat and the tiny scarlet
blood-sacs in the inner corners of her eyes. There was absolutely no
expression in these eyes that seemed to look through stone walls. They
were frozen pools of stillness that seemed to take the world as they
found it without any surprise and with a knowledge that was as ancient
as the browned stones upon which the sleepy green slivers of lizards
dozed. Dreeme, pressed abjectly against the stone wall, experienced an
agitation through all his limbs. A choking sensation welled up in his
dry throat and his hands, clinging fiercely to the parched stalks by
his knees, shook as though with a palsy. It was only for an instant.
Her eyes continued their blank survey and reached the house. Turning,
she walked slowly back to the door, the white china pitcher outlined
against her black dress, and slipped silently in. The door shut behind
her without a sound. Dreeme remained for several minutes against the
stone wall fearing to test the strength of his legs. Then he rose to
his feet and tramped back through the burnt and brittle grass, crashing
through the bushes to the road. He walked swiftly along the Leeminster
Road to Marlborough without looking back.


III

The girl’s eyes were like wet violets, a soaked blue so deep as to
be astonishing. Mrs. Slater had said: “Deborah.... This is Doctor
Dreeme ...” and then she had added in a grudging tone: “My niece ...
Deborah is my niece ...” Dreeme remembered that he had bowed and
mumbled vaguely in his throat. It did not surprise him that Mrs. Slater
had a niece. She looked as though she had nieces. Besides, all New
Englanders had nieces. It was the penalty of the country. That ...
or ... well, perhaps, no nieces. It was all a question of family, of
children, of course. Grandfathers were at a premium in New England now
but nieces and nephews and cousins were the common coinage of pride.
It was impossible to go into a musty Back Bay parlor, for instance,
without hearing something about: “He’s a cousin of ...” or “She’s the
niece of....” It was like that. Being reduced to mop up one’s lesser
relatives, so to speak. Or to reach out through a dubious cousinal
(_could_ there be such a word?) connection and so getting a foot
_in_. Families scattered and broke up; the main stem shattered;
there was nothing but twigs left. “I am a twig of the Winthrops.” A
wind-blown twig without any leaves. Mrs. Slater scraped his chair back
and he sank into it. She was staring at him with fluttering eyes.
There were snapping eyes all around the table. He was getting choppy in
his thoughts. Choppy ... choppy.

He assumed a bland indifference and waited for the smoking bowl of
cabbage to be pushed his way. The long red slices of corned beef lay
like so many tongues at his elbow. He forked one neatly and slapped it
onto his plate.

Physiognomy, they said, was a science in itself. The twist of a man’s
mind from the twist of his mouth. _His_ slant from the slant of
his nose. But what about a man with a cloven head? What about a woman
with ... oh, wonderful! The cabbage, a pale browny-green glistening
with tiny jewels of grease, reached him and he speared an efficient
mound of it. A long walk induced hunger. Take faces now. The sly
student ran his eyes over a face and solved it as easily as a rebus
is solved, a rebus put together for infantile intellects. One assumed
that the student was right but one did not really know. Still ... there
must be a lot in it. If the proper perspective was achieved the face
fell into an approximate map of the mind. Easy. Like pulling a rabbit
out of a silk hat. But you had to catch your rabbit first. Dreeme put
his knife and fork down softly. He was light-headed. Giddy. Too much
sun. But if he was going to get anywhere he would have to study faces,
covertly, tracking out half-obliterated urges, deciphering.... Mrs.
Slater asked him if he would like some vinegar on his cabbage. Good
God, no! “Thank you,” he said and shook his head. He picked up the fork
and thrust it into his smoking mound of cabbage. The little jewels of
grease dripped from the raised portion. He gazed about him, stifling an
intensity of stare behind an assumed nonchalance.

He was surrounded by masticating jaws. Walden Slater, the Reverend
George Burroughs, five little Slaters with pop eyes and glistening
chins down which cabbage grease ran. And ... that girl. Mrs. Slater,
having placed everything on the table, sank with a sigh of relief
into her seat. Her eyes fluttered as one brown, freckled hand reached
for the corned beef platter. She, at least, was patent. Her plumpness
bulged at the caught-in house-wrapper. Her face was a small moon
with a turned-up nose, a wide mouth that inclined downwards at the
corners, and round eyes that thrust forward from the puffed circles
that contained them. Her wispy straw-colored hair was drawn back in
a sort of door-knob and the heads of three metal hair-pins stood up
from it like tiny croquet arches. She was an aunt, after all. It
was quite reasonable. Opposite her Walden Slater’s long upper lip
snapped feverishly at a dangling bit of cabbage. The lip of a camel.
The cocks-comb of hair stood upright on his head and the thousand
and one wrinkles in his red weather-beaten neck rippled as he leaned
forward over his plate. The tuft of ragged hair beneath his lower lip
glistened with cabbage grease. There were marks of perspiration about
the arm-pits of his blue denim shirt. His broken nails carried a fair
share of the dark soil of Marlborough. Now and then he would raise his
watery gray eyes and look swiftly about the table. The heavy brows
above them, bristling with a nondescript brush of hair, rose and fell
as his long jaw moved up and down. Jabbing his fork into a long tongue
of corned beef he tossed it dexterously upward and caught it with a
lip that seemed, rubber-like, to stretch down to meet it. It was a
triumph of coordination and Dreeme watched it with a pleased and sleepy
satisfaction. Now if he could catch corned beef like that ... on the
wing, so to speak.... The five little Slaters cracked their iron-shod
heels against the legs of their chairs as they dribbled food. Give them
time. They would grow as dexterous as Walden. They were a regimented
quintet. They rushed out to school with a great clattering of feet
and rushed back again to dinner with the same infernal racket. Their
immature minds were small muddy circles into which the schoolmaster
flung flawed pearls. The jewels sank to the bottom and were seen no
more.

Dreeme’s mind revolved, for an instant, about educational processes.
Tomorrow this community of Marlborough would be changed. It would be
renewed by the five little Slaters and their companions in age. What
would they make of the valley and the dour town? Would things remain
the same? Would that persistent shadow of mystery that hovered over the
place be lifted or would its darkness, like the impalpable darkness of
invisible wings, deepen and remain? Who could prophesy what would be
the state of affairs at that not-so-distant time? There was no reason
why the outer world should impinge too strongly on Marlborough, for,
after all, the valley was a cul-de-sac, a cache into which the Past had
thrust an untidy bundle of urges and traditions and left them there
to rot in the sunlight. And Dreeme seemed to see the Marlborough of
the future stretching out like a corpse in the bright sunlight of the
valley and striving ... striving.... He shuddered at the picture so
suddenly brought up before his mind, a picture of a white leprous mass
struggling to live, dead and yet never dying, with closed eyes that
continually quivered, with blue lips rolling back over yellow decayed
teeth, with long skeleton fingers opening and shutting and fighting
against the _rigor mortis_ of Time. He slowly put down the....

“If you _please_!”

The Reverend George Burroughs’ sallow face was thrust appealingly at
him and the mechanical portion of Dreeme’s brain slowly grasped the
request.

“Cabbage? What cabbage? Oh, yes,” he said hurriedly and pushed the
decimated platter of curdling grease along the table.

Mr. Burroughs, his face drawn into a severe and disapproving
recognition of wool-gathering in general, accepted the glistening
remnants with some degree of asperity. Like a little horse. Like a
little yellow withered horse. Mr. Burroughs certainly had an equine
appearance. Dreeme permitted his eyes to survey the preacher with a
faint degree of curiosity. Though he had sat at the same table with him
for two years he had never developed enough curiosity about the skinny
man of God to observe him closely. Now he would do it. He would fix him
in his mind as a butterfly is fixed in a box. He would thrust the sharp
pin of his comprehension through the withered thorax of the Reverend
George Burroughs. The preacher dropped his face and successfully eluded
his silent inquisitor. Dreeme almost called out, “Hey, there!” The
preacher’s bald forehead bent above his second helping of cabbage.
Dark hair, starting from the ridge of that high forehead grew downward
and lost itself in the musty black coat that huddled over the dingy
collar. The man’s skin was as sallow as a Chinaman with the jaundice.
Though partially concealed by the amusing foreshortening attendant to a
lowered head Dreeme could see a fairly long face with high cheek-bones,
eyes set far apart, and a good-sized mouth. “He will raise his head
and neigh at me in a minute,” thought Dreeme. The preacher did raise
his head but he did not neigh. Instead of that he looked fixedly at
the young doctor for an instant with horribly still eyes and then
transferred his attention to his cabbage. For no reason at all Dreeme
was embarrassed at this expressionless study and he hastily diverted
his eyes elsewhere.

The girl’s eyes were like wet violets, a soaked blue so deep as to be
astonishing.

Mrs. Slater had said.... Why yes, she was a niece.... A New England
niece. Now that was funny for she did not look like a niece at all.
Nieces were ... oh, _nieces_! She was a slender pliant wisp in a
matter-of-fact gray dress and with a tiny white collar and cuffs. She
ate daintily, nibbling at the bits of corned beef which she raised on
the tip of a fork held in the smallest hand for an adult that Dreeme
had ever seen. Her absurdly miniature mouth was slightly pursed as
though an infant bee had stung it, the smallest of stings, so to
speak. Her hair was a bright soft bronze, the sort of hair that ...
well, thought Dreeme, it probably feels like warm mist. Now that he
was fairly looking at her he could see how porcelain-like she was,
how small in bones and fastidious in gestures. Such a niece for Mrs.
Slater! It was almost impossible and Dreeme’s glance flitted swiftly
over the five children kicking their heels and gulping their food
and Walden Slater conducting a successful foray against a chunk of
corned beef that had desperately striven to elude his remorseless
fork. The young doctor’s eyes returned to the girl. Deborah. Her name
was Deborah. Mrs. Slater had said.... The girl looked up and caught
Dreeme’s glance with a bright flash of her absurdly blue eyes. The
smallest hint of a smile touched her pursed lips and she turned back
to her food. Dreeme suddenly felt quite elated. It was not that he
_cared_. He was not a lady’s man in any sense of the word.
Just a hard-working doctor who, at this moment, was neglecting his
work because of certain silly obsessions that were driving him to
distraction, obsessions that Humphrey Lathrop would have to clear away.
He would see Humphrey that afternoon, drop in late and smoke a pipe
with him, perhaps. Anyway.... Deborah looked up again. Her eyes seemed
to say, “We have a joke together, haven’t we? Niece? How absurd!”
Dreeme pushed his plate back and waited for somebody to speak.

Nobody did. Marlborough meals were like this. A greedy silence lowered
over the table.

Walden Slater, overcoming the resistance of the last bit of corned
beef on his plate, rose awkwardly to his feet, scraped once or twice,
belched forth a triumphant elegy of wind over the meal, and turned
toward the door. He shambled out, long arms dangling. His exit was a
signal for a general clattering of chairs. The five children avalanched
toward the front yard for their fifteen minutes of surly play before
the warning bell of the little one-room school-house across the way
made them still surlier. Mr. Burroughs walked softly to the window and
stood there humming “Rock of Ages.” He was atrociously out of key,
a droning whine that clung tenaciously to one note. His still eyes
wandered absently toward Deborah as he lulled his dinner to sleep.
Dreeme said:

“So you’re Mrs. Slater’s niece?”

The girl looked up brightly.

“Her poor relation,” she replied. “She is very kind to me. Since father
died she....”

“You might bring out some dishes,” broke in Mrs. Slater vigorously.

She was a small girl and she carried the stack of greasy plates with an
instinctive grace that pleased Dreeme. When she came back she renewed
her bright attention toward the young doctor.

“We lived in Leeminster, you know,” she said.

Dreeme did not know but he nodded understandingly.

“Perhaps you read about father,” went on the girl, as she piled saucers
in a high heap. “It was in the county paper. The bag of cement fell on
him, you know.”

“Of course,” said Dreeme politely.

“The Lord gives and the Lord takes,” insinuated the neighing voice
of Mr. Burroughs, who broke off his humming for this shaft of divine
wisdom and then instantly resumed it.

“He died in half an hour,” added the girl.

“Really?” exclaimed Dreeme.

He watched her go out with interested eyes. Mr. Burroughs’ humming got
on his nerves and he writhed uneasily at the dreary drone. The preacher
was like an old bumble bee with bronchitis. He stood in the window, his
large mouth pursed, his horsey forehead slightly lowered, and intimated
sadly that the Rock had been cleft especially for _him_. In
the flattest of whines he announced his burning desire to fly to Its
bosom. “May it fall upon you and crush you!” thought Dreeme somewhat
vindictively, the unending whine scraping along his nerves. He waited,
in some expectancy, for the reappearance of the girl. But it was not
she who came through the door and gathered up the remaining débris
of the meal. It was Mrs. Slater, a Mrs. Slater with fluttering eyes
and quick lumbering movements. Dreeme felt like smiling but instead
of giving way to any such impulse he rose to his feet and sauntered
toward the door. A lugubrious whine followed him, creeping up his back
and gently pushing him toward the hot early afternoon sunlight. At
the lintel he paused and looked back. A musty expanse of black coat
and an oblong of black hair. Behind it a shapeless hum that drearily
mangled a helpless hymn. A dumpy woman folding a red and white checked
table-cloth. She was expressionless now. A big clock ticking. Also
expressionless. A waterfall design in pink wall-paper. Curved pink
water falling indecently into black base-boards. Scattered chairs to
be placed discreetly against the wall until supper. They stood about
dejectedly, awaiting the touch of a hand ... what was it? He stepped
through the hall and into the street. The heat was oppressive. It
rose at him on scarlet haunches and panted against his face. He stood
looking up and down the thoroughfare at nothing before he returned to
his next-door office in the little cottage. At nothing. Absolutely
nothing. That was it. That was where _he_ stood. That was where
they put _him_. A niece, eh? Well, why not? Mrs. Slater probably
had a dozen nephews and nieces living within a radius of ten miles
and the fact that _he_ had seen none of them in two years really
meant nothing. Mrs. Slater was like that. Marlborough was like that.
She didn’t want the girl to grow too friendly with him. To tell him
things. Not even obvious things. Ridiculous. He would ply the girl with
questions at suppertime and shock, astound, disconcert, and upset the
whole table. Well.... He stood smiling at his own thoughts. Let them,
then.... Now what did that mean? He was growing reckless as well as
nervously excitable. It was time to see Humphrey Lathrop. Decidedly,
Marlborough was getting.... He progressed slowly to his own door and
placed a hand upon the polished knob.




Chapter Three


I

Doctor Humphrey Lathrop was so huge that it was difficult for him to
move about even with the aid of the two gnarled canes that flanked
either side of his gargantuan reinforced chair, a throne that creaked
ominously as his shifting bulk, a bulk that seemed to roll slowly like
cooling lava, swayed forward in wheezing conversation. He sat like an
enormous and kindly jelly-fish, his stomach resting on his great round
thighs and straining fiercely against the bulging vest spangled with
fobs and seals, his triple chins trembling beneath his wrinkled face,
his broad flat feet encased in comfortable slippers that suggested a
pair of medium-sized Gladstone bags. His black velvet smoking jacket,
odorous with a villainous tobacco, spread over him like a voluminous
cape. The polished baldness of his round cranium was thrust into a
skull-cap that fitted as snugly as a skin. On the back of his neck the
rolls of fat rippled as he stretched a plump arm out and lifted the
tiny green tea-cup in a massive hand. He wheezed softly as he moved,
a pleasant sibilant sound that chimed with the remonstrative creaking
of his over-loaded chair. Dreeme, perched opposite him on the end of
his chair, observed the ancient friend of his father with an approving
and respectful eye. He saw the moon-face and sagging jowls tanned by
many suns and eaten by an intricate net-work of wrinkles (which Lathrop
called “my map to eternity”) and the large blue intelligent eyes gazing
out of the gold circles of precariously balanced spectacles, and
experienced, as always, a curious sense of inferiority and complete
trust in the wisdom of the old doctor. Humphrey Lathrop was more than
an ancient friend. He was a monument of probity and wisdom, a great
quivering idol from whose lips issued counsel and the finalities of an
achieved experience. He was a Mahomet transformed into a mountain. For
fifty years he had been the solitary medical adviser to Marlborough
and it had only been after his bulk had reached such proportions as to
render it impossible for him to get about or climb in or out of his
rusty old buggy that he had turned over a meager and thankless practice
to the son of his boyhood friend. He had done so with misgiving and
regret for he distrusted the vagaries of the young in the profession
which he had honored for half a century. He was old-fashioned, deucedly
so, believing that a doctor’s prime concoction was common-sense
mixed with a little peppermint. It had been enough for him to supply
the simplest of remedies to the ailing and he possessed an undying
suspicion of what he denominated as “applied book-learning” in so far
as the practical treatment of sickness was concerned. He pointed
out time and again that there were no rare diseases in Marlborough.
Children were born in the usual way and men and women died as they had
always died. Between these two important dates were the ailments of the
young, mumps, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and measles. After that there
were accidents, cuts and bruises and broken limbs, and then such major
ailments as typhoid fever, chronic stomach trouble (which, so far as
Doctor Lathrop was concerned, included stomach, kidneys, and liver),
and pneumonia. He scoffed at appendicitis, calling it “an aristocratic
belly-ache.” In spite of his limitations as a doctor, and, perhaps,
because of the wiry health of his patients he had been accounted an
unusually successful practitioner. The thunderous approach of his great
flat feet and thumping canes were the immediate prophecies of relief.
What impressed Dreeme most strongly about him was the excellence and
keenness of his mind when taken apart from his dogged attitude toward
medicine. Though he might be a narrow-minded old fogey of a doctor,
he was, as a thinking man on general topics and life in general,
far-sighted, deliberative in judgment, ratiocinative, and exceedingly
shrewd. He mixed a certain amount of imagination with his observations
and limited it with a complacent fatalism that was less abrupt than
dimly wistful. Therefore, whenever Dreeme was perplexed he visited
Lathrop, finding in him a genial fount of encouragement and pertinent
comment. At this moment he was fumbling toward an utterance of the
problem weighing upon his puzzled mind and the old doctor, fully aware
of the purpose of the visit, studied him with some amusement, his blue
eyes twinkling behind the gold spectacles.

“I was called out to the Westcott farm last night,” said Dreeme
finally, pushing his cup from the edge of the little table.

Lathrop’s blue eyes opened wide and then closed. He wheezed gently and
drank his tea, pausing to blow at the scalding mixture, and then put
the cup down. It tinkled sharply in the silence of the room. Dreeme
heard the monotonous buzzing of a fly in the curtains by the window.

“So?” said Lathrop at last. Then he seemed to dismiss the subject,
reaching for his blackened corncob pipe and stuffing it from the can of
shag on the table.

“You don’t come to see me often, Daniel,” said the old doctor as he lit
a match, applied it to the pipe, and puffed wheezily. The pipe wouldn’t
draw. “Drat it!” he exclaimed, putting down the charred corncob, and
gazing about the room with a calm benevolent smile.

“I don’t see anyone often,” remarked Dreeme somewhat dejectedly.

Lathrop looked at him quickly, pursing his large lips.

“I warned you that this was no place for a young man,” he said. “You
can’t go about here. There is nothing to see and still less to do. I
don’t mind it but I am an old man and I couldn’t get about if I wanted
to. I have to sit in this chair like an old rheumatic hippopotamus and
look out the window.”

“And nobody goes by,” added Dreeme gloomily.

A faint chuckle irrupted from the huge body before him.

“Nothing but the sun and the rain and the clouds and the snow and the
night,” checked off Lathrop on his pudgy fingers. “But I don’t mind. It
isn’t so bad to have the chair placed out in the sun and to doze in it.
It warms me up.”

“I haven’t minded it either,” said Dreeme, “that is, until a day or
so ago. Then my mind got working again and I began to grow curious. I
want to know the ‘why’ of things. I want to know about people and why
communities are what they are.”

“That’s simple,” declared Lathrop. “Environment ... blood ... breeding.”

Dreeme flung out an impatient hand.

“Oh, I know,” he said. “I know all that. But there is something in back
of those things, something that creeps in the soil and climbs in the
trees and looks out of empty window-panes and circulates about you when
you walk in the street, and....” He broke off abruptly. “Do you believe
in magic, Humphrey?” he inquired suddenly.

Lathrop chuckled and wheezed, fumbling for the handkerchief in the side
pocket of his smoking jacket. The blowing of his nose was like the
sounding of a trumpet.

“So that’s it,” he said. “So that’s it. Lordy, Lordy.”

He picked up his pipe again and sought for the pen-knife in his
trousers pocket and began to clean out the stubborn bowl.

“Daniel,” he said, “I’ll tell you what I believe. Perhaps it will help
you and perhaps it won’t.”

He paused and maintained a silence until the pipe was cleaned, filled,
lighted, and drawing comfortably. Then he settled his huge bulk back in
the creaking chair and observed Dreeme with bland blue eyes through the
gold spectacles.

“You’ll have to forgive the inconsistencies, Daniel,” he began.
“I’ve never worked out a system of things. I’ve been too lazy and
too conscious of my own ignorance to do that. But I have certain
instinctive beliefs and I imagine they are unalloyed with the
new-fangled notions that are called modern psychology. I think that we
have two ways of classifying what is strange and mysterious to us--the
supernormal and the supernatural. I do not say ‘no’ to any of the
supernormal things. Against the supernatural I turn my face. It isn’t
reasonable. It isn’t even spiritually reasonable. For instance, the
most ordinary inventions today would have seemed supernatural three
hundred years ago, whereas, at that time, they were merely supernormal,
existing in that unexplored terrain outside of the comprehension and
investigation of the day. So today we have faith that the things which
seem supernatural are merely in _our_ unexplored terrain and that
tomorrow or next year or next century they will be made ordinary to
us. There is a great difference between the radio and Jonah in the
whale’s belly. One is supernormal and the other is supernatural. A
man cannot be heard from San Francisco to New York, as people loosely
state, but a mechanical invention carries the sound of his voice. That
is supernormal but conceivable. But Jonah in the whale’s belly is not
represented by any kind of mechanical contrivance. He is not carried
there and represented by any kind of ultra-wave. He is just there,
his physical self. That is supernatural. A man putting his head in a
pail of water and holding it there for three hours and then coming out
unaffected by the immersion is supernatural. But a man in a diver’s
suit with oxygen tanks attached who goes beneath the sea for three
hours is merely supernormal. I believe in the supernormal--in the vast
and still unexplored terrain that stretches before us but I do not
believe in the supernatural.”

“You believe in the scientific explanation of everything,” said Dreeme.

“I wouldn’t say that,” replied Lathrop, pursing his lips. “No, sir,
I wouldn’t say that. I would even go so far as to say that there are
things which I conceive to be supernormal that cannot be explained by
any scientific theory whatsoever. I do not believe in the levitation
of tables by spirit-hands although I do not say that tables are not
levitated. I do not believe that an ectoplasm is a materialization of
the dead but I do not say that there is nothing unexplainable there for
the eye to see. I do not believe that the dead talk through the lips
of the living although I do not affirm that the words issuing from the
medium’s mouth are always her own.”

Doctor Lathrop waved his pipe at Dreeme.

“I believe in mysteries,” he insisted. “I believe these mysteries to
be intellectually suspected at rare moments but never actually solved.
I do not believe that we will ever solve them. So far as I know they
move on another circle of time or in another dimension or anything
you choose. But I demand that they be called supernormal and not
supernatural.”

“Do you believe that there is a supernormal aspect to Marlborough,
then?” asked Dreeme, seeing at last a short-cut to the thoughts that
boiled so inchoately in his mind.

Lathrop nodded his head and Dreeme laughed triumphantly.

“Then you know what I mean,” he said, “when I say there is something
in back of all this, something in the soil and the air and the very
houses,” and he waved his hand toward the window.

“Yes, yes,” agreed Lathrop, “I haven’t denied it, have I? Every
community has its supernormal aspects, its twisted web of mysteries
floating like a fine skein in the air above it. We’re all tangled up
with supernormal things. I admit it. You cannot go anywhere without
finding yourself pushed against a dark wall of impenetrable silence
that speaks without words and always speaks in a foreign tongue.”

Dreeme’s lean face grew solemn as he hitched his chair closer to the
little table and extended his hand, palm upward, toward Lathrop.

“That may be true enough,” he said. “But the sensation I experience
in Marlborough is different. Every community has its own strange aura
rising from it. Even the veriest over-night town thrown together beside
oil-wells or gold-mines speaks in what you might call a foreign tongue.
But it says brave or bright or progressive things. It lifts itself
toward some sparkle in the adventurous sky above it. I have been in
New York and raised my eyes to the heavens and seen, in my mind’s eye,
at least, a thousand glittering spires which were the reflection not
of the monstrous shafts of granite about me but of the City behind
the city, the great, mad, impressive, unresting urge upon which the
infinite foundations of this finite metropolis are built. It was
awesome but it was not fearful. Marlborough, I tell you, is different.”

Lathrop stirred uneasily, his enormous bulk swaying forward to a
strident creaking of the chair.

“I told you when you first came here that Marlborough was different,”
he said. The shadow of a growing perplexity was in his eyes.

“I know you did,” responded Dreeme, “and telling me so much you told me
nothing. You told me there was a breed of New Englanders here that I
had never seen before. I admit it now. But why is this breed different?
You did not tell me that. You told me that a mixture of ethical and
Dionysiac madnesses produced the forefathers of these people, of the
Bidwells and Barnsons and Westcotts and Slaters. Well, what does that
mean? You opened the door of a dark room to me, a door which I should
have pushed open myself sooner or later, but you did not give me any
lamp. Do you know what the sensation is that I have when I think of
Marlborough?”

Lathrop shook his head slowly, the loose chins beneath his round face
wagging like the wattles on a cock.

“I think constantly of a horrible dead body, a white leprous mass of
flesh, that is striving to live,” answered Dreeme in a low voice. “The
dark circles of the closed eyes quiver, the blue lips roll back, and
the long fingers, struggling against _rigor mortis_, slowly open.
There are only shadows in the palms of the hands.”

“Good God!” exclaimed Lathrop, reaching hastily for his cup of cold
tea. After a moment he laughed in his wheezing way.

“You have the imagination of a penny-dreadful,” he remarked.

“Have I?” asked Dreeme. “Do you really think so, doctor?”

Lathrop drank the last swallow of his chilled beverage and then put the
cup back and turned to his corncob pipe.

“Look here, Daniel,” he commanded. “Do you want me to prescribe for
you? You’re suffering from nerves. Your digestion is bad. Do you sleep
well? How about a nice vacation? Eh, what?”

Dreeme shook his head.

“I’m all right, Humphrey,” he said. “You can’t get rid of me in that
way. You’ve got to tell me things.”

Lathrop sighed loudly.

“I was telling you things,” he remarked. “I was telling you what I
believed. Let me go on. Perhaps there will be a clew in it for you.”

He paused for an instant and whistled loudly as his blue eyes roamed
about the room.

“Let me give you some of my detached thoughts,” he said at last. “I
believe in the sense of the past. I believe it to be a living urge in
itself but I also believe that it may be explained. Any place that has
been lived in long enough will rear a fine fabric of associated ideas
stretching back through the centuries. I believe that a philosophy
of living may be developed from this sense of the past. I believe
that a philosophy of living may unhinge the brain if it is based on
vague enough historical urges and cause a man to mistake supernormal
phenomena for supernatural things. I believe in the power of the
fanatic and so many things may be regarded as fanaticisms--the
fanaticism of ego, of evil, of good, of superstition, of a displaced
historical sense. This last one alone is worth a treatise in itself.
I believe in the suggestion of the more powerful will and its might
in causing lesser wills to pervert the realities into mysteries. I
believe in the concerted suggestion of the crowd to formulate a seeming
atmosphere in any community. Do these thoughts tell you anything about
Marlborough?”

“In a way,” answered Dreeme. “But not enough. Give me the key to all
this, Humphrey, for you must know it. You’ve lived here for half a
century and you have had opportunities to observe.”

“No more than you have,” replied Lathrop quickly. “Haven’t I intimated
to you that an idle curiosity was the worst of all evils? Daniel, you
must not try to pry into things too closely. I could, perhaps, tell you
enough to quicken your curiosity into an intolerable sneakiness. You
would go about peering at people, watching their movements, spying upon
their activities, surmising their thoughts and reactions and springs of
being. And, sooner or later, you would be known for the Paul Pry you
would be and your practice would be lost and it would be impossible for
you to live in Marlborough. I tell you,” and the doctor slapped his fat
knee loudly, “these people _will_ not be watched and analyzed. Let
well enough alone.”

Dreeme raised his eyebrows.

“I’m not a Paul Pry,” he said finally. Lathrop seemed to take this
remark as a dismissal of the subject and his joviality, which had
been somewhat dampened by Dreeme’s insistence, reasserted itself. He
hammered the floor lustily with his cane and after a moment a long
vinegary countenance thrust itself through the door.

“Lucinda,” ordered Lathrop, “bring a bottle of apple-jack and two
tumblers.”

The vinegary face grew still longer. A thin mouth, a mere slit in the
wrinkled face, shrivelled in severe disapproval.

“You had some apple-jack this mornin’,” announced a high nasal voice.

“I’m going to have some more now,” answered Lathrop blandly.

The visage swayed for a moment in the doorway and then disappeared to
the sound of a loud sigh.

Lathrop winked at Dreeme.

“The old fool,” he said. “Lucinda’s been with me for forty years and
she still considers me a giddy dissipated youth.”

“Do you believe in God?” asked Dreeme suddenly, apparently giving
utterance to some train of thought in his mind. It was now Lathrop’s
turn to sigh as loudly as Lucinda had sighed.

“Daniel, Daniel,” he said, shaking his head. “Can you tell me what you
mean by God?”

“That’s the old way of evasion,” said Dreeme impatiently. “Do you
believe we exist as individuals after we die?”

“I believe we exist as individuals in a thousand and one ways and eyes
and minds and words spoken or written,” answered the old doctor.

“Do you believe that we exist in the consciousness of ourselves as
individuals after we die?” persisted Dreeme.

“I do not,” answered Lathrop wearily.

Dreeme slipped back into his train of thought and a moment or so sped
by while the stillness of the room was broken only by the buzzing of
the fly still entangled in the window-curtain. It shrilled loudly as it
darted blindly from the soft folds of cloth to the hard surface of the
transparent pane of glass.

“Even in life,” added Lathrop, “I do not believe that we exist as
individuals in ourselves, although, of course, our consciousnesses,
being what they are, can tell us nothing else.”

The door swung open and Lucinda’s vinegary face appeared over the tray
upon which perched the amber-hued apple-jack bottle and two greenish
tumblers. She stalked silently to the table and deposited her burden
upon it. Lucinda was tall and spare and her arms were extraordinarily
thin. Her long face, small black eyes, and pursed mouth registered a
deep disapproval beneath the thin graying hair, tied in a back-knot,
that covered her narrow head.

“I should think one glass might be enough for you, Humphrey,” she
complained, backing from the table like a tall and awkward colt. At the
door she turned to add a final word.

“And young men might do better than sit drinkin’ alcohol when there’s
plenty of sick people about needin’ attention.”

The door closed noisily behind her. Lathrop’s wheezing chuckle followed
her to the kitchen.

“The old fool,” he said softly and tenderly as he poured out the amber
liquor.

Dreeme accepted the tumbler that was offered him in an absent-minded
manner, placing it on the edge of the table. He sighed loudly and
Lathrop, gazing over the top of his glass, scowled pleasantly but said
nothing.

“Why do you side-track me, Humphrey, whenever I mention the Westcotts?”
inquired the young man at length with asperity in his voice.

“Did I?” asked Lathrop mildly.

Dreeme did not answer but took a brief swallow of apple-jack.

“Good, isn’t it?” questioned the old doctor with a fair degree of
enthusiasm. “The national tipple of New England,” he went on. “Eve’s
brew,” he concluded, draining off the tumbler.

“What do you know about Eve?” taunted Dreeme with a wan smile.

Lathrop wheezed for a full minute, and then, reaching over with a
great effort, dug at Dreeme’s ribs. Then his face sobered.

“Oh dear!” he said. And then: “I didn’t side-track you, Daniel. I
merely ignore you.”

Dreeme finished his drink slowly and put the tumbler down. He said:

“I shall find out about the Westcotts, I have been in the farm-house
and I can go again.”

“Did they invite you back?” inquired Lathrop.

The young man stared moodily across the table. Lathrop smiled blithely
and poured himself a second tumbler of apple-jack.

“You’ll get tipsy,” remarked Dreeme.

“No such luck!” wheezed the old doctor. “I was brought up on this
drink. I sucked it in at my mother’s knee.”

“That’s a lie,” answered Dreeme. “You were not permitted to drink
anything stronger than milk at home.”

“How did you know that, Daniel?” asked Lathrop with mild surprise. He
drained half the tumbler and wiped his mouth. Dreeme sat doggedly in
his chair.

“Very well,” said the old doctor with a sigh of defeat. “I give up.
What do you want to know about the Westcotts?”

“Everything,” announced Dreeme. He did not change his position but a
brief light of excitement danced in his eyes.

Lathrop shook his head. “I can’t tell you that,” he said, “because I
don’t know everything. But I’ll tell you what I do know and you may
make the most of it. With this preamble....” He cleared his throat.
“You just wear a man down, Daniel. I’m departing from the rule of a
lifetime. Much good may it do you or me!”

He filled his ubiquitous pipe and lighted it. A piratical odor assailed
the air.

“I came to Marlborough in ’57,” he said. “New England in ’57 was a
strange place. The old world was breaking into pieces and there were
faint, very faint glimmers of a new order of things. It was the days
shortly after Dan Webster had thrown his party. Charles Sumner was
being assaulted in his seat in the Senate and the Abolitionists were
roaring their heads off. It was a curious time because the Republic
was rushing straight to perdition. It was State’s Rights and ‘nigger,
nigger, who’s got the nigger’ all the time. There was always a nigger
in _somebody’s_ wood-pile. Up popped a woolly head and the farmers
who had no use for nigger-labor grunted like hedge-hogs for Abolition.
I was pretty young and careless about the destiny of our revered
Republic so I did not cogitate _too_ much about things (you’d
call them phenomena, Daniel) that were for me no more than theoretical
problems. It was my business to explore the highways and byways of
Marlborough, fish the streams, go fowling for bats, pick blueberries,
and sleep in the sun. I don’t imagine I thought much about the people
whom I met. Most of them were funny. One of them rather impressed
himself upon me for I used to enjoy snooping about the Leeminster Road
and there I would meet him stomping along and smacking at the stones
with his stick. That was old Captain Uriah Carrier. He had been a
ship-mate of Hawthorne of Salem, the one who died of fever at Surinam
and whose son wrote books.”

He paused and reached for his can of shag. Then he said:

“Is there anything crazier than writing books, Daniel? It is the
ultimate idiocy, the last gasp of the lunatic.”

“All this is getting somewhere?” asked Dreeme.

Lathrop wheezed. He said:

“More or less.”

He settled back and proceeded with his rambling story.

“Let us, my impatient young friend, pause and consider Captain Uriah
Carrier. He was the type of man that distinctly does not exist
any more. He had hunted whales in the Pacific, had terrorized and
robbed the natives of Tahiti, had blackbirded off the African Gold
Coast, had carried a Manchu woman about with him for mistress, had
retired, returned to Marlborough--for he was born here, joined the
Congregational Church, married, raised children, and become the usual
pillar of New England. He was a pillar of smoke by day, for his tobacco
was vile, and a pillar of fire by night, for his cellar was full of
Jamaica rum. He was a tall man with bristling white hair and stained
whiskers (a lovely rust-color about his mouth) and an evil eye. He had
an invariable greeting for me. ‘Younker,’ he’d say. ‘Look out for the
devil.’ I’d say, ‘Where is he, Capt’n?’ ‘In my ’bacca pouch,’ he’d
growl, and shake it at me. I was too old for that, though, and would
laugh at him, whereupon he’d show his yellow fangs, smack another stone
with his stick--it was big and knobby enough to kill Goliath with--and
stomp along muttering to himself. A great man, Daniel, but I’m glad
that I did not follow in his wicked footsteps.”

He wheezed a soft sigh. Dreeme stirred impatiently in his chair.

“Well, now,” went on Lathrop. “Captain Uriah Carrier had several
children, all of whom died young except one and that was Peleg Carrier.
I went away to college and came back after the Civil War. The old
captain was dead. I heard that he sat up in his huge four-poster after
Gettysburg sucking at a rum-bottle and singing some foul old sailor
song full of the most terrific obscenities. Then he had fallen back,
said ‘What ho, now!’ in faint surprise, and passed out. Peleg Carrier
was a quiet sort of boy as I remember him but it is not so much the boy
I remember as the man who returned from Germany to Marlborough after I
had slipped into the saddle as doctor here. That must have been in the
early seventies when Jesse James was shooting up Missouri and Kansas
and old Sitting Bull was preparing his revenge and the buildings for
the Philadelphia Centennial were being raised. Peleg Carrier was rather
different from his blasphemous old scoundrel of a father. He was a
melancholiac.”

Lathrop brooded for a moment, one great hand raised to his round face.
Dreeme could see the hairy ring of fat about the old doctor’s wrist.

“My memory of Peleg Carrier is revised and aided and abetted by my
later analysis of him,” proceeded Lathrop. “I got to thinking about
him early in life and for some years he was a pet study of mine.
A sort of unusual specimen, you know. He lived all alone in the
Carrier house on the Leeminster Road, a house that burned down long
before your time. I imagine that leading a lonely rigorous life in
a desolate country community induces melancholy. Don’t you, Daniel?
Peleg, however, was born a melancholiac. Melancholia, I take it,
is not a malady so much as a matter of temperament. It renders its
victims austere and dour. They dissimulate violent passions that are
exhibited only through tempestuous outbreaks of weeping and nerves.
By their nature they are exposed to a continual perturbation of the
vital organs, to spasms and obstructions, for instance. These physical
disorders induce an unquietness of mind without respite just as bad
eating brings horrible dreams. Therefore in their waking hours these
unfortunate people are the victims of disordered stomachs, spleens and
livers. Their minds as well as their bodies are attacked and such a
thing as constitutional anxiety sets in and predisposes them to sombre
fancies. These pathological conditions favor an over-development of the
interior life and melancholiacs become disposed to the depravities of
the imagination. Errors of sense ensue and their enfeebled normalities
become the slaves of phantoms. It is but a short step to frenzies and
fanaticisms. Peleg Carrier was such a man. Tall, cadaverous, with a
face as yellow as old parchment, and a continual twitch of the hands,
he passed like a morose ghost through the life of Marlborough. Who
knows what preyed upon his perverted mind? Perhaps it was the sins of
his father, Uriah. Perhaps the inclination toward those sins was reborn
in Peleg and strangled by him through a supreme effort of will. I don’t
know. If there was an ethical impulse in him it must have run against
a stone wall in Uriah. Perhaps half the dourness of life is in living
down the sins of our fathers. This seems to be getting nowhere, Daniel,
but I want you to remember both of these Carriers, the first an old
ferocious rascal and the second a nervous melancholiac. Peleg married
late in life the woman who was his housekeeper and she had one child.
The father died the day that Martha was born.”

Dreeme pricked up his ears at the name.

“Well, there you are,” said Lathrop placidly. “There you have Martha
Westcott.”

“I can’t see ...” began Dreeme.

“Of course you can’t,” broke in the old doctor, “and neither can I. But
we can both guess. Westcott himself I know little about. I have heard
that he was the son of one of Peleg Carrier’s German friends, born in
those days when Peleg was studying in Germany. I have also heard that
he was a grandson of old Uriah Carrier. The first I saw of him was when
he suddenly appeared in the valley to take charge of Peleg’s funeral.
Who sent for him and from where he came are mysteries to me.”

“Is he so much older than his wife?” asked Dreeme with some surprise.

“Twenty years or so,” remarked Lathrop. “Martha is only twenty-five.”

“What!” exclaimed Dreeme.

Lathrop nodded.

“She’s always looked sort of ageless,” he said. “Westcott brought her
up. They lived in the old Carrier house until it burned down. Then they
went to Germany. When they came back seven or eight years ago they were
married.”

The old doctor yawned and stretched his huge arms. He looked
quizzically at Dreeme from beneath his eyebrows.

“So there you are, Daniel,” he said. “It is no story at all, you see.”

“Who do you think Westcott is?” inquired Dreeme.

“Well,” said Lathrop meditatively, “they say that old Uriah had a sort
of cloven head. Perhaps he’s the man in the moon, Daniel.”

The soft chime of a clock broke in upon them and Dreeme counted six
beats. It was time to go.

“You’re not telling me much about Jeffrey Westcott and his wife,”
remarked the young doctor.

Lathrop shook his head despondently.

“I don’t know anything about them, I tell you,” he complained, a faint
note of irritation in his voice. “I’ve never been inside their house.
I haven’t talked to them for five years. I haven’t seen them. What do
you want me to say, Daniel? Do you want me to invent a fine theory
concerning them?”

“If you must,” said Dreeme. “But why not tell me the fine theory you
have already invented?”

For an instant Lathrop nearly exploded. Then he said softly:

“Darn it!”

He looked at Dreeme in a woeful manner. He said:

“You _will_ have something, won’t you?”

Leaning forward he grasped Dreeme’s hand in his huge soft paw.

“Good-night, Daniel,” he articulated heartily. “Good-night.”

Dreeme disengaged his hand and sat tightly in his chair.

“I have my supper early,” remarked Lathrop in a mildly protesting voice.

His chair creaked as he leaned back in it.

“I hate to talk about people,” he said in a loud voice. “It means no
good, I tell you.”

There was a loud crash in the room and both men sat upright suddenly
and stared about them. Lathrop’s can of shag had slipped from the table
to the floor. The dark curling tobacco lay in an untidy heap between
them. The can rocked on its round side for a moment and then ceased.

“Humphrey,” said Dreeme, “you have thought a lot about the Westcotts.
You’ve even studied their hereditary strain. You describe a villain and
a madman to me and then you introduce a man who has studied in Germany.
God knows what he studied. The Black Arts, perhaps.”

“There aren’t any Black Arts,” interjected Lathrop, gazing woefully at
his tobacco.

“He studied something, anyway,” went on Dreeme, ignoring the
interruption, “and I will venture to assert that it was neither
differential calculus nor Emmanuel Kant. He is still studying it. He’s
an abnormal creature and so is his wife. Why have you kept hinting
at some sort of a fanaticism and pointing out the difference between
supernormal and supernatural and insisting on the melancholia of Peleg
Carrier?”

Lathrop made a motion as though washing and wiping his hands.

“I refuse to be led into wild theories, Daniel,” he said. “I base my
opinions on facts. Any other process means eventual madness. Good
Lord, how do you suppose I have lived here for half a century without
turning into a sheer lunatic? Principally by minding my own business,
which I advise you to do. And by treating a fact as a fact and letting
it carry me no farther.”

The twilight, shot with the spent gold of the afternoon, curdled about
the corners of the room. It dusted in through the windows and rolled in
wispy vapors over the heads of the two men. It crept along the floor
and eddied beneath the tables and chairs. Dreeme felt the slow tide
rising about his feet and curling about his hands. He made an impatient
movement as though to brush it from him. He started to feel Lathrop’s
hand suddenly placed on his knee.

“Daniel,” said the old doctor, “thought is a terrible thing. You are
too young to grow morbid. Your nerves are on edge. Let them rest.
Forget the Westcotts and forget your mystery of Marlborough. It is only
by new thought, by bright strenuous acceptances that this sad land may
be translated from the barren graveyard of Puritan traditions to the
New World that is our heritage. I will not give you half-baked notions
to feed on for then you would grow as somber as the people you see
about you. I’ve told you what I know about the Westcotts and if I have
certain personal reactions to them and to the people in this community
it is far better that I keep them to myself. I, at least, can cage my
thoughts and let them grumble there and hurt no one. You are too young
to keep your opinions to yourself and they would escape and end by
devouring you. Eat, sleep, read, do your work, my boy. That is all that
you need do.”

“You’ve not kept a single thing from me, have you, Humphrey?” said the
young doctor accusingly.

Lathrop pursed his great lips and refused to meet Dreeme’s eyes.

The twilight edged the young man toward the door and he rose
reluctantly. Humphrey Lathrop’s huge bulk eased back in his chair to a
noisy creaking. He smiled agreeably. Dreeme picked up his hat and held
out his hand to the old doctor.

“I’ll drop in and see you soon, Humphrey,” he said.

“That’s the boy,” wheezed Lathrop, patting the back of his hand.
“That’s the boy.”




Chapter Four


I

Mrs. Slater moved, a black silhouette, across the yellow glow of the
kerosene-lamp, bearing in chubby hands the last of the supper dishes.
She kicked the kitchen door open with a grunt and disappeared. It was
silent in the room. Walden Slater, having removed his boots with the
elastic sides, drifted almost surreptitiously to the back porch, his
gray woollen socks touching the floor soundlessly. Reaching his haven
he sank with a hoarse sigh of relief into the broken rocker. Dreeme
could see his bent form against the misty light of evening whenever
the door to the kitchen flapped open. He sat there and rocked to the
faint creak-creak of the chair; his talon-like hands grasping the arms
of the rocker. He was a personification of a certain aspect of this
New England. He was the tired man reeking with dried sweat, earth, and
barn-yard odors sitting in the quiet evening and drawing in hoarse and
throbbing lung-fulls of fresh air. His bones were tired. His flesh
crawled sluggishly with an old weariness. The hinges of his knees were
stiff. He was a finality in himself, a period put to a long sentence
of history. The kitchen door swung to and fro and Dreeme ceased to
look at the farmer. He looked out of the window instead, into the dark
side-yard where the Slater children sat huddled together on a broken
barrow and talked soberly in low tones. Their voices sounded thin and
far away, pinched sounds, words rolled between huge fists. The low
light of the evening fell across the sides of their faces. Small impish
profiles turned to the brooding night. A dark form passed between
Dreeme’s eyes and the children’s faces and the young doctor saw the
figure of the reverend George Burroughs, skinny hands clasped behind
the frayed skirts of his musty coat, stalk off into the darkness. It
was like a brief eclipse, an instant’s impenetrable blackness, and
then it was gone. Light footsteps died almost instantaneously in the
direction of the Leeminster Road.

Dreeme looked back into the room ... well ... he progressed slowly
toward the kitchen door.

“Where is your niece?” he asked Mrs. Slater with a directness that was
unusual in Marlborough where people talked by inference. The woman’s
eyes fluttered wildly at this unexpected question.

“Deborah ... well, Deborah....” She hurried toward the kitchen door
with a massed pillar of plates, a sort of leaning tower of Pisa that
threatened to dissolve into fragments at every step. At the door she
turned. She said:

“Helping out.... They needed somebody to help out....”

Her voice drifted back through the door.

“Mrs. Westcott ... sent for her....”

Dreeme brooded upon this for an instant, fumbled in his pocket for his
pipe, and then sauntered slowly toward the kitchen. Mrs. Slater, at the
sink, her sleeves rolled back over her short plump arms, observed him
with a suspicious concern, her head cocked on one side, an eye turned
back. It was like the eye of a querulous parrot. Dreeme leaned against
the wall, and, watching her, filled his pipe.

“Has Mrs. Westcott been here?” he asked.

Mrs. Slater turned to her dishes. She said:

“Oh, no!”

It was inconceivable, of course.

Dreeme waited for a moment as he lighted his pipe.

“Who has?” he inquired.

Mrs. Slater looked reproachfully at him as she fumbled for certain
words in her throat.

“We thought we’d have Deborah with us ... especially since....” A
clashing of dishes drowned a few words. “But the preacher said ... he
saw Mrs. Westcott....”

“You mean Burroughs had your niece sent over to the Westcott farm as
hired girl?” broke in Dreeme.

Mrs. Slater did not like the word.

“She’s going to help out ... until Mr. Westcott is better....”

She actually glowered at Dreeme.

“In that lonely hole,” thought Dreeme aloud.

“It’s hard enough to live ...” began Mrs. Slater.

“It _is_,” said the doctor strongly.

Well, it was none of his business. The poor relation. Go where you are
sent. All the same ... it was a shame. Cloven head and his malignant
eyes. Eyes like wet violets. “Rock of Ages.” Now why had he thought
of that? He opened his mouth to speak again to Mrs. Slater, thought
better of it, and turned back into the lamp-lit room. He had wanted
to talk to the girl, to find out what she thought of things and how
this valley had affected her young mind. But now.... Why she might
as well be in Timbuktoo. The Westcott farm-gate opened into.... “All
hope abandon....” He picked up his hat from the little side table and
walked slowly through the hall and into the yard. The hushed voices
of the Slater children sounded like a faint drone. He could hear the
rocker on the back porch. Creak-creak. The dew was heavy. It was better
to keep to the gravel path. Creak-creak. He reached the street and
turned toward his own house. Creak-creak. Shine, moon. He looked up at
a murky sky. No moon. It was too early for the moon. Creak. “Stars of
the summer night.” Longfellow. “Far in yon azure....” Creak. He fumbled
(creak) at the knob to his door, pushed it open, and entered the small
hall. To go upstairs. Bed. But he was not sleepy. He would go into
the back study and read for a while. Or mull over Humphrey Lathrop’s
conversation. Humphrey knew.... He felt his way along the dark hall and
pushed the door open into the study. The minute he entered the room he
knew that there was somebody there. He was not frightened. He leaned
back against the door and said softly: “Who is it?”

A throat cleared noisily.

“Wagner,” replied a hoarse voice.

“Are you by the table? There is a lamp there. Light it,” said Dreeme.

The match spurted like a tiny firework and great shadows sprang up on
all sides. A dancing ring of Jinns. Wagner’s red beard hung like a
sultry smoke above the chimney. The man lowered his head and peered at
Dreeme across the table.

“What is it, Wagner?” inquired the doctor. “Is Westcott’s leg bad?”

The shaggy head shook slowly.

“That’s all right,” he replied. “I wash it now. I’m real good at it.”

His eyes narrowed under his bushy brows and his yellow teeth glowed
through the mass of hair.

“She said you was to meet her by ten in the back room of the burned
mill,” he said slowly in his rusty sepulchral voice. “She told me to
tell you.”

A faint throb of anticipation tugged at the doctor’s mind.

“Deborah?” he asked. Wagner said:

“Missus Westcott.”

Dreeme’s mind stopped dead. Automatically he said:

“Tell her I won’t come.”

“She said she guessed you would all right,” replied the hoarse voice.

To think now. Leaning over the well. The white nape of her neck. Heavy
boots dragged across the floor.

“What does she want?” he asked softly. There was no response. Boots
dragging. A puffing. Dreeme floundered in a sea of amazement. He
repeated his question loudly.

“What does she want, I say?”

This silence! Collecting his wits, he peered about the dimly lighted
study. Empty, of course. He had gone out. Gone right by him. Dreeme
walked over to the table and sat down in the easy chair by it. A tiny
white moth dipped and volplaned about the smoky chimney. Now what was
this? He would have to think about it. He leaned back in his chair and
pulled at his cold pipe.

The faint ticking of the clock was like the tiny regular beating of
a miniature tomtom. The minutes danced to it, shaking their small
feet in an unending circle. They tripped by him, hands joined, and
infinitesimal tapping heels maintaining a regular time that measured
off the softly-flowing hours. He watched the vain moth dashing its
white wings desperately against the smoky chimney. Sooner or later it
would get scorched and flutter to the table, a charred and crumbling
pinch of powder. Life was a curious thing. Breathed into a bit of dust
it became a moth. Or a man. Something was happening to him now. His two
years of dreary silence were breaking down and he was beginning to grow
morbid about things in general. He was getting nervous, acutely aware
of invisible tentacles that seemed to reach out of this darkness that
encircled him on all sides and touch him softly. Humphrey Lathrop had
said that it was nerves. But perhaps it was more than that. Perhaps
it was a sixth sense slowly coming to birth inside him, a sense
nourished by his loneliness that was reaching out into new dimensions.
He was pursuing phantoms, hunting through the sun-shot fields about
Marlborough for invisible essences that drifted deliberately and had
a particular semblance of their own. He was going to solve an intense
and formidable riddle. He was going to track down the secret of an
atmosphere, the aura of a community. It sounded absurd enough but
it was only the absurd things that mattered greatly after all if a
man desired to be more than an eating, sleeping, laboring animal.
To be a man, and all that _that_ meant, was to walk arm in arm
with phantoms, to discourse with shadowy substances, to resolve high
mystical riddles. Ah! The moth shrivelled against the hot glass and
dropped to the table. So that was that! He turned it over tenderly
with a paper-knife and then pushed it to the floor.

Now then! He looked at the ticking clock from which the joined minutes
were tripping their fantastic and regular dance. It was nine-thirty.
Then it would be in half an hour. His thoughts, held tightly by the
leash of his will, were set free and they sprang forward like a pack
of ravenous hunting dogs. Up the Leeminster Road they sped and his
spectral self followed them as an eager hunter follows his baying
hounds. For an instant the face of Deborah flashed in the dark air and
then it disappeared, left far behind by this rout of yelping coursers.
He had said that he would not go. But she knew that he would, that his
curiosity would carry him as far as the mill at least. What she wanted
he did not know but he could suspect it. She was assuredly a lonely
caged-in creature. She stood at windows and watched the night-sky and
wondered about the life that went boiling so turbulently by on the
great highroads to the west and the east of her locked doors. She sat
in a room lined with books beside a cloven-headed man and a secret sat
there with them and she had nobody to share that secret with her, no
one, that is, except the man himself who _was_ the secret. Perhaps
she wanted to tell him things, to pour out the subterranean stream
of her consciousness. He could imagine her muffled voice speaking in
the darkness of the mill. It was not strange that she had sent for
him, after all. It would have been stranger if she had maintained her
silence. Dreeme rose slowly from his chair and blew the light out.
Well....


II

She was seated in an embrasure formed where a portion of the brick
wall had fallen away and dropped into the yellow-scummed water of
the mill-pond. He could see the dark silhouette of her head as it
turned sideways against the smoky light of the moon, and for a moment
he paused in the doorway watching her, noting the regularity of her
boldly-cut features and the cold sensuousness of her rounded lips. It
was almost symbolic to find her so, no more than a silhouette, a face
seen in a single aspect, a profile clean-cut and set against unsteady
light that flowed with the rippling of milky waters. She was like this.
She was the outline of a mystery, a part of that riddle that somehow he
must solve if he was to have any peace of mind. It was dark and gloomy
in the mill. Its fire-blackened walls retained the horror of an old
debacle. Two men had been incinerated here. She said:

“I was sure you would come.”

She had not turned her head. She still sat sideways against the moon.
But her hand moved. It was pale and indistinct as it shifted into
the dim light. He advanced toward her slowly, his footsteps sounding
hollowly on the cracked cement floor.

“What is it?” he asked. “What do you want?”

Her head turned and although her face was a blackness he could feel her
eyes studying him, fondling his features with a glance that was both
tired and expectant.

“I was tired,” she answered in a muffled voice.

That seemed to explain something and he continued his advance until he
was beside her. She drew back slightly into her corner of the embrasure
and he sat down on the cold crumbling bricks. He said:

“You mean ... of loneliness?”

Her shoulders quivered a trifle. She did not need to answer that. Her
movement dislodged a fragment of brick and it dropped with a sharp plop
into the mill-pond. Dreeme started nervously at the sound.

“Why were you spying on me through the stone wall today?” she asked
suddenly, and then went on, not waiting for an answer. “I knew you
would come. You mustn’t loiter about the house, though. It isn’t safe.
He would be sure to find it out.”

Dreeme felt like a drowning man, and he made a valiant effort to save
himself.

“I had business Leeminster way,” he replied in an uncertain tone. “I
just happened that way. I wasn’t spying, I....”

“You needn’t lie,” she returned coolly. She put her hand on his knee.
She said:

“You are the first young man I have talked to alone for years.”

The electric touch of her fingers filled Dreeme with a nervous
excitement. He fumbled vaguely for words, but his mind was like a
great empty sack. Explore as he might there was nothing there.

“He keeps me shut up,” she went on. “I have to ... but no matter.”

Dreeme still sought blindly for words. Her voice and her
vaguely-outlined face were dead weights on his intelligence. He could
not rise above them or push them aside.

“I like you,” she said. “Does that sound silly? Let it. I liked you the
minute I saw you.”

“I think ... I mean ...” began Dreeme.

“You were like a boy with the weary lines of a man’s face impossibly
stamped on you,” she remarked slowly. Her eyes studied him a moment.
She asked softly:

“Are you afraid?”

His silence, complete and emphatic, was the mute answer to her
question. In the milky light he could see that she was almost smiling.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said as though she were speaking to a child.

“I’m not afraid,” replied Dreeme with an effort. “What is there to be
afraid of? I don’t understand. That’s all.”

Her face was level with his, and she looked at him for a moment
steadily, her dark eyes under their heavy lids full of a vague surmise.

“How long have you been here?” she asked presently.

“Two years,” answered Dreeme much as though he were a school-child
being examined.

“So long?” she murmured. “You see how ignorant I am. Men pass outside
my window and I never see them.”

Dreeme, in spite of his confusion, doubted that.

“What do you know about me?” she proceeded. There was a faint
breathlessness in the question.

“Practically nothing,” he said.

She sighed, and it seemed to Dreeme that she sighed in relief.

“We are not children, are we?” she asked irrelevantly.

Dreeme shook his head.

“It has been so long since I conversed with anyone that I have almost
lost the use of words,” she said half to herself. “Yet words were once
my favorite play-things. I would shape them into all sorts of patterns.”

She removed her hand from his knee for an instant and then put it
back. It seemed to Dreeme as though there had been a brief flaw in the
electric current that was pouring into him and which so unsteadied him.

“Be silent, then, and let me talk,” she went on. “I need to say things.
I am tired of talking to myself and inanimate objects, tired of
reading, tired of working, tired of listening to things that I do not
much care about any more.”

She paused for a moment but Dreeme said nothing.

“You see,” she said. “I needed someone.” Her hand closed about his
wrist softly. “I needed you. I had not been in the room more than a
minute before I realized that you were that sensitive type about....
Do you remember looking at me? Weren’t you trying to say something to
me, trying to say it without words?”

Her speech had suddenly become a husky caress. She leaned forward. She
murmured in an almost inaudible voice:

“Say it now.”

Dreeme fumbled for words. Had he desired to convey any message to her?
He could not find it in the welter of his mind.

“I was wondering,” he stuttered. “I mean, it seemed strange to find
that room full of books, that curious man, and ... you.”

He was suddenly aware that he did not desire this relationship between
them to establish itself too quickly and too firmly upon a basis
of mystical understanding. It was too silly. Two strangers did not
reveal themselves so nakedly to one another. He clutched eagerly at
the tattered cloak of his New England reticence. She did not appear
to understand that he was attempting to convey a polite snub, a
discreet hint, as it were, to resume the formal disguises of casual
acquaintances, but her hand slipped from his wrist. Dreeme almost
breathed with relief.

“It is good to be away from that house and to be able to talk as I
wish,” she proceeded. “It is an evil house. It is dominated by an evil
man.”

Dreeme said nothing. He sat gazing at the mill-pond in a phlegmatic
manner. Her dark eyes narrowed a trifle as she watched him.

“I, too, am evil,” she added.

Her tone was matter-of-fact, as though she were stating a thing already
understood. At the same time, there was an implied challenge in it.
Dreeme felt that he should say something.

“I don’t think you are evil,” he protested. There was but little
conviction in his voice.

“All that is relative, though,” she went on in a voice almost
indistinct. “Do you like to ponder over things, to intellectualize
them? So do I. Evil is relative. Perhaps he is not evil according to
his own lights. Sitting alone in the house I have evolved my own scheme
of things.”

“What is it?” he asked suddenly. “What is it in that house? Why is he
different from other men? What is it in Marlborough that ... what ...”

He waved his hand expressively, showing for the first time a curious
liveliness.

A slow startled look suffused her face. She gazed at him steadily for
a moment, and then the corners of her mouth quivered. Behind the cold
mask of her face she seemed to smile.

“I will not tell you,” she answered, “At least, not now.”

There was an implicit promise in her voice. But no sooner had she
conveyed this slight intimation of future explanations than she seemed
to regret it.

“There is nothing,” she said. “It is the loneliness. It is the
ingrowing. It is the days passing along and every day the same.”

“Have you lived here all your life?” he asked.

She paused a moment. She said:

“All my life. I have never left this valley. I have never found the
door that leads out into the world.”

She was a liar. Dreeme knew that at last. Her voice had again become
a husky caress. It strove to reach out and embrace the dubious young
doctor. He was conscious of a vague note of insincerity in it. Far back
in his mind a sly intuition manifested itself, and it suggested that
this woman was very near to acting, that she was cautiously feeling her
way into his emotions. She wanted to find out if he could be swayed by
passion, pity or intellect. He must be careful, terribly careful. He
must avoid the almost overpowering magnetism that emanated from her
white slumberous body.

“Life should proceed,” she said, her words sounding like slow
calculating steps through the difficult labyrinth of her thoughts. “It
should go on and touch different places and different people, accepting
and rejecting, considering all. It should meet the passions and accept
them all and live through them and with them. But my life is not like
that. I am cut off, set apart from things, bounded by walls and the
will of one man. My thoughts boil in me to no purpose. My mind revolves
and it achieves no friction, no flashing of sparks. It is just an
insane wheel whirling endlessly in a vacuum. That is what it really
is. I cannot go on like that and remain sane.”

Dreeme did not know what to say. He knew that he was beginning to be
frightened.

“I do not live in that house,” she went on. “I exist in it. I stare out
of the window in summer and see parched fields stretching to eternity.
In the winter it is all an expanse of untrodden snow. Sometimes voices
come to me from the road. That is all. That is all, I tell you.”

Her voice rose, deep and husky. Louder than she had spoken before she
declared:

“I was born to great acceptances.”

Dreeme was becoming more and more frightened. He did not want to hear
these things, these somber intimacies of a household that was no part
of his affair and yet he could not stop listening. Her words were a
warm web that caught up all his thoughts. He could not stand up and
say, “I’m sorry, but this is not my business.” It would be cowardice.
He opened his mouth to say something, perhaps that very thing, but she
continued to speak as though to hold his wavering will in the balance.

“I don’t have to describe my life to you,” she said. “You know. You
know because you know Marlborough, and the strength that exists in the
walls of the houses of Marlborough. But there are things that you do
not know. You do not know that my husband is ... but why should you
know? He is like God, but I cannot tell you what I mean by that.”

She stopped, apparently expecting some exclamation, but Dreeme sat in
silent bewilderment and said nothing.

“He directs destinies,” she went on. “He lets nothing stand between
him and the objectives he has planned for himself. Not even me. Least
of all, me. He has great power over the minds and futures of people
when he chooses to exercise it. It is impossible to be independent
with him. Once inside the walls of his house there is no individuality
left to the visitor,--or rather the intruder, for no one enters his
house except intruders. He spreads like a great force over everything.
Freedom becomes a secret possession then, something to be cherished
darkly at one’s bosom. It is only in an escape from that house that
one may assert one’s unique unity. It is by slipping away that I keep
myself sane. I have slipped away now. He is busy at his books, and the
new girl moving about will, perhaps, seem to be me.”

“What books?” asked Dreeme abruptly. If he could find out what Westcott
read he could find out what he thought. That was Westcott’s own idea.
Even as he asked the question he realized that he was crudely diverting
Martha Westcott from her self-revelation, and he flushed at his
unconscious rudeness. She did not seem to notice his divagation. She
said:

“I don’t know. He buys old books, sends to Europe constantly for items
he finds in the catalogues that come to him, but I never look into
them. My mind is my book. I think that he is formulating a new religion
from them.”

He was aware of her untruthfulness again, of something held back and
reformulated in the mind, of a desire to impress him and yet not to
tell him anything substantial.

“A new religion?” he repeated with a shade of curiosity.

She dismissed it vaguely. She said:

“He is fashioning a new god in his own image.”

It sounded silly to Dreeme. He wanted to smile. A cloven-headed man
on an avoided farm in a forgotten valley creating a new god. He felt
like blurting out, “Oh, come now. That is a bit too thick.” Instead he
declared:

“We all fashion God in our own image. It is our unfortunate weakness.”

She was getting impatient with this topic. She did not want to talk
about anything but herself.

“But not his kind of a God,” she replied, a vague note of irritation in
her tone. “Perhaps, after all, he is fashioning himself into the image
of an old god. Would that be unusual? I really can’t tell you. I don’t
know. I am only a part of the furniture in that house. I, too, have my
philosophy of living.”

She paused for a question.

“Yes?” said Dreeme politely.

She stirred uneasily, and her knee, warm beneath her skirt, struck
against his leg. In moving her head bent forward and the fragrance
of her hair swept his face. Suddenly he was enveloped in the hot
disturbing atmosphere of flesh. He wanted to rise to his feet now, to
terminate this ineffectual interview, to explain to her that though
she might upset his mental equilibrium by the magnetism of her body,
the subtle insinuations of her mysterious eyes, and the leashed ardor
so like a caged tigress that moved behind her pale flesh, he was yet
aware of her cunning licentiousness that would use him for her own
malicious ends. He could view her with a cold intensity from a distance
now, could speculate as to her designs; yet, at the same time, he was
aware that in her immediate presence she dominated him by a power that
was not entirely beauty. It was this that made him uneasy and unsure of
himself.

“Yes,” she said, low, husky, half-passionately. “I have my philosophy
of living. It is to drink to the dregs the opportunities vouchsafed
us by Time, to take advantage of that cruel gaoler, Destiny, and fool
him at every turn. We are born free and we should live free. Our blood
whispers messages to us and we should answer those low calls that ring
in our ears if we are to vindicate ourselves to ourselves. Have you
ever rested your head against a woman’s breast and heard the blood
racing furiously through all its arteries? What are we put into the
world for? We are the fruit of suppressed joy, are we not? It is the
liberation of self for which we are ordained. There is only one way
of being actually free, and that is to surmount the thousand and one
petty laws and dogmas that hedge us about. We speak constantly of
obligations, but what do we mean by them? Do we mean the suppression
of our free instincts and the obliteration of our integrity before the
selfish demands of another’s welfare and peace of mind? Is not that
a slavish instinct? What is our debt to humanity but the reverse of
humanity’s debt to us. There is a freedom based upon the destruction
of all laws, political, religious and moral, a freedom where we may
tread the earth as gods in a great tranquil equality, and it is to that
freedom that I turn my face. If I am free in myself, if my thoughts and
secret passions move as they please, why not this flesh which I carry
travel in freedom also?”

He heard the soft sound of her breast struck sharply by her hand.

“I do not say ‘no’ to anything,” she went on. “I merely say ‘does it
satisfy me and fill me for the moment?’ If it does it is good. If it
does it is an end in itself. Let men and women think what they please
and move about with free wills. I abolish slavery.”

It all sounded like a set speech to Dreeme, something she had written
out and memorized, something that she had evolved to sap the spiritual
integrity of whosoever she might meet in this mood of attack. Well, he
would show her that he was adamant.

“You are an anarchist,” he said. He strove to say it lightly, to
fashion it into a mere flippant rejoinder. To his chagrin he heard his
own voice trembling.

“I am a woman,” she replied. “All women are anarchists at heart. The
only laws they respect are the laws of their desires. I am an anarchist
of the soul, of the mind, of the flesh. Nothing but the limitations of
my body shall stand in my way. And through the limitations of my body I
will find my own deliverance.”

She stopped at that as though expecting a sudden flood of answers on
his part and her eyes were fastened upon his face. He said nothing but
waited.

“I am lonely,” she murmured in a low, almost inaudible voice.

Dreeme, turning his face directly toward her, looked into her eyes. She
was speaking through them, steadily, mercilessly. For a moment they
stared at one another, and then Dreeme, his face flushing and his body
shaking, stood up. In the moonlight so diffused and cloudy her eyes
dilated like those of a tigress.

“Have I told you nothing?” she cried. “Have I said nothing to you?”

Her voice was loud and raucous, a terrible sound that caused Dreeme’s
body to sway. It was as though she were lashing him with a whip.

“You have told me many things,” he answered in a trembling voice, “and
most of them I did not want to hear.”

She stood up before him and put her hands upon his shoulders, the
nails of her fingers pressing into his flesh.

“You coward!” she said. “You miserable coward!”

He took her hands from his shoulders, but still retained them in his
own. Her hands were cold and the palms were moist.

“I am not a coward,” he answered in an uncertain voice.

She breathed deeply, a long shuddering inhalation, and then put her
mouth close to his ear, her long body resting lightly against him.

“Listen!” she said in a husky whisper. “Are you as lonely as I....”

Suddenly she stopped and twisted about toward the door of the mill, a
door that yawned on the road and framed in its square a clouded milky
haze.

“Do you hear it?” she asked in a low monotone.

He had already concentrated his faculties and was listening intently.

“Yes, I do,” he answered. A cold fever settled on him as he replied,
and he knew that he was perspiring icily at every pore.

Over the narrow wooden bridge that spanned the Saccarac River sounded
slow footsteps. He could hear them distinctly in the nerve-wracking
silence of the night, a measured advance that increased in sound as the
invisible traveler neared the mill. One of the bridge-boards creaked
beneath the weight of this unknown, and then there was a brief silence.
The unseen wanderer had apparently paused, and Dreeme could imagine
him leaning on the wood rail of the bridge and gazing into the black
water that flowed so sluggishly beneath the cloudy sky. There were
no stars reflected in that water. There was not even the reflection
of the face of the noctambulist who was leaning over and gazing into
nothingness. Even as the thought flashed through Dreeme’s mind he heard
the tread resumed, this time to the accompanying crunch of gravel.
Whoever it was had crossed the bridge and was following the path
that skirted the ruined shell of the mill. Suddenly, with surprising
strength, Martha Westcott thrust Dreeme away from the broken embrasure
where they had sat in the murky glow of the half-drowned moon and
against the charred side-wall of the mill. From that dark corner they
could stare obliquely at the door. They stood there crushed against the
wall, the acrid smell of burned timbers in their nostrils, while the
crunching footsteps deliberately progressed toward them. The invisible
wanderer was passing the angle of the mill now, following the blackened
wall, just about to cross the milky square of the doorway. At this
moment the sound ceased, stopping with a startling abruptness as though
the hidden prowler had paused with one foot in the air. Dreeme could
hear the woman beside him catch her breath in a tiny strangled sob.
Both of them, flattened against the blackened beams, their shoulders
touching, watched the dimly-glowing frame of the entrance with dilated
eyes. In the silence that surged back about them like a dark wave,
Dreeme could hear Martha Westcott’s heart beating. It was like a drum.
It seemed to increase in volume until the whole interior was throbbing
with the sound. Then slowly, ever so slowly, a dark shadow obscured
the doorway, although there were no accompanying footsteps. The shadow
hovered for an instant as though it were poised in the air, and then,
to Dreeme’s horror, a low monotonous humming filled the wrecked room.
The shadow, enlarged by the deceiving rays of the cloudy moon, appeared
to sway, to diminish, to swell in rhythm with this unceasing drone.
Dreeme, his nerves at the breaking point, started impulsively forward,
but the tight clutch of Martha Westcott’s hand on his wrist caught
him back. At this moment he recognized a melody in the low humming.
“Rock of Ages.” Somebody was standing in the doorway of the mill and
monotonously humming, “Rock of Ages.” Immediately Dreeme’s imagination
shaped before him a shallow-faced figure in a frayed frock coat. A lean
figure with dead eyes.

He had barely time to identify the man in the doorway before the
humming ceased, and the shadow withdrew as noiselessly as it had
appeared. There was the instant’s pause and Dreeme suddenly recollected
that there was a patch of soft earth before the mill door. Of course.
The loiterer was crossing that, returning to the gravel path again.
Even as his mind began to function rationally once more he heard the
crunching footsteps, this time decreasing in sound as the wanderer
progressed along the road to Marlborough. They were slow, casual, a
retarded crunch-crunch, a deliberate and unexcited dwindling. Presently
there was silence. Dreeme, relaxed and almost smiling at the fever of
fear into which he had been thrust by the nocturnal rambler, turned to
Martha Westcott. He expected to find her relieved, but instead of this
he could faintly decipher a concentrated expression of mingled fear and
anger on her face.

“Well,” he said, “our unexpected caller has departed.”

“You knew him?” she asked.

They were both walking toward the door, tacitly admitting that the
rendezvous was at an end.

“The worthy Burroughs?” said Dreeme lightly. “Of course. He was taking
his usual evening promenade.”

She said nothing until they reached the milky square of obscured
moonlight. Then she asked:

“Will you meet me here tomorrow night?”

“No,” said Dreeme.

She frowned at that.

“I have certain things I want to tell you,” she went on. “I need your
advice about a number of matters.”

“Why don’t you come to my office?” he inquired.

“You know very well why,” she replied.

He said nothing but stood restlessly outside the door, anxious to leave
her and unwilling to be too abrupt.

“Burroughs didn’t see us anyway,” he said inconsequentially. “It was
too dark in that corner.”

She opened her eyes wide at that and regarded him with a mocking
expression.

“It isn’t wise to meet in this clandestine way,” he insisted. “Somebody
might see us, and you know how people gossip. I don’t like gossip when
there isn’t any reason for it. It’s ... it’s too nerve-racking.”

He teetered on one foot and turned toward Marlborough. She was leaning
easily against the door. She said:

“I will tell you a great many things tomorrow night.”

Dreeme made an impatient gesture, and started to walk away.

“He did see us,” remarked Martha Westcott, not so much to the young
doctor, as to the night about them. “Of course he saw us.”

Dreeme did not turn about, but kept on his way down the road. The air
was cool and frolicksome, and it ruffled the hair on his forehead. It
was fresh and pleasant. It was not like the acrid smell of burned wood.
Two men had been incinerated in the mill. That was a long time ago, and
still the charred timbers stood there waiting for somebody to rebuild
them. He wondered how late it was. There was not a single light in
any of the houses. If he turned back now he would see Martha Westcott
leaning against the door of the mill, her heavy-lidded eyes and archaic
mouth turned toward him. He would not turn back though. The road
twisted a trifle, and he knew that the mill was hidden, that if he
looked back he would see nothing but the sprawling angle of a stone
wall. An invisible weight seemed to fall from him. He had not realized
he was so tired.




Chapter Five


I

The girl beat with her hands against the door, whimpering softly as the
steady concussions shook the white-washed planks. The morning sunlight
caught her by the shoulders in warm hands and seemed to shake her. She
did not pause to listen for any approaching footsteps, but continued to
hammer at the wood as though in a half-trance, and but semi-conscious
of what she was doing. White clouds ballooned upward in the bright blue
sky and watched her from a distance. They were snowy-plumaged hawks
observing the peregrinations of a lice-like humanity upon a rolling
ball of earth and sea. The girl was a far-away mote to their far-seeing
eyes, a speck of dust without form or meaning. She moaned to herself
and shook the door. Dreeme heard her thin voice so broken by suppressed
and breathless sobs as he hurried down stairs, turned the key in the
rusty grating lock, and flung the door open. She stumbled into the
hall, her tear-streaked face lifted like the face of a wounded animal,
and lurched against him with a sudden paralysis of knees, clinging
tightly to his arm. Dreeme pushed the door shut and half-carried her
along the hall to the little study.

“Why Deborah!” he cried. “What is it? Sit down. Shall I get you a glass
of water?”

She refused to sit down, but continued to cling to him still
whimpering. Her face was streaked with tears and dust, and her mouth
shook convulsively. The pupils of her eyes were dilated, and she did
not seem to see him.

“What is it?” he repeated. “What is it? You must tell me, you know.
What has happened?”

She gazed about the little study in a vague manner, and for a moment
appeared to strive for the mastery of her feelings. Her mouth opened
and coherent speech seemed about to issue. Then she broke down
completely and, relinquishing his arm, dropped to a chair beside the
table upon which she buried her face. Dreeme, hearing her unrestrained
sobs and noting the convulsive quiver of her pathetically small
shoulders, realized that this was better than the stifled whimpering
with which she had entered the room. She was giving full vent to her
outraged nerves now, letting them run away with her until, tired and
exhausted, they would once more be subject to her reason. The young
doctor sat down calmly and waited.

Outside the morning moved on leisurely sun-shot feet through the cool
lane. Sparkles of light caught at the flawed panes of the windows.
In the sky the clouds hovered like white hawks. Birds chirped loudly
in the ancient trees, and a creaking wagon drawn by a heavy-hoofed
farm-horse protested its way toward the general store. Dreeme listened
as the creaking axle-tree and softly-jingling harness grew fainter and
finally died out. He heard the far caw of a crow as it sped in feathery
darkness toward some field unguarded by an ungainly scare-crow. It
was all peaceful and unvexed, a crystal tide of morning, a time for
calmness and not tears. He waited patiently. He inspected the atrocious
wall-paper that closed him in from the sun, and cleared his throat
with dry humor. The wall-paper designer must have been a practical
joker. Finding nothing better to do he drew his watch out and looked
at it. The heavy, old-fashioned, silver-cased heirloom blandly
announced that it was quarter past seven. He forced it back into his
vest pocket, and stroked one freshly-shaven cheek meditatively. He
had not slept so well. He ... had been troubled by dreams. He thought
of ... no, he wouldn’t think of her now. Mrs. Slater would be along
with his breakfast soon. He raised his eyes to the ceiling and waited.
Fly-specks. Blackened rings of lamp smoke. It was cracked in the
corner. That was where the mice nibbled and made little crackling
noises during the night. Did they live on wood or plaster?

The girl lifted her head suddenly and pushed back her disheveled
hair. Her eyes were like wet violets, a soaked blue so deep as to be
astonishing. Dreeme smiled at her gently and said nothing. She looked
at him in a surprised manner.

“I feel better,” she announced in a very small voice.

“I’m glad you do,” he replied. “Shall I get you a glass of water now?”

“Please,” she nodded.

When he came back with it she had wiped her tear-stained face with a
small handkerchief, smoothed her hair, and brushed part of the dust
from her gray dress. She drank the water in slow sips, gazing at him
over the top of the tumbler. Dreeme leaned back in his chair and
observed her. Curiously enough, although he had seen her but once
before she was like an old acquaintance now. It was as though he were
sitting in the room with what, in his New England, would be dubbed
“family.” A tacit feeling of confidence established itself between
them. Her intensely blue eyes, her misty bronze hair, her small mouth
and nose, even her thin arms and slender wiry hands, were part and
parcel of an old knowledge. It was pleasant to be like this while the
mysterious white hawks in the sky hovered so far above them.

“I’m not like this generally,” she informed him as she put the tumbler
down. There was a wise and confidential intimation in her voice.

“I know you’re not,” he answered. “You’ve been terribly frightened.”

His statement was almost a question, and the pupils of her eyes dilated
again as she nodded assent.

“I’ll tell you all about it directly,” she said.

She was small ... small. That was his main impression. But intelligent.
Wise. He waited with a seeming patience praying fervently that Mrs.
Slater would not appear until he had found out the source of Deborah’s
trouble. He could guess part of it, but he did not want to let his mind
stray too far along the vague pathways of unsubstantiated surmise.
The girl closed her eyes and obviously strove to adjust herself in a
reasonable manner to the subject which was in her mind. It was patent
that she did not know how or where to begin, and that she was fearful
of not being able to communicate the essence of her story to Dreeme.
She wanted to speak reasonably now. To assure herself, perhaps, of her
own rationality. He would help. Like a doctor.

“Begin at the beginning,” suggested Dreeme. She opened her eyes. She
said:

“I don’t know how to tell you and make it seem like anything. It’s....
It’s more feeling than anything else.”

He nodded sagely, and, after a moment’s hesitation, she began.

“You see I have to do something for my living. Father was killed at
the court-house in Leeminster, and he was all that I had. We lived
there ... Leeminster, I mean ... and father was a constructor. He built
houses. There weren’t many to be built, of course. He was working on
the ell of the new court-house and the men mixed cement on the roof
of the front porch. One of the bags was pushed off in some way, and it
fell on father. He died in half an hour. That was a month ago. Then I
had to close up our house ... such a little one, sell things, and help
finish up father’s business. I had a very good lawyer, Mr. Stopes.
Perhaps you knew him?”

Dreeme shook his head.

“Lawyers,” he said, “are out of my line. They never get sick.”

“He was a very good lawyer,” she insisted. “After the estate was
settled there was just enough to pay his fee. Then Aunt Slater sent
for me. It was only yesterday that I came over. I walked all the way.
I thought I should stay here and help Aunt, but it seemed that Mr.
Burroughs had heard about me or seen me in Leeminster ... he preaches
there sometimes ... and he told Aunt that Mrs. Westcott needed somebody
to help around the house. I didn’t want to help because I am not a
servant, and I told Aunt so, but she said that she couldn’t afford to
keep me. I thought that was funny, because, after all, she _had_
sent for me. I’m telling you this because I want to show you that I
was feeling bad in my mind anyway, and perhaps exaggerated some of the
things that happened later.”

Dreeme nodded. Mrs. Slater was like that. She was a New England aunt.

“I didn’t have to come,” proceeded Deborah. “I might have stayed in
Leeminster and taught school. Father was very careful about putting
me through my studies. Well, I went over late yesterday afternoon to
the Westcott farm with Mr. Burroughs. We walked because he said he
thought I would like to see the country. I didn’t like the country, and
I didn’t like Mr. Burroughs. He is like the country, dull and ghostly
and green and sad. I think I first became afraid and nervous on that
walk, for Mr. Burroughs, after we started, never said a word to me. We
just plodded along, and he would look at me sideways with his funny
eyes. I tried to say something once or twice, but he only nodded. I
felt as though I was walking into a nightmare. The Westcott farm seemed
terribly dreary to me, and I was frightened as soon as that horrible
little boy appeared at the fence-gate.”

“Miles,” said Dreeme.

“Is his name Miles?” asked Deborah. “I didn’t know. He had a great
growling dog on a rope, and he let it walk after me up the path. It
snarled all the way. He started to say something, but Mr. Burroughs
just waved his hand and the boy went off through the bushes. We went
into the kitchen and Mrs. Westcott was there. Mr. Burroughs introduced
me, and I went right to work helping Mrs. Westcott. There were piles of
dishes to wash. After that Mrs. Westcott showed me where I was to sleep
and where I was to put my things.”

She paused for a moment and shut her eyes, seeming to revisualize
inwardly the appearance of Mrs. Westcott.

“She’s quite beautiful, I think,” Deborah proceeded. “But it is what I
would call ... something frozen-like, you know.”

Dreeme shifted slightly in his chair.

“If you could imagine cold fire, fire that was just like ice, I think
that would be Mrs. Westcott,” went on the girl. “She didn’t have much
to say to me. She moved around the kitchen like some ... like some
queen, like somebody who didn’t want to be there and didn’t mean to
be there very long. Presently she went away with Mr. Burroughs, and
I finished up the work in the kitchen and went into the living room.
There wasn’t anything to do there, and I kept on into another room that
was full of books. It was just like a library, shelves all around, and
such tattered books. There wasn’t one that was new. The only thing that
I could think of to do was to dust the books. So I found a bit of cloth
and started in on them. It would take a lifetime to dust those books. I
had removed an armful from one of the shelves and was about to dust the
shelf itself when I saw a lot of little dolls in a row against the back
of the shelf. They were terribly amusing, and I took two of them out to
look at them more closely. One was a tiny man and he had needles stuck
in his eyes. The other had a needle thrust into the knee. I pulled
it out. It was while I was holding the dolls in my hand that I felt
somebody standing in back of me. At first I was afraid to turn around.
I was sure that my knees would give way. I put the dolls back, and
stood there looking at the shelves. Then something began to turn me,
and I faced about, and there stood that awful man in the doorway, with
his head thrust forward, and his still eyes watching me with a sort of
smile way back in them.”

Deborah paused and thrust a small tongue over her dry underlip.

“I first began to be really frightened then,” she added. “You see, I
have nothing to go upon but sensations and intuitions.”

Dreeme sat motionless in his chair, his entire intelligence
concentrated upon her story. She said:

“It came over me like waves, and I began to feel like somebody in deep
churning waters. There was no reason for it, just something inside of
me telling me to be afraid. He stood in the doorway and looked at me,
and I stood there unable to move or say a word. I could see the ridges
on his head. ‘Who told you to come in here?’ he asked. ‘Go back to the
kitchen,’ he added. ‘When I want you to dust the books I’ll tell you
so.’ His voice was low and snarling. I don’t know how I got to the
door, but I did, and he must have passed me, for just as I was stepping
out of the room he shouted, ‘You damned little fool!’ He was standing
by the shelves with one of the dolls in his hand.”

Dreeme frowned. Something about wax dolls with pins thrust into them.
He had read it somewhere. He could not recall it now. He put the
subject away for the time being, and resumed his calm rôle of auditor.

“Nothing more happened till suppertime,” Deborah was saying. “I stayed
in the kitchen and helped with the cooking. Then we all sat down at
table. There was Mrs. Westcott, and the boy, and Wagner, the hired man,
and myself. Mrs. Westcott wanted to say something to Wagner. I could
see it on her mouth and in her eyes. And Wagner wanted to hear what she
had to say, for he sat like an attentive bull-dog waiting for a caress.
But before she could say anything _he_ came out of the library,
lurching along in an awkward fashion, for he is lame in one leg, and
sat down. None of us spoke then. The dishes were passed in silence.
Mrs. Westcott sat with her eyes lowered to her plate, although every
now and then she would glance under her long lashes at Wagner, who sat
on the edge of his chair with a puzzled expression on his face. He was
just like a bull-dog that is trying unsuccessfully to comprehend what
its master desires it to do. Mr. Westcott saw them every time, and he
would smile in the most malevolent manner. That supper was terrible. I
thought that it would never end or that I should suddenly scream and
run out of the room. Do you know that taut feeling when your nerves
seem strained to the breaking point? I was like that. The boy ... did
you say his name was Miles? ... ate like a greedy little animal. Wagner
was puzzled and surly. Mrs. Westcott was terribly excited, although on
the surface she was as still as snow. I could sense the fever in her.
Mr. Westcott was the only calm person, and his calmness was like the
breathlessness that is in the air before an electric storm breaks. You
know what I mean. When you can hardly breathe. And I was thinking how
terrible it was to be there, and how miserable and frightened I was.
How could I stand it? How could I stay there? The silence, it ... it
seemed to crawl around the room, to move like a great lazy snake, to
slide under the table and up the backs of the chairs, and across the
face of the clock. The air was heavy. Like before a storm, you know.
Like....”

She stopped abruptly, plainly at a loss for words to convey the strange
nuances of that meal. Dreeme sat uneasily in his chair, dimly conscious
that he was involved in this imbroglio of ominous silences. He began
to feel like a man sitting at the edge of the crater of a slumbering
volcano. Sooner or later it would erupt, and he would be destroyed by
unimaginable fiery lavas. He could picture to himself the silence of
that supper without the aid of Deborah. Around a table sat a group
of wax figures with living eyes. The eyes spoke, but the mouths were
speechless. These eyes whispered, laughed, threatened, fought invisible
duels. They were glittering assassins moving stealthily toward their
defenseless victims. Deborah was a victim. He was a victim. Anyone who
blundered into that death-like circle of wax figures was a victim.
Deborah’s voice cut across his brooding. She had given up the attempt
to picture the Westcott supper with any degree of vividness. She said:

“After supper, we rose from the table without a word. Wagner hurried
away. He went like a ghost. I heard the door close softly behind him.
Mr. Westcott heard it, too, for it seemed to be a signal for him to
go into his room of books. He said to Mrs. Westcott, ‘Leave me alone
now. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ She said, ‘Don’t make a fool of yourself.’
He smiled at that and said, ‘That’s your prerogative.’ Then he went
into the library and closed the door behind him. I helped wash dishes.
Pretty soon Mr. Burroughs came. He slid into the house humming to
himself. He loitered about the kitchen for a while and talked to Mrs.
Westcott about what sort of a year it was, and how he was going to
preach Leeminster way on Sunday. Mrs. Westcott just laughed in her
husky way. ‘Preach!’ she said. ‘You’re an insane humorist, George.’ He
smiled, too, and looked at me in that sly still way. ‘Watch out for
my little Paschal Lamb,’ he said, nodding at me. Then he went to the
door of the library and knocked, and pretty soon he went in, leaving
the door ajar. I could hear him talking with Mr. Westcott. I continued
to work about the kitchen, but the door that led into the sitting room
was open, and so, too, was the door to the library, ajar, I mean. I
could hear men’s voices, but it was hard to distinguish the words. I
didn’t notice when Mrs. Westcott went away, but when I looked for her
to ask her about something, she was gone. Once I heard Mr. Westcott’s
voice raised. He cried out, ‘I tell you she’ll do, George. At the place
called Dagon....’ Then I heard footsteps coming toward the door. ‘The
master ...’ began Mr. Burroughs, and the door was closed with a slam. I
couldn’t distinguish any more words. When I went into the sitting room
I could just hear Mr. Burroughs’ voice. It was monotonous, as though he
was preaching, and it sounded like some foreign language. Maybe Latin.”

She stopped and looked at the silent attentive figure of Dreeme.

“It doesn’t sound like anything does it?” she asked.

“Go on,” said Dreeme briefly. Queer word, Dagon.

“I’m getting to what really frightened me now,” she said, “All that
went before was a mere leading up, a series of nothings that put me
in a nervous state of mind. I wanted you to know, though. I went to
bed rather early because I was tired. It was a long time before I got
to sleep. You know how a strange bed feels, and when one is nervous.
But I did get to sleep finally, and I guess I slept pretty heavily. I
don’t know how long I slept, but I am sure that I was awakened by three
horrible screams. I started up....”

“You heard somebody screaming?” asked Dreeme. She shook her head. She
said:

“No, I didn’t hear anything. But I am sure that I was wakened by three
screams. I don’t know.... I.... I sensed the echo of them, I guess.
I started up wide awake and half-mad with fright. I knew instantly
without looking that the door to my room was open. There was a little
moonlight straggling in at the window and when I looked toward the door
I could see him standing there. I could see his face very plainly, and
the ridges on his skull. He....”

Dreeme uttered a stifled exclamation.

“You mean ...” he began.

“Yes, yes,” she said, the shadow of fear starting up in her eyes again.
“Mr. Westcott was standing in my doorway and looking at me. He was
leaning forward a little, his head lowered on his breast, and staring
at me from under his eyebrows. The moonlight rippled across his uneven
head and his flat nose. His eyes were large and dark and still, with
that awful stillness that seems to say so many things. He stood there
and stared, and everything seemed to die inside me. The blood paused in
my veins, and a queer sort of dizziness came over me. I was conscious
of nothing but his eyes, and of an enormous will in his eyes that
seemed to but half-reveal itself. I seemed to swoon, to float upward,
while his eyes grew into huge circles that swallowed me and the room.
Far off, as though from another world, I heard a low voice saying, ‘At
Dagon. At Dagon. For the master.’ He did not say that, for his lips
never moved, and even if he had spoken I could not have heard him, for
my ears were like dead things. It was through his eyes that everything
came to me. And it was looking into his eyes, being drowned in his
eyes, that I saw....”

For a moment she lost the faculty of speech and lifted a small white
frightened face to Dreeme. Her lips fumbled for words, and the young
doctor could see them moving dumbly.

“Wait,” he said, “Don’t tell me any more.”

In the back of his mind a faint light was beginning to dawn. It was far
away as yet, as far away as those snowy hawks that hovered over the
valley. He would have to mount as high as those clouds if he was to see
everything spread out like a simple map before him.

“I must,” she said with an effort. “I must try to let you know. It was
all in his eyes. An unutterable evil. A concentration of everything
that is horrible and bestial in this world, or, for all I know, out
of it. His eyes were telling me of all the sins and perversions and
horrors that have existed since before the beginning of time, of
reptile urges and.... I can’t explain it, you see. I do not know how to
handle the words. But I saw ... the horror of time ... and....”

She could not go on. But she did not sob again. She sat with
trance-like eyes and said nothing.

Dreeme was staring at her intently, and, from a half-shocked mind,
striving to piece together her stumbling narrative of mingled fears
and menaces. Curiously enough he did not doubt the authenticity of her
mental fever. This was no mere hysteria, no nightmare. It was as though
the hidden facet of an admitted evil had been slowly turned toward
him. The far-away light continued to shine in the deepest recesses
of his mind. He felt all that she felt as he heard her story, and
understood vividly enough the aspect and profoundity of that terror
which moved her, and which she conveyed so haltingly. She had sensed
something that could not be adequately expressed in words, just as he
had sensed something in the community that was beyond the power of
speech.

Deborah began to speak again. She said:

“He turned and went out noiselessly, and the door made no sound as it
closed behind him. I could hear the clock ticking somewhere. It was the
first time I had heard one in that house, and somehow it made the night
and the world real again. I could not sleep again. It was too much to
expect. I lay there staring at the door for hours, and sure that there
was somebody on the other side of it, somebody standing there with his
head thrust forward and still eyes that grew as large as moons. It
began to grow light, that skimmed-milk-like color that the early cloudy
morning has, and I kept saying to myself, ‘I must go away from here. I
mustn’t be found here in the morning.’ It was only by a terrific effort
of will that I forced myself to get up and dress. I can’t tell you how
blinded with panic I was when I pushed the door open. There was no one
there. There wasn’t a sound in the house as I crept down stairs and out
of the kitchen door. I reached the road and looked back at the house.
It squatted there like a dead thing with blind eyes. It couldn’t see
me. I began to run then. I ran all the way here. I thought I could hear
things running after me, but when I looked back the road was empty. I
even thought I heard someone laughing in the air. I came to you first
because....”

The door swung open and the small plump figure of Mrs. Slater appeared
behind a breakfast tray. Her eyes opened with amazement when she
saw the drooping figure of Deborah, but she said nothing until she
methodically placed the tray on the table and removed the napkin from
the food. Then she turned to the girl, a thin disapproval curling down
her mouth.

“Land’s sakes,” she said in a querulous tone. “You’re in town early.”

Deborah gazed from her aunt to Dreeme, a mingled defiance and
supplication in her blue eyes.

“I’ve run away,” she said. “I’m not going back. I won’t stay there.”

Mrs. Slater arranged the breakfast plates in a deliberate fashion. Her
eyes fluttered as she moved about the table. She said:

“You can’t run away. Girls don’t run away in Marlborough.”

There was no interest in her voice, nothing but a faintly-aggrieved
protest.

“She has run away,” remarked Dreeme shortly. “Can’t you see her in
front of you?”

Mrs. Slater ignored him. In a voice entirely lacking in curiosity she
inquired:

“What was the matter, Deborah?”

“I ... I was frightened,” replied the girl. “I don’t like that awful
place and those awful people.”

She stopped abruptly at that. Dreeme understood that she realized the
impossibility of explaining anything to Mrs. Slater. He undertook to
fill the gap.

“Deborah is a highly nervous girl,” he said. “It is necessary that she
have surroundings that are favorable. A lonely farm and a brutal farmer
who peers into one’s bedroom at night, and who is up to the devil knows
what, are not the surroundings for her. Speaking as a doctor....”

“Your coffee’s cooling,” said Mrs. Slater. She shifted the sugar-bowl
uneasily. Dreeme poured a cup of coffee and handed it to Deborah.

“There’s plenty of breakfast in the house of your relations,” announced
Mrs. Slater, the wan ghost of indignation in her voice.

“But not plenty of room,” added Dreeme. He sat down angrily to his
breakfast, and proceeded to eat. Mrs. Slater stood looking at her niece.

“You know I would do for you,” she said, “but Walden has about all he
can handle with the children. The land’s mighty poor.”

She ignored Dreeme completely. The young doctor visualized a picture
of a stoop-shouldered man struggling all day with thin soil that noisy
little mouths might be fed. He cultivated a stone and strove to make
bread of it. Well, it was no circus. Still....

“You can’t place Deborah where she is frightened and unhappy,” he said.

“Mrs. Westcott is the only neighbor around here who wants somebody,”
remarked Mrs. Slater. There was a hopeless and dispirited note in her
voice.

Neither Dreeme nor Deborah replied. Mrs. Slater stood by the table
stolidly, her eyes fluttering.

“There’s nothing to be frightened of at the Westcott farm,” she added.
“Nothing at all.”

Dreeme passed a slice of toast to Deborah. Curious. All his life. He
knew she sat that way. Mrs. Slater moved closer to the table.

“I don’t see why you should be unhappy there,” she said. “I don’t see,
at all.”

“Well, we’ll talk it over later,” interposed Dreeme. “Let Deborah
recover her equanimity.”

“It’s hard on me,” said Mrs. Slater. She stooped to lift an empty
plate, and tiny lines rippled across her plump face. It was sagging a
bit now. The earth seemed pulling it downward. She was aggrieved at
life in general and Deborah in particular. Dreeme she plainly regarded
as an interloper, an officious stranger, who thrust himself into
affairs that did not concern him. For an instant he was angry. It was
hard on her! He opened his mouth to expostulate, even to deliver a long
speech on her unkindly attitude, when a measured thumping sounded in
the hall leading to the study. It was a rhythmical alternating sound,
now loud and then soft, the sound of a man, perhaps, with a wooden leg.
A man with a wooden leg or.... Before the door swung open Dreeme knew
who it was. With calm eyes, therefore, he raised his face to Jeffrey
Westcott who stood in the doorway. He said:

“Good morning. You are into town early.”

Westcott nodded slightly. His eyes were fastened on Deborah.

“You’re abroad early also,” he remarked to her. His voice was low and
casual. The girl did not answer him but turned appealingly to Dreeme.
Westcott smiled vaguely, the mere flash of an ironic humor that was
undisturbed and sure of itself.

“How are you, Mrs. Slater?” he asked.

Mrs. Slater fluttered her eyes and coughed an intimation that she was
not so well. Dreeme perceived that she did not like Westcott, but was
making an effort to conceal her instinctive antagonism. There was
fear in this effort. The farmer’s eyes roved about the room, casually
inspected the books in the little case, and then reverted to Deborah.

“I’ve the horse here,” he said to her. “I’ll take you back now.”

“She’s not going back with you, Mr. Westcott,” interposed Dreeme dryly.
“She’s not going back at all.”

Mrs. Slater opened her mouth with a cluck.

“Not at all,” repeated Dreeme, giving him a defiant look.

Westcott continued to regard the girl.

“Weren’t you coming back with me, Deborah?” he asked in a low silky
voice.

A strange thing happened. Deborah rose to her feet slowly and took a
single step toward the farmer. His dark eyes were fastened piercingly
upon her now. Dreeme jumped from his chair and turned the girl around.
Instantly she burst into tears.

“Don’t let me go,” she pleaded.

“I know now,” said Dreeme. He faced Westcott with a smile. He added:

“Try that on me. See if it will work on a man.”

Westcott lowered his cloven head.

“Really, doctor,” he said in a mild voice, “I don’t understand you.”

He, too, was smiling slightly.

“You neglected to send your bill,” he went on.

Fumbling in his pocket he drew forth a brand-new five dollar bill, and,
limping forward, laid it on the table.

“There,” he said. “We are quits. Let us hope that we may remain quits.”

He opened his eyes and gazed full into Dreeme’s face. There was
absolutely no expression in his look. It was like the meaningless stare
of a blind man. Paying no more attention to Deborah he turned to Mrs.
Slater.

“Is Walden in the fields?” he asked.

She nodded, and he swung on his heel.

“Good morning, doctor. Good morning, Mrs. Slater,” he said. He ignored
Deborah. An instant later they heard his lame thumping through the
hall, and then the closing of the front door. Dreeme absently picked up
the bill. On it was scrawled:

“Even a fool may learn wisdom.”


II

The Reverend George Burroughs stretched his long yellow hand out and
grasped a slice of bread. He made it a point to take the fattest
cut. Dreeme, watching from beneath lowered lids, noted that the
preacher’s hand was shaped like a claw. The fingers curled back like
the crazy-shaped bits of driftwood he had seen washed up on the tip
of Cape Cod years ago, when, as a boy, he had made a vacation trip
to those rolling dunes of white sand. Indeed, the Reverend George
Burroughs himself was very like something that had been washed up on
the beach. Some sort of skinny sea-monster, an old merman who was half
sea-horse. It was time to keep an eye on the preacher. Dreeme looked up
at Burroughs and discovered that the man of God apparently was thinking
the same thought, for his expressionless eyes were fastened upon the
young doctor over the bread that he was cramming into his capacious
mouth. Burroughs masticated loudly and continued to stare at Dreeme.
The pupils of his eyes were like two black shoe buttons. He had never
done that before. He had always averted his eyes or dropped them to the
heaped plate above which he constantly hovered so eagerly. Dreeme was
less startled than amused. If he had entered into the old hypocrite’s
line of vision at last so much the worse for the old hypocrite. He
would give him something to look at. Something to think about. The old
night-wanderer! The old fool who poked his horse-like face into burned
mills to see what he might see! The withered employment agency for the
Westcott farm! Dreeme remarked calmly:

“You enjoy evening strolls, preacher.”

Burroughs, his mouth clogged with bread, nodded slowly.

Dreeme awaited an answer, and as none was forthcoming apparently, he
transferred his attention to the rest of the table. He had sat so many
times at this board and had seen nothing and understood everything.
Now he saw everything and understood nothing. This noon, for instance,
it was simple enough to perceive that a general unrest pervaded the
secretive diners. It was even communicated to the children, who gazed
frightenedly from face to face, seeking for the reassurance of an
unslipped mask, for a visage that did not suggest the complexities
of perturbation. Mrs. Slater, her cheeks heightened in color--tiny
scarlet flags mutely calling for aid--and her eyes fluttering, was
plainly disaffected and at odds with circumstances. Walden Slater was
so upset that he ate meagerly. His long camel-like upper lip closed
half-heartedly over the mouthfuls that he balanced precariously on the
flat blade of his knife. The preacher was puzzled, a bit startled,
perhaps, to find Dreeme thrust into his scheme of things for he must
have heard all about the young doctor’s championship of Deborah.
Deborah! She, at least, was real. Though Dreeme did not know these
other people he knew _her_. She smiled briefly across the table
at him, and it was as though she had flung him a flower. A small blue
flower with a starry heart tossed across a table of strangers. A flower
as blue as her eyes were blue, as starry as the pupils of her eyes. He
smiled back at her broadly. The smile was intercepted by everybody at
the table. He enjoyed their reactions to it. Mrs. Slater nipped at it
as a parrot nips at a cracker. The children thrust little faces of ice
between it and Deborah. Walden Slater retreated from it in a bewildered
manner, and then, to Dreeme’s pleasant surprise, wrung the doleful
ghost of an accompanying smile from his long lip and tossed it gingerly
to Deborah. The Reverend George Burroughs observed it impassively and
blew a little cloud of darkness over it. The busy knives and forks
played a greedy melody.

“In the cool of the evening it is good to walk,” announced the
preacher. He spoke as though he were delivering the text for a sermon.

“And much may be seen by night that is invisible by day,” returned
Dreeme facetiously. He felt in a high good humor, light-minded, puffed
up with a malicious playfulness. He was quite fearless of the community
and its inhabitants, “I will not be here long,” he thought to himself.
He, after all, was but a sojourner. He did not belong in Marlborough
and he was glad of it.

“The true heart of man is often bared to the darkness,” agreed
Burroughs in a sententious voice. For an instant Dreeme thought
the preacher was laughing at him, and he gazed at the yellow face
before him suspiciously. There was no hint of a smile upon that long
countenance. It was a sober blank, quite clear of any subtle writing.
Indeed, it was a little too guileless. “Perhaps,” Dreeme thought,
“I am not as self-sufficient as I think I am.” His eyes returned to
Deborah. She was looking at him brightly. Well, he would have to be
self-sufficient for her sake. Still, these people were accepting his
interpositions too quiescently. He knew that they could not be as
weak-willed as that. Humphrey Lathrop had intimated too much. He,
himself, had observed too much. Did not Burroughs know that he had
met Martha Westcott in the burned mill? Had not Burroughs told all
this to Westcott himself? Or had the darkness concealed them from the
inquisitive eyes of the preacher? Martha Westcott had said “no” to that
and he had believed her. And why had Westcott received his interference
in the matter of Deborah’s return to the farm so blandly? What was he
planning behind his smiling face and hypnotic eyes? That was it, of
course. Westcott was fooling with hypnotism. He had hypnotized Deborah
that night and even when he had come for her this very morning he had,
for an instant, subjected her will to his. Dreeme scraped his plate
clean with outward unconcern but inwardly he was perplexed. “As a
matter of fact,” he thought to himself, “I am all at sea.” He was not
self-sufficient at all. He was aware of a great many questions, but he
could offer but a meager handful of answers. These people were leagued
against him, and they intended to do what they pleased with him when
the psychological moment came. And that would be when he interfered
too strenuously in their designs, when through fool-luck he clogged
their purposes. That would be when? The scraping of knives and creaking
of chairs aided and abetted his inquiring mind. He pushed his plate
back and scowled. Then his features lightened. Of course! A thrill of
triumph ran up his spine, and the far-away light in the depths of his
mind glowed brighter. It would be when he found the place called Dagon.
It would be when he stood on that spot and faced these farmers in the
very heart of their mystery. Even as the unfamiliar name flashed across
his consciousness the preacher’s yellow hand closed upon his wrist. He
lifted startled eyes to the calm equine face.

“I asked,” said the Reverend George Burroughs in his solemn voice, “if
you enjoyed strolling in the evening.”

Still at it, eh?

“By myself, yes,” replied Dreeme. The yellow hand disappeared beneath
the table.

“It is good to be by one’s self,” remarked the preacher. “He who goes
by himself need fear no man.”

The stilted voice of Burroughs rose like the neigh of a horse.

“That is not exactly the saying, is it?” inquired Dreeme politely.

The preacher wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said nothing.

They had finished eating now. The defeated platter lay in greasy
subjection. The knives and forks reposed upon the stained field of
battle like discarded weapons. The buzzing flies hummed above the
debris monotonously. With a clattering of steel-tipped shoes the
children squirmed from their chairs and fled through the door. Mrs.
Slater and Deborah rose and staggered toward the kitchen under loads
of plates and cups and gravy-boats. They were Trojan women carrying
the shields of their warriors. The three men still sat in their
places as though there was something to be said between them. Walden
Slater opened and shut his mouth. He looked helplessly from Burroughs
to Dreeme. His sweaty shoulders seemed to climb up about his tanned
leathery face. A remnant of bread swung like a miniature acrobat from
his chin.

“It’ll be a poor crop,” he mumbled.

“Poor crop,” echoed Burroughs.

“Why will it be a poor crop?” asked Dreeme.

Walden Slater opened his mouth and eyes very wide at that. After a
moment he answered weakly:

“Because it will be a poor crop.”

Several minutes of silence ensued.

“The Lord will provide,” remarked Burroughs finally.

Walden Slater did not brighten perceptibly at these glad tidings. He
had put his trust in the Lord before, and he knew exactly how much
it was rewarded when there was too much sun and not enough rain. He
corrugated his brow in the unusual travail of thought.

“I guess ...” he commenced.

“If rain ...” started Burroughs.

“How much ...” questioned Dreeme.

All three men had started at once, and at the surprising medley of
voices they ceased abruptly. Each one waited for the other to speak. No
one dared to begin. Mrs. Slater and Deborah had removed all the dishes.
The red and white table-cloth was folded up and put away. The hot
afternoon sun splashed through the windows and flooded the dining room
floor. Burroughs cautiously withdrew his chair from the golden pool.
Walden Slater spoke with unusual rapidity for him.

“About Deb,” he said, “I guess if she wants to stay, she can. I told
Jeff Westcott that. I said....”

He stopped as abruptly as he commenced.

Dreeme wanted to jump up and fling his arms about the weary farmer.
This was what had been on Walden Slater’s mind. This was what he had
desired to communicate to Dreeme. Having delivered himself of his
pronunciamento he rose painfully to his feet and turned toward the
door. The Reverend George Burroughs picked his teeth meditatively with
a wooden toothpick he had drawn from his black vest pocket. Then he
blew his nose with a rare fish-horn effect.

Dreeme fumbled for his pipe contentedly. Well, Walden Slater was a
friend. He was an ally. He was stretching a grotesque gnarled hand
across the imbroglio of nights and days to Dreeme. The young doctor
watched the farmer’s bowed shoulders disappear through the door. He was
going back to his meager sun-parched acres where he would labor all
the harder that he might feed one more mouth. Dreeme lighted his pipe,
pushed his chair back, and walked slowly across the room. Before he
reached the warm flood of sunlight he was halted.

“Doctor Dreeme.”

The Reverend George Burroughs stood beside the table with a half-raised
yellow claw. His stringy black hair stood out above his frayed coat
collar.

“If you enjoy the pleasing scent of the evening air,” he declared in
his neighing voice, “perhaps we may stroll together some time. I am a
silent companion, I fear, but equally a lover of nature. If you desire
I shall be pleased to give you some information about the flora and
fauna of this neighborhood.”

“Thank you,” responded Dreeme. “I generally stroll alone when I
do stroll, which is not often. Sometime, however....” He waved an
inconclusive hand.

Outside he wondered. “Now, what the devil does he mean?” He turned at
the gateway to meet a corpulent red-faced man who came running heavily
down the road. The fellow was waving his arms in excitement. “Doctor,”
he called as he came nearer, “Doctor.” Dreeme waited for the excited
individual. When he came abreast of the doctor he stopped and puffed
furiously while he mopped his ruddy face with a ruddier handkerchief.
“Cardiac trouble,” thought Dreeme. Aloud he said:

“You shouldn’t run in the sun.”

The individual flourished his active hand.

“They’ve found a body by the Saccarac River, almost under the bridge,”
he bellowed. “I’m Barnson. I don’t know nothing about it. My farm’s
just above the bridge. My son, Simon, found the body. You remember, you
treated him for blood-poisoning in the foot last Fall.”

Dreeme was uncertain as to whether he had treated the body or Simon for
blood-poisoning in the foot, but he turned with Barnson and started to
walk hurriedly with him up the Leeminster Road.

“Whose body?” he asked.

“Didn’t wait ... to find out,” puffed Barnson. “My boy, Simon, found
it. You remember ... the boy you treated.”

He sat down heavily by the roadside.

“Dang it, I’m winded,” he declared. “You run ahead.”

“The body won’t run away,” said Dreeme.

Nevertheless he mounted the incline at a trot, his exertions and the
sun covering his face with a freely running river of perspiration.
The dry red sand puffed about his feet and sifted into his shoes. As
he turned the arc of the road by the burned mill he saw a knot of men
standing by the river below the bridge. They were leaning forward,
their shoulders almost touching. He scrambled down the bank, the
wiry weeds catching at his clothes and thrusting up his coat-sleeves
as he half-slid and half-stumbled toward the low baked bank of the
river. The men drew apart at the sound of his scrambling feet, and a
freckled-faced youth with a bobbing Adam’s apple, whom he recognized as
Simon Barnson, turned to him as he approached the group.

“It’s Wagner, Westcott’s man,” he called in a shrill voice.

Dreeme waved the men aside and approached the limp bundle of clothes
that huddled before him. Wagner lay on his side, his heavy-booted
feet sunk in the muddy ooze of the Saccarac River. One arm was
twisted across his face. The two or three farmers who stood in a
knot conversing in low tones, observed Dreeme curiously as he went
methodically about his task of investigating the condition of the
corpse. It was only by a violent effort that the young doctor moved
Wagner’s bulky upflung arm sufficiently to study the dead man’s face.
He started back with an exclamation of horror at the sight. Wagner’s
eyes had been torn out and a wooden peg had been driven into each
socket. Streamers of blood had flowed from these wounds and coagulated
along the tanned cheeks and in the red and bushy beard. The purple
lips were drawn back over the yellow teeth in a last ghastly smile of
anguish. In the back of the hired man’s head, a trifle above the lined
red neck, was an open wound, a gaping orifice of blood and splintered
bone, that might have been made with some fairly sharp instrument, an
axe or a heavy chisel.

“He’s dead all right,” said Dreeme, rising to his feet. “How long since
he was found?”

The farmers stood in stolid silence until Simon Barnson constituted
himself spokesman.

“I found him ’bout half an hour ago,” he said. “Then I run home and
told Pa. Then I run to Bidwell’s.” He indicated a tall farmer standing
near. Bidwell backed hastily away.

“Don’t you be talking too much, Simon,” called a voice from the top of
the bank. “You’ll be talking yourself into jail first thing you know.”

Dreeme glanced up and saw the elder Barnson sitting on the ground and
mopping his fiery face. His lips curled, and he turned back to the
silent farmers. He said:

“It’s murder, you know. I should say the man’s been dead about three
hours. We’ll have to find out who’s been across this bridge during the
last three hours.”

The farmers shuffled together.

“I reckon there’s authorities’ll find that out,” said one of them
coldly. The others nodded in agreement.

Dreeme felt helpless and out of place. He addressed himself to Simon
Barnson.

“Has the coroner been sent for?”

Bidwell, the tall farmer, spoke up at that. He said:

“Yessir. I sent my man with the mare out to Leeminster right away as
soon’s Simon told me. He’ll pick up Westcott on the way back.”

“Oh, will he?” said Dreeme. He stood beside the body gazing down at it.
Wagner stared up at him with a fixed grin upon his ensanguined face.
He lay like an old sack half-filled with boneless flesh. He was worm’s
meat now. All his toiling in the hot sun and the fierce rains had come
to this. His heavy feet had crunched through the last field. His hands,
so calloused and split with labor, would guide farm implements no more.
Dreeme looked down at the clenched hand that he had forced from the
disfigured face and he saw clutched in the black, broken-nailed, stumpy
fingers a bit of paper. It was curious that he had missed it before.
He knelt down and tried to force the stiff fingers open. The farmers
watched him from a little distance curiously, their necks craned,
their eyes narrowed to slits in the sunlight. It took all his strength
to open these dead fingers but with one last desperate effort he heard
them break with a crackling sound and the slip of paper fluttered to
the oozy bank. He snatched it up before it drifted into the river.
Standing up he held the paper before him and looked at it. There was
nothing upon it except the tiny drawing of a goat’s head. Dreeme stared
at it in perplexity.

“I reckon you’d better save that for the coroner, Mister Doctor,”
remarked Bidwell.

“I intend to,” replied Dreeme shortly.

None of them trusted him. He was a stranger and they wanted their own
kind around, men who talked and thought as they did, who understood
without words the springs of hidden actions. Well, to hell with them!
Let them all go to hell! He heard the creak of the coroner’s buggy
and the clop-clop of the horse on the bridge-boards above him and
lifting his eyes he saw the thin-mouthed Leeminster official. One of
their own kind at last! Beside him was Jeffrey Westcott, hatless, his
cloven skull gleaming blue in the sunlight. The farmer turned his
head downward and stared coolly at the body of his hired man. Then he
transferred his attention to Dreeme. There was no expression in his
face.

“Down here, coroner, down here,” called Simon Barnson.

“Hold your horses, son!” replied that official. “I’ll be right there.”

He lumbered heavily from his buggy and slid down the bank in a sitting
posture, adjusting his steel-rimmed spectacles as he came.




Chapter Six


I

Dreeme sat gloomily in front of Humphrey Lathrop and waited for the old
doctor to deliver any advice that he might have to give.

“There you are,” he had concluded, an exasperated perplexity lining
his face. “I’m out! It’s a closed community so far as I am concerned.
A murder is committed, a murder as obvious as the nose on your face,
and I can do nothing about it. I’ve tried. I’ve run about town in the
boiling sun all afternoon, I’ve even been to Leeminster. What’s the
result? Nothing!”

Humphrey Lathrop pursed his great lips and looked wise. “He’s the
frog,” thought Dreeme. He was thinking of the old story of the frog
who puffed herself up until she burst. The little frog had seen a cow.
He had described it to his mother. It was big, enormous. “Was it as
large as this?” she had inquired, puffing herself up to formidable
proportions. “Larger,” the little frog had said. The big frog scowled
(imagine a frog scowling!) and had puffed herself still bigger. Her
abdomen had distended to an horrendous bulge. “As large as this?” she
had asked proudly. “Larger,” responded the little frog. The mother was
beside herself. She had puffed valiantly again and her green skin had
stretched and swelled wonderfully. She was a rotund circle of emerald.
“As large as this?” she had shrieked. “Oh, larger,” the little frog
answered gloomily. He had probably become a bit bored by this time and
had wanted to go off and sit on a lily pad and snap at flies. With a
last desperate effort the great frog indrew a huge breath. There was
a pop and then no frog. The little frog had looked up in the sky and
then down at the ground but he had failed to discover his mother. She
had burst into fragments, disappeared entirely. Humphrey Lathrop puffed
himself up in this way. Some day he would burst and disappear. And then
Dreeme felt quite ashamed of his malicious analogy. Humphrey Lathrop
was a kind helpful old man. His importance was only the privilege of
age. He was not consciously puffing himself to impossible proportions.
He was merely trying to ease Dreeme’s mind, to act the wise counsellor.
The young doctor observed him and nearly smiled. Then his levity
abruptly died away as his reason thrust him back among his grievances.

“There you are,” he had said. “What’s the result? Nothing!”

“It’s always the result,” said Humphrey Lathrop gloomily.

Dreeme reiterated himself.

“After I saw the body I questioned the coroner. I wanted to study the
wooden pegs. I gave him the scrap of paper with the goat’s head on it.
I wanted to talk about time, about possible murderous weapons, about
a dozen and one things. He put me off with silly generalities. I went
to Bidwell, who seemed to have the confidence of those infernally
silent farmers, and pleaded for an investigation without loss of
time. He evaded me. I talked to the damned selectmen or whatever they
are, Winship and Collender. There was nothing doing. Nothing but
antagonism in sleepy little suspicious eyes. The constable was busy
getting in some parched hay. He knew nothing about it and didn’t want
to know anything about it. He was a hopeless fool. Finally I went to
Leeminster. The officials there referred me back to Marlborough. I tell
you, Humphrey, it is impossible to start a serious investigation of
this murder. By God, I’ll write to Boston. I’ll telegraph Washington.”

He paused breathless. Lathrop broke into a low chuckle.

“You can’t do anything,” he said.

They sat in silence after that and Dreeme smoked moodily. The twilight
drooped its dark wing over the valley. The white hawks that had hovered
in the sky were gone now. Shadows crept up the tree-lined street and
squirmed into the corners of the houses. There was a shadow over the
Saccarac River. A shadow over the trampled bank where Wagner’s body
had crushed the reeds. It would be night soon. The sable mantle would
drop and the lights would be extinguished.

“It’s impossible,” said Lathrop. The great chair creaked as he shifted
his huge body. “Go away, Daniel. Don’t worry yourself. Marlborough will
look out for itself as it has always looked out for itself. You can do
nothing about it.”

The air seemed to sigh about them.

“An investigation is not too much to expect,” said Dreeme doggedly.

Lathrop shook his mountainous shoulders. His three chins quivered with
the gesture.

“Don’t expect anything here,” he said after a moment. The shadow of
night was in his eyes.


II

Dreeme walked down the road to his house. The night was extraordinarily
clear, the heavens being covered with a huge wheel of glittering stars.
Lifting his head the young doctor could see the Great Dipper, the
Little Bear, the steadfast North Star. The Milky Way was a shoal of
misty light pricked to diamond points by infinities of sparkling gems.
Between the hosts of stars and the road were the crowded tops of the
ancient trees interposing their thick foliage. The huge branches idly
shaking their multitudes of leaves made moving patterns upon the road,
crazy designs and impossible arabesques. Dreeme stepped through these
checkered patterns unseeingly. Two shadows walked on either side of
him. One was a shadow of ruddy gloom, the secret lustre of a beryl;
the other, a shadow of dim light, the shy reflection of crystal. He
walked between them and the moon moved like a lantern in the hand of
some sky-traveler above him. The shadows crept closer to him and he
instinctively spread his arms to keep them from him. There was no sound
in the quiet evening and yet they were speaking to him. The ruddy
shadow said:

“I do not say ‘no’ to anything.”

Dreeme walked faster. The shadow of dim light said:

“I had a very good lawyer, Mr. Stopes.”

“I do not hear you,” said Dreeme. His pace increased until he was
trudging along at a furious rate.


III

In his study Dreeme turned the pages of the book impatiently. Finally
he closed it and placed it upon the table. He would think. He wondered
if he ever stopped thinking, if, indeed, his cerebral efforts were ever
more than an ineffectual attempt. The clock struck nine and he noted it
automatically. Another day had fled by. A day of excitement and terror
and perplexity. He sat desolately and watched the yellow flame of the
lamp as it sputtered despondently. The chimney was soot-stained. Mrs.
Slater should clean it. There was small reason to think when he could
find no answers to his thoughts. Perhaps Humphrey Lathrop was right,
after all. If he had troubled his mind about nothing his mind would not
be troubling him so fiercely as it undoubtedly was now. Perhaps the
time had come for him to pack his books, his trunk, and his bags, and
take his way eastward out of the valley, leaving the dour natives to
live their lives in their own way and to continue to clutch the mystery
that permeated the community to their secretive bosoms. Why should
he stay here where he was a barely-tolerated stranger and prescribe
cures for unthankful patients who viewed even his ministrations with
suspicion? It was no career for a young man. The rewards could be
counted neither in money nor in friendships. He was a fool, an infernal
fool.

And thinking these thoughts he reached a hand to pick up his book but
paused, the hand poised in mid-air. She had asked him to come to the
burned mill again that night. During the troublous surprises of the day
he had forgotten all about it. It was inconceivable to imagine that
she would appear after the unusual happenings of the day, happenings
that had touched her so closely. Was she not sitting in her room,
understanding, perhaps, why Wagner had been killed? Dreeme shuddered
at the approach of the thought which he had kept so resolutely out of
his mind. To go to the burned mill now would be a very fool’s errand.
He would find nothing there but blackened bricks and charred beams and
the disturbed dust where he had sat in the broken embrasure with her
and watched her obvious efforts to entangle him. He had even told her
that he would not come, told her so brusquely and with no pity for her
demands. What had she said to him? “I will tell you a great many things
tomorrow night.” What had she meant by that? What was she driving at,
anyway? His hand dropped to his lap and he sat gazing vacantly at the
yellow lamp-flame.

The first time he had seen her, she had fascinated him. He supposed
that was the word for it. Anyway, he had felt her presence, had sensed
the magnetic appeal of her power, the outrageous suggestion of her
will. Nature had endowed her with certain unusual attributes and
chief among them was this curious power of disturbing the rational
equilibrium of the men about her. She was sly and skillful in her
amoral way, determined to have what she wanted regardless of the
consequences. There might be some things to be said on her side,
particularly by the special pleader who, dominated by her undoubted
beauty, perished in the spell of her personality. But Dreeme knew
that she could not dominate him in this way although at the first she
had disturbed him greatly. Even now he knew that he would be visibly
excited in her presence. The man in him would tremble before the
woman in her. She could not touch his brain, though, for that was an
insuperable bulwark between them. It was his stout shield of defence
and beat upon it as she might with the sharp sword of her loveliness
she could not hack her way through. She was like the beautiful and
heartless wife of the Afrit in the Arabian Nights, the one who
possessed the vast number of rings, each one a souvenir of a time when
she had betrayed her sleeping lord. Well, _he_ would not be a
victim. No ring of his should join that glittering and invisible chain
that he suspected Martha Westcott wore about her white throat. He was
safeguarded from her by a welling desire that rose in his heart, by
a desire that he knew would keep him in Marlborough until the time
came when he might go away not alone. A shadow of dim light, the shy
reflection of crystal, stood near him now and his eyes brightened as
his thoughts shifted.

He had helped _her_ anyway. He had stood between her and the
callousness of her reticent relations, between her and the despairing
selfishness of her helpless aunt. She had wanted to bury her on a
lonely farm, to engulf her in the very mystery that tormented all his
faculties. He wondered if she was sleeping now in the house next door,
lying with one thin pathetic white arm stretched across the bright
patches of the crazyquilt and dreaming, perhaps, of him. Dreeme smiled
at the yellow lamp-flame. He was growing sentimental. Her confident
helplessness, her blue-eyed surrender to circumstances, her ultimate
faith in the goodness of humanity, her unquestioning dependence on
him, all these things touched him acutely. He felt his eyes grow moist
at the thought of her. She, at least, was real. He had said that to
himself before and he would say it again and again for it gave him a
strange strength. She counted and made the whole thing worth while. He
could depend on her as she depended on him. He would constitute himself
her champion, the fighter who would stand between her and ... Dagon.
The name sprang spontaneously into his mind. “Dagon,” he said aloud,
listening to the sound of the word in the little study. “Dagon.” It
meant something. It was a place.

His mind turned back. “I will tell you a great many things tomorrow
night.” Did she mean anything, after all, by that statement? Or
was it merely a snare, a bait to inveigle him back to a rendezvous
that he found in itself distasteful? Would she, for instance, tell
him about Dagon, describe it to him, indicate where it was, explain
what it meant? If pushed to a last extremity of desire she might. He
flushed at the thought of so befooling her. Still.... He was fighting
with whatever weapons he could grasp. If only.... The clock noisily
announced nine-thirty. Of course, she would not be there. She would
never dare to come after what had happened the night before. Go ...
stay ... go ... stay. The clock was ticking it now. Still undecided he
rose up and reached for his hat. It would do no harm to take a walk
anyway, to stroll in the cool of the evening as the Reverend George
Burroughs would say. Dagon ... Dagon. He closed the door softly behind
him and stood in the moonlight.


IV

The burned mill stood in the bright moonlight, its charred door yawning
on the road. It looked like the sun-dried skull of a buffalo resting
forlornly on the dry sand of a parched plain. Yet about it were the
trees shot through with a milky light and beyond it was the silver
blade of the Saccarac River. Dreeme walked slowly through the door
wondering if she would be waiting there for him. Inside he paused with
a brief start of surprise and anger as his eyes located the figure in
the broken embrasure. The moonlight flowed in crystal over a cloven
head bowed forward in a listening attitude. This shaven cranium seemed
phosphorescent in the rich glow.

“Good evening, doctor,” said Jeffrey Westcott. There was the hint of
a grim levity in his voice. He stood up, his powerful arms swinging
ape-like at his sides, waiting for the young doctor to approach closer.
Dreeme eyed him speculatively and without fear. Of course. He might
have known if he had thought clearly enough about it.

“I’m afraid that this is an abrupt surprise for you,” remarked the
farmer. His tone was studiously polite, the tone of a man about to have
business dealings with a stranger. The snarl that had permeated it the
first night when Dreeme had removed the bullet from his plump calf
was missing. The young doctor approached him slowly and sat down in
the embrasure. Well, if he was in for a scene.... Westcott turned, the
moonlight rippling across his flat face. His eyes and teeth glittered
in the flood of light.

“It is a surprise,” said Dreeme calmly. “I expected to meet your wife
here.”

He might as well have it over with at once.

“She is detained,” answered Westcott softly.

“You must not misunderstand me,” proceeded Dreeme, a trifle stiffly.
“Your wife and I....”

Westcott spread a broad hand deprecatingly.

“I know my wife,” he said in a very low voice.

There was silence then while Dreeme shifted his eyes from the farmer
to the scummed waters of the mill-pond. They were like an old opaque
mirror in the moon. Did he know his wife, though? Did anybody know his
wife. Astarte Syriaca. The wife of the Afrit. What was she?

“No, no, doctor,” resumed Westcott as though he were reading Dreeme’s
thoughts. “My wife’s little vagaries do not disturb me. She discommodes
me at infrequent times but I have a remedy for it.”

Dreeme glanced at Westcott’s long powerful arms.

“I suppose you beat her,” he remarked shortly.

The farmer flung back his head and laughed, a low rumbling laugh, a
hollow burst of merriment that rattled among the blackened beams.

“Nothing so simple as that,” he said, after he had recovered himself.
“Nothing so simple as that. You’re a trifle primitive, doctor.”

There was a faint hint of hysteria behind the calmness of Westcott.
Dreeme could sense it, a far-away excitement that was kept under
control only by an effort of the mind. The farmer was laboring under an
unrest that he desired to conceal. The young doctor sat coolly gazing
into the scummed mirror of the mill-pond. There were no faces there,
not even the reflection of the silver drum-head of the moon, nothing
but a glow, a blank meaningless glow. The farmer sucked in a long
breath suddenly.

“When are you going away, Doctor Dreeme?” he inquired. There was a
finality in the question that made it as much an order as a query.

“I don’t expect to go away,” said Dreeme.

So that was it? He was to be forced out of town, was he?

“Do you find much that holds you here?” Westcott’s tone was studiously
innocent, devoid of any sly innuendo. Yet the implied order was there.

“I find much that interests me here,” answered the young doctor. He
wanted to add, “Even you,” but thought better of it. Let the farmer
show his teeth in his own way. Suddenly he felt Westcott’s broad hand
on his shoulder.

“Doctor Dreeme,” the farmer said. “You had better go away from here.
The farmers don’t want you any more. They are suspicious and ill at
ease with you. You are fashioned from a different kind of flesh than
they are. Your mind works differently. There are doctors who can come
from the outside, from that world of cities where everybody is more
or less the same in social relationships, and settle here and be of
some use but you are not one of them. Old Doctor Lathrop was like
that. You are too ... too speculative, too eager to find out things,
too unwilling to permit the valley to go its own way and employ its
own methods. The itch of curiosity is too strong inside you. These
men who scrape at the soil do not want active intelligences about
them. They distrust strangers. Go away. Forget that you were ever here
and forget the people who are here. The world has forgotten them and
they desire no less than to stay forgotten. This is good advice that
I am giving you for I know what I am talking about. I may not mingle
much with these people but I know their minds. After all, I am one of
them. I tell you to go away ... before you are sent away in a manner
humiliating to you.”

The heavy hand dropped from Dreeme’s shoulders. The dark eyes studied
him curiously.

“Thanks for the advice,” said the young doctor. “I’ll stay.”

“Why are you so obtuse?” asked Westcott sadly. Behind the intonations
fluttered the tiny scarlet bird of hysteria.

Dreeme became a trifle angry.

“I’m not obtuse,” he snapped. “That’s why you want me to go away.
You’re afraid of what I’ll find out. Of what I’ll discover about your
wax dolls and your goats’ heads and your hypnotic charlatanry and your
murdered hired man and ... and your place called Dagon!”

Westcott’s face became distorted in the moonlight. The scarlet bird flew
upward with a feverish beating of wings.

“You fool! You fool!” he cried, in a strained raucous voice. “That’s
it! You must be made to leave this valley even if you are carried out
of it!”

Dreeme laughed shortly.

The blazing eyes of Westcott moved closer to his face.

“Do you think we care one tinker’s damn about you?” he shouted. “Do you
flatter yourself that we are afraid of you? You simple idiot! We are
doing our best to get rid of you without hurting you! You mean nothing
to us. You are stumbling about in the darkness and don’t know where you
are. You are pitting your puny mind and strength against a power that
is as old as the Egyptians, a power that established itself in this
valley nearly two hundred and fifty years ago. We who have listened
to the voice of the Master need fear nothing but deliverance from the
Master.”

“Have I gotten on your nerves as badly as that?” cried Dreeme
maliciously.

Westcott’s voice had changed and a crazy ecstasy was in it. The scarlet
bird filled the burned mill with a hysteric swishing of wings.

“He walks on the hills at night. He whistles to the Sacred Goat and
snaps his fingers at the moon and stars. In the dark palms of his hands
is all the power of the earth. He stands at the place called Dagon and
his feet are rooted like mountains.”

Dreeme rose to his feet. Westcott was swaying like a drunken man and a
thin white froth bubbled on his lips.

“Aie-e-e-e, Asmodeus!” he screamed. “Sweep this man out of my father’s
holy place!”

Dreeme thought he was about to fall upon the ground and he stretched
out a hand toward him. Westcott shuddered all through his heavy body.
Then, as suddenly as it had come, his delirium passed away. The madness
died out of his eyes and voice and he sank down in the embrasure. The
scarlet bird had flown away on the wind.

Westcott lifted his hand to his eyes and sat for a moment in silence.
Then he turned to Dreeme.

“I am taken with seizures,” he said rapidly. “I am an extremely nervous
man. You must not take my outbreak too seriously. You are a doctor. You
know.”

Dreeme sat down opposite him in the embrasure. The far-away light in
the depths of his mind was glowing so brightly that it dazzled his
reason. Shapes passed before it and they were familiar but he could
not quite identify them. He glanced sharply at Westcott. The farmer,
quite himself, was smiling slyly, secretively.

“Nervous delirium,” he said confidentially, tapping his cloven head. “I
lose control of myself.”

Dreeme eyed him searchingly.

“I am not so sure,” he said. “Are you all right now?”

Westcott nodded. The young doctor noted that the farmer’s hands were
quivering, however.

“As you admit I am a doctor,” he said, “perhaps you will give me a
doctor’s privilege of questioning you. Do you ever take drugs?”

“I do not take drugs,” replied Westcott, “and I do not give you a
doctor’s privilege of questioning me. When I need a doctor I send for
one. I do not need one now.”

The bright moon placed a silver sword between them. Westcott rose to
his feet.

“I have given you my advice,” he said, “You will do as you please about
it.”

He turned toward the door.

“Wait,” cried Dreeme. Westcott turned on his heel and regarded him
smilingly.

“Will you answer three questions?” the young doctor asked. Westcott
said:

“Ask them and I will answer or not as I see fit.”

“Why did you hypnotize Deborah?”

“I didn’t hypnotize Deborah.”

“Who killed Wagner?”

“I don’t know who killed Wagner.”

“Where is the place called Dagon?”

“I never heard of the place called Dagon.”

“Three lies in as many seconds,” said Dreeme bitterly.

“Only two of them were lies,” remarked Westcott. He actually chuckled.
His hands had stopped trembling and he stood easily, nonchalantly,
watching Dreeme sardonically with his large dark eyes.

“No, doctor,” he said. “You are beating at a stone wall. When I first
saw you I detested you. Later I revised my reaction to you. In fact, I
feel a sympathetic pity for you. You are so ... so obtuse. Sooner or
later you will cut your own throat.”

“You say you belong here,” broke out Dreeme, ignoring the farmer’s
remarks. “I don’t believe it. You don’t talk like a farmer. You have
nothing in common with Slater or Bidwell or Barnson. You live alone out
in that secluded house. Are you so ashamed of yourself that you exist
so secretly? What are you up to in that room lined with books? Are you
fashioning yourself into the image of an old god?”

The last question had popped into his head suddenly. He was quite
fearless, indeed, he experienced the peculiar sensation that there
was a conversational _rapport_ between him and the farmer if he
could only find the key to it. There was no doubt in his mind now
that Westcott was mad, that he was ridden by some monstrous theory,
that he pursued some irrational objective. He suspected that if he
could discover the proper opening Westcott would pour out as much of
it as he dared. He began to believe that the farmer was a theoretical
fool masked as a lion. His last question had arrested Westcott who had
already turned to go.

“What’s that?” asked the farmer. “What’s that?”

He turned slowly. He said:

“What do you know about old gods?”

“Perhaps I know more than you think,” insinuated Dreeme craftily.

Westcott eyed him suspiciously and with some concern.

“I wonder ...” he mused to himself and then broke off. He surveyed
Dreeme coolly.

“You picked that question up somewhere?” he said. “You never thought of
it yourself.”

A light dawned on him and he smiled.

“Ah, dear Martha,” he murmured. “Dear talkative Martha.”

He came back and sat down in the embrasure. The moonlight flung great
silver arms about him.

“You bring to life an inborn loquaciousness,” he said. “I had forgotten
the need of conversation. Doctor Dreeme, I am not an ignorant man.
I have studied in three countries and I bear a degree from one of
the most famous German universities. I have traveled in Arabia and
in Persia and in India. I have lived among the secret priests of
unknown religions. Behind all their conflicting dogmas I discovered
one objective. Years ago the peculiar circumstances of my birth pushed
me into a specific line of investigation. The seeds of that particular
knowledge for which I sought were buried in this valley and I settled
here with the determination to foster them and cause them to grow.
You say that I have nothing in common with the farmers of Marlborough
but that only reveals your ignorance. I have this in common with
them,--they, too, know of the seed. They, too, keep the ground fertile
that it may grow in its appointed time. Their lives and the lives of
their forefathers are but a preparation for the time when that seed
will sprout. I am the self-constituted gardener. I am the man who
directs.”

He paused and gazed across the moonlit room. His eyes were filmed,
trance-like, and he seemed to be looking inward at the secret growths
of his mind.

“To fashion myself in the image of an old god,” he murmured. “That
is a crass way of putting it. There are no old gods. There are only
new gods, gods builded out of our invincible wills and forced by the
strength of intelligence into the domains of high powers. The greatest
of all gods is man’s will. If a man possesses enough knowledge he can
do anything, shape the destinies of those about him, influence the
comings and goings upon the surface of the earth, cause wars and the
breakup of nations, and even, when the seed is sprouted and the tree
has flowered, defeat the purpose of death.”

Westcott seemed entirely unconscious of Dreeme. He was talking to
himself now.

“‘And the will therein lieth which dieth not,’” he quoted. “The
instincts of man are constantly drawn toward what, for want of a better
word, we call evil, as a filing of iron is drawn toward a magnet. Evil
is therefore the fountainhead of life. All the gods, Buddha, Allah,
Christ, are the enemies of the will for they pretend to dominate it.
The only god is that demon of the mind who places himself in bold
antagonism to the high tyrants of the heavens. Satan is the only god
and he is the god that we daily create out of our will. All that we
are springs out of evil. We have misunderstood evil so long, masked it
in outrageous masks and clothed it in obscene garments, that we forget
that it is a pure essence, that it is evil--as we understand evil--only
when we compare it with our artificially created good. The animals
know no evil because they know no good. They know nothing but a great
impulse pulling them one way always,--the way of self-emancipation.
It should be so with us. There is neither evil nor good but a sole
purpose and that purpose is the domination of the will over matter,
the power of regulating time by the exertion of the will. Within us
the sixth sense lies dormant. We taste, touch, smell, hear and see
but these are animal functions. The sixth sense is to will. When that
is discovered we shall be the lords of creation. How can we develop
and strengthen this weak will that staggers like an infant child in
the dark corridors of our brains? The old magicians did not know. I
have read all their books and my house is filled with them. Can the
will be sharpened by symbols, by monstrous symbols that tear our time
accustomed minds from the old impulses and subserviencies? May we
by building an artificial structure of liturgies and ceremonies and
sacrifices, by constant allegories that call the imaginative faculties
of the will into exertion, discipline and exercise that weakness that
is our shame today? In other words, may we by a complete reversal of
all those religious mummeries that subjected our will and made it puny
before the imaginary gods, destroy the prison walls we have builded
about ourselves? We made the gods by worshiping them, by fearing them.
Can we unmake them by reviling them, by walking boldly before those
pillars of hollow smoke? There was once a group of people who believed
that the will might become paramount if they followed the dictates of
their mystic senses regardless of so-called good. They called the will
by a symbolic name and they met in secret forest clearings. They made a
pledge with evil and they barely understood why they did it. They....”

Westcott stopped suddenly and looked at Dreeme. The trance-like light
died out of his dark eyes.

“I will not tell you any more,” he said. “Why should I talk to you of
these things. You do not understand.”

“There are some things I understand,” answered Dreeme. “You associate
Satan with the free will. You imagine you can strengthen your own will
to superhuman dimensions by denying the impulses of good. You....”

“I deny no impulses,” said Westcott roughly. “I follow the solitary
impulse.”

He rose to his feet.

“Good-night, doctor,” he said. “Take my advice and go away.”

“Go away!” cried Dreeme. “Why should I go away??”

“Because,” replied Westcott, “even a fool may learn wisdom.”

He strode heavily to the door, his injured leg swaying his body from
side to side as he walked. He did not even turn back as he passed out
into the full moonlight. A moment later Dreeme heard his uneven stride
as he passed over the little bridge. Dreeme sat alone in the burned
mill and looked at the scummed water of the quiet pond. One thing was
certain. Westcott was a mad man. He was a megalomaniac eaten up by a
ridiculous theory that gave him an excuse for any excesses he desired.
Anything might fit into his theory of strengthening the will. Even
murder. Constant brooding upon his purpose had awakened an hysteric
ecstasy in him and there were times when this ecstasy broke into an
uncontrollable display. Dreeme tried to remember what he had read about
these lunacies in the past. Somewhere, he was sure, he had learned that
an abnormal intellectual power went hand in hand with an infant-like
abandonment to symbols. For instance, one of these fanatics might
display the most brilliant intellectuality in building up an elaborate
and mystically logical structure and this structure might be built
upon the most absurd and impossible foundation. Or, again, the mad
man might reveal the most refined cunning to a certain point and then
observe a cloud in the sky, a leaf on the ground, the note of a bird
in the darkness and be swung abruptly from his purpose. Such men were
dangerous. Any slight incident might provoke their madness.

Dreeme had an instantaneous picture of Westcott sitting alone among
his books and searching through the yellowed leaves for the secret
of the mastery of the will, building up impossible theories out of
insane hints, drawing into the crazy net of his mind all the obsolete
mysticisms of the dark ages, of the Egyptians, of the Indian fakirs,
of the Satanists. He was partly sane and partly mad. One half of his
brain functioned with surprising agility; the other was a dark morass
of supernatural superstitions and primitive impulses. It was plain that
he was employing the community for his dark purposes and it was equally
plain that the community, because of some secret injection of blood,
favored these impulses. These farmers were ridden by an ancient fear
which Jeffrey Westcott kept alive. They did not see him often but they
knew that he was there and while he was there, sitting in his lonely
house and avoided by those about him, he would continue to dominate the
valley. He employed some legend for his own ends and the farmers were
in some way the inheritors of that legend.

Dreeme rose to his feet and proceeded out of the burned mill and down
the road toward Marlborough. He had never seen the moon so white, so
lustrous. It was as though the valley were bathed in a crystal liquid,
as though the air were full of sparkling essences that flowed through
the tree-tops and along the fronts of the farm-houses. He drew in long
draughts of the clear cool air as he went his way, a little surprised
at it for the day had been so hot and the sun had been so like a
fountain of pale fire spraying the dry streets. As he walked along he
wondered why he had ever feared Westcott. It was easy enough to handle
a man like that. One had but to keep an eye on him. That was all. And
yet ... Dreeme was not so sure. Westcott’s actions were unpredictable.
The actions of any lunatic were unpredictable. He might be smiling and
suave one minute and a ferocious beast the next. What had he desired
with Deborah, for instance? In what way could she serve to strengthen
that will that was apparently his only god? It was too much to believe
that he desired her only as an aid to his wife in the farm-house. In
some way Deborah entered into his crazy scheme. Well, he would keep
his eyes open and his wits sharpened. He would stand between Westcott
and Deborah to the end of time. The end of time. That was a long period
but it was not long enough for him to watch over Deborah.

His mind reverted to the interview with Westcott. It was funny. Why
had the farmer shown so little rage at the idea of Martha Westcott’s
meeting with him? Was Martha playing her game with the connivance of
her husband? Dreeme was inclined to think that this was not so, that
Westcott, sure of his power over his wife, let her run to the end of
the rope which he held and then pulled her back when he thought she had
gone far enough. Perhaps he practised his will upon her, forcing her to
do the things which he did not want her to do only for the pleasure of
stopping her when he felt like it. Dreeme turned in at his gate still
brooding and was about to open his door when he heard the creak-creak
of Walden Slater’s rocker. He would go around the house and see if he
could engage the taciturn farmer in conversation.

Walden Slater sat slumped in his chair, a corncob pipe stuck at a crazy
angle in his wide mouth. He was looking at the moon.

“It’s bright tonight,” remarked Dreeme, sinking down on the stair to
the little back piazza.

Walden Slater grunted, removed his pipe, and rubbed his long upper lip
with a huge hand.

“Aren’t you up late?” asked Dreeme.

“Uh-huh,” said the farmer.

“It must be about eleven o’clock,” continued Dreeme.

“Ten-thirty,” said the farmer. “I just heard the kitchen clock.”

“What’s wrong?” questioned the young doctor.

Walden Slater rocked slowly. Creak-creak. Creak-creak.

“I dunno’s there’s anything wrong,” he said mildly.

“Have they done anything about Wagner?” asked Dreeme.

Walden Slater squirmed about in his chair and put his pipe down on the
floor.

“Took him to Leeminster,” he said ungraciously.

Dreeme laughed aloud. He said:

“You old curmudgeon!”

Walden Slater grinned with some difficulty and then remarked:

“I’m thinking.”

Dreeme rose to his feet, still smiling.

“This is a nice social neighborhood,” he said to the moon.

Walden Slater thrust his pipe back in his mouth and resumed his
inspection of the great white globe that floated in the heavens above
him. Dreeme turned the corner of the house slowly.

He didn’t feel sleepy. The night was too fine, too exhilarating.
It was like a heady wine, some mystic vintage that ran through his
body and sharpened every impulse, every wit. It was on a night like
this that the imagination might spring hawk-like into the air and
bring down fair and impossible prey. Dreeme wondered how far the
mind might travel through the starry immensities above him, through
the glittering star-fields unplowed by Time, before it reached ...
something. Humphrey Lathrop did not believe in the supernatural. He
clung to the theory of the supernormal, of mysteries that might be
explained as the intelligence of man lifted itself higher and higher
and even of mysteries that might never be explained but which were yet
felt in the intuitive senses as supernormal and not supernatural. Poor
old Humphrey! The dear old frog swelling larger and larger! He sat in
his cottage retired from Time and Lucinda squabbled about his frequent
potations of apple-jack. He was happy, though. As happy as anybody
could be who had long ago put ambition behind him and had not very much
before him to expect.

Dreeme paused before his own door and half-put out a hand to turn the
knob. The door was ajar. That was funny. He was sure he had closed it
carefully when he started out for the burned mill. He stood looking at
the door vacantly, his mind wheeling about elsewhere, wheeling through
the enormous starry arc that revolved in the sky above him, wheeling
through the cool and quiet expanse of the sleeping valley. Why should
he go in and sleep when there was no sleep in his eyes? He was not
tired. He would continue to walk until he was wearier than he was now.
He turned from the door and retraced his steps along the path to the
road. As he turned into the sandy stretch he heard the creak-creak of
Walden Slater’s rocker. The farmer was thinking, doggedly following
some faint light that glimmered before him. Poor Walden! Dreeme smiled
to himself as he stood in the sandy road and listened to the faint
protest of the rocking chair. He was beginning to pity everybody.
Was this a testimony of his own exhilaration, a sign of his unsought
superiority? He began to whistle softly some old tune that crept back
into his consciousness. He didn’t know what it was but it seemed to fit
the night.

The sound of the Slater front door softly opening caused him to turn
his head. Who would dare to walk through that blank closed parlor stiff
with its horse-hair stuffed chairs and its lumpy sofa and its colored
portraits of dead and vanished Slaters? He stood by the fence, his
face turned toward the door and waited. A slender form came down the
steps and along the path toward him. She walked slowly, almost with
diffidence, and she did not speak until she was standing close beside
him. He noticed that her dress was white, her party dress undoubtedly.
The moon poured its silver light over her and she stood like a white
ghost in a white world, her blue eyes sparkling and her small mouth
curled in a faint smile. Reaching out his hand he drew her toward him.

“I’ve been waiting by the window all evening,” she said.




Chapter Seven


I

“Not that way,” said Dreeme hastily as Deborah instinctively turned up
the Leeminster Road toward the Saccarac River.

Everybody seemed to head in that direction as though there were
a magnet at the end of the road attracting them irresistibly. He
would change the scheme of things by facing another way, by facing
an opposite direction than that in which lay the Westcott farm, the
burned mill, the trampled bank of the river, and the creaking bridge
that had groaned with the weight of the coroner’s buggy. She wheeled
on her small feet and followed him obediently and they passed the dark
front of his little house and the tarnished brass plate upon which was
inscribed “Dr. Daniel Dreeme.” A moment later they were walking side
by side through the main street of Marlborough, a main street that
speedily opened into a tiny square faced by the small church, the post
office and general store, and Mrs. Larkin’s boarding house where nobody
ever boarded. The blank fronts of the scattered buildings gloomed at
them incuriously. Though this was the heart of the community Dreeme
could not hear a single beat. The heart had stopped pulsing for the
night and even in the daylight it functioned but sluggishly. No lights
glimmered from the windows of the houses for all the inhabitants
had long ago crept into their beds and stretched out beneath their
home-made quilts to wait uneagerly for another early rising. Yet the
moon flooded the square and made it as bright as day and in that
crystal bath they walked slowly, feeling the cold light run along their
faces and ripple over their arms.

“Did you expect to see me tonight?” asked Deborah. Her voice was a thin
silver wire plucked by a soft finger.

“No,” said Dreeme. “But I wanted to see you. I didn’t know it, though,
until you came down the path like a little ghost.”

“I’m not a ghost,” she said. “I wanted to see you all evening. I sat by
the window and waited.”

“Why?” he asked.

She was silent at that and only shook her head.

“Have you anything to tell me?” he inquired.

She shook her head again.

Moved by a sudden impulse he put his finger under her chin and raised
her face. Her violet-blue eyes gazed at him calmly but something in
them, some far-away message, set his pulses pounding furiously. He
dropped his hand and looked away. Unconsciously they hastened their
pace, passing through the square and the narrow side street that led
toward the lower end of the town. The houses thinned out, falling away
like specters from them, and an instant later they were trudging along
a country road.

“If you follow this road far enough,” he said with an effort at
lightness, “you’ll reach the real world.”

“I shall travel on it soon,” she answered. There was a break in her
voice.

“What is the real world like?” she asked after a moment.

“It is full of people,” he said. “It is full of cities. It is like a
noisy jungle. It is easy to hide there.”

She did not answer him. For a long time they walked in silence, their
shoulders touching lightly as their bodies swayed over the uneven road.
His hand rubbed against hers as they moved along the sandy stretch
and for no reason whatsoever he resisted the temptation to take her
small fingers in his own. There didn’t seem to be anything worth
saying although he was conscious that she was waiting confidently for
something to be said. He knew what it was and she knew, also, that both
of them were saying it without words, without the use of futile speech.
Their brushing shoulders said it to one another and their touching
hands made it unmistakably plain.

“We’d better turn back,” he remarked finally. They were far along the
road now and no houses loomed their dark bulks against the white sea of
the flowing moon.

They turned and retraced their steps, walking swiftly through the
loose sand and pebbles of the road. She continued to look straight
ahead and occasionally he would glance sideways at the cool oval of
her face. It seemed but an instant before they were back among the
squatting houses, closed in by the silent walls and shut away from the
full light of the moon. In the shadow of the frame-building that served
for post office and general store she stopped and turned to him and
said:

“I put my best dress on.”

A moment later he realized that both his arms were about her and that
he was saying:

“I love you! I love you! I love you!”

He kept repeating it and she did not interrupt him but leaned against
him listening contentedly. When he stopped she looked up at him and
said:

“Shall I tell you that I love you?” He said:

“I’m babbling like a fool. I’ve been wanting to tell you this all day
and I didn’t know it till just now.”

“I led you on,” she said soberly. Then she laughed with a quick
feverish gaiety.

“I didn’t need to be led on,” he declared. “It was the getting started
that was difficult. I’m a slow idiot. I wasn’t sure. I’m not sure even
now.”

“That you love me?” she gasped.

“That _you_ love _me_,” he returned.

“Oh, _that_!” she said.

She put both her slim arms around his neck and embraced him tightly.
For an instant he seemed to be wearing a necklace of fire.

“It was because I loved you that I ran to you this morning,” she
announced. “I wanted you to protect me.”

“Good Lord! Was it only this morning?” he exclaimed.

“It was only yesterday that we met,” she said. There was wonder in her
voice, too.

He bent down to her and kissed her for the first time. Her lips were
like damp rose-petals and they clung to his greedily.

“If it was only yesterday,” he said, “how long our Paradise will be.”

She disengaged herself from him and they walked slowly up the street
toward the Slater house, hand in hand.

“Some day,” he said gravely, “I’m going to ask you what your last name
is.”

A small ripple of laughter broke from her.

“It’s Morton,” she announced. “My name is Deborah Morton.”

“My first name is Daniel,” he declared. “At present I am in the lion’s
den. I haven’t been bitten, though.”

“Daniel and Deborah,” she repeated softly to herself.

At the gate to the Slater house they paused and he looked down at her,
noting her fresh white dress and the fragility of her small figure.

“You are nothing but a child,” he said. “What is this?”

He touched the square brooch on her breast. She unpinned it and handed
it to him.

“Do you want it?” she asked. “I’ve had it always. It was given to me by
my mother. My father gave it to her and his father gave it to him. It
has been in the Morton family for years, for ages.”

He held it up to the moonlight and inspected it and as he saw what it
was an exclamation of amazement broke from him.

“What is it?” she asked. “Have you seen it before?”

“No,” he said, handing it back to her. “Keep it. It must be some sort
of an heirloom.”

She pinned it back on her breast and lifted up her face that he
might kiss her. “Good-night,” he murmured, and an instant later her
ghost-like form hurried up the path to the front door. Dreeme turned
toward his own house, wondering why Deborah should have a brooch upon
which was the finely-cut cameo of a goat’s head, the exact replica of
the drawing he had wrenched from the dead hand of Wagner.


II

Dreeme heard the solemn-toned clock in the Slater house striking as he
pushed his own unlatched door open and stepped into the narrow hall.
One hollow sound. A single and ineffectual blow at the star-lit night.
It must be eleven-thirty, he thought, for Walden Slater had mumbled
something about ten-thirty when he had paused at the back piazza an
hour before. Time for all good men to go to bed. Time for all good
men to come to the aid of their party. After he pulled the door shut
behind him and shot the bolt and turned around he realized that the
lamp was glowing in his little study. For an instant he stood in stupid
perplexity, wondering how he could have been so excited as to leave the
light aflare and the door ajar when he had hastened forth two hours
ago to the burned mill. Was he actually as absent-minded as that? “I
didn’t leave them so,” he said to himself, shaping the words silently
with his lips, and then walked slowly along the hall to the study.
Through the angle of the partially opened door he could see a patch of
black dress against which a long white hand hung languidly, the fingers
idly curled. He stopped and observed it, not with surprise--indeed,
subconsciously he had expected it--but with a vague distaste that
wrinkled his forehead and tightened his lips. She was sitting in a
listening attitude waiting for him to turn the corner of the door. He
was tempted to turn and walk out hastily, letting her have the house
to herself until the loneliness and weariness of waiting forced her to
return to her own home. He was tired and didn’t want to talk. He had
ridden a wave of excitement all day, a towering tidal wave that had
swept him high and far, and now he was exhausted, let down, filled with
the glow of a faint triumph, to be sure, but pleasantly hollow inside.
He was like a swimmer who had outreached his strength but achieved some
goal in the endeavor. He desired nothing more than to climb into his
bed, stretched out beneath the great square patches of the coverlet,
and sleep dreamlessly, to renew his benumbed faculties for the day
that was to follow. What on earth could she have to say to him now?
Had his attitude not settled everything last night when he had left
her at the mill without turning back? She had called him a miserable
coward. Well, let her think so. Perhaps that was the safest way for
him. All he desired now was to get out of the valley with Deborah. Let
them continue as they willed with their own theories. They were all
mad and perhaps it would be a good thing if they killed each other off
in the process of their lunacies. His curiosity about them was sleepy
now. The unrest that had pervaded him at the thought of the mystery
hovering over Marlborough was slothful. It was more important to go out
into that real world with Deborah and begin to live. Here, he was in
a valley of shadows. He stood, therefore, in the shelter of the door
peering through at the lighted room in sleepy impatience and lethargic
anger. She sat there listening. She knew he was lurking just out of her
sight. He could see her hand crumple up in irritation.

“Will you come in?” she said in a low husky impatient voice.

He crossed the lintel reluctantly and stood facing her. Her eyes
glistened in the saffron glow of the lamp as she observed him coldly.
It was only by the heightened rise and fall of her full breasts
outlined beneath the dark fabric of her dress that he could see how
enraged she was. Vaguely he wondered how long she had been sitting
there and waiting for him.

“Since ten o’clock,” she said as though in answer to his thought. “I
heard you walk about the house an hour ago. I heard you stroll away
with that ... that servant girl. I heard you come back with that ...
that servant girl.”

He decided that Deborah did not need any defence so he complacently
ignored her contemptuous speech.

“Are you as lacking in ambition as you are in courage?” she inquired
maliciously in her peculiar husky voice.

Dreeme nodded. He didn’t care what she thought as long as she left
speedily. She could not rouse him to anger by anything she said. With
an excitable gesture she stood up and paced swiftly about the room,
her long shadow flickering across the atrociously-papered wall. Dreeme
watched her objectively. She was magnificent. There was no doubt of
that. Like a tigress. A great slumberous tigress in whose arteries ran
a secret and smoldering flame. Full breasted, long in the thighs, wide
cheek-bones and great eyes, hair like a blue-black smoke curling over
her white forehead, archaic mouth. He had pictured her in so many ways.
Medusa. Astarte Syriaca. Wife of the Afrit. Tigress. A creature of the
imagination compounded out of dark and passionate urges. Yet his veins
ran slow now at the thought of her. She could not touch his emotions
again as she had that first time in the lamp-lit library when he had
felt her presence like a dim magic in the room. He could look at her
coldly and say, “Please go. I do not want you here. I do not trust
you. You belong in this unreal world and I am not a part of it. There
is the shadow of blood on your mouth.” He even opened his mouth to say
these things and then thought better of it and closed his lips tightly.
She stopped in front of him, her face a few inches from his, and
studied him fiercely. The bitter-sweet aroma of her hair rose about his
nostrils. He thought fixedly of the frail ghost-like figure of Deborah
and observed her coolly.

“You have a new mask,” she said shortly. “Where is my weak doctor now?”

“He never existed except in your imagination,” he replied.

In spite of her anger she smiled.

“Do you think so?” she said.

She continued to study his face. Her large understanding eyes were
disconcerting and he looked away from her finally.

“Did you go to the mill?” she inquired.

“Don’t you know?” he returned.

“So did I,” she added. “But he was there waiting. I knew he was waiting
for you. I told you that Burroughs saw us. I came here, then, and
waited.”

Dreeme moved over to the table and she followed him, seating herself by
the side of it.

“Did he tell you to come here?” he asked. “How could you have passed me
on the road?”

“He did not see me. He does not know I am here,” she said. There was a
flash of anger in her eyes. After a second she added:

“I cut through ... in back of the Slater house. There is a path there.
You must know it.”

He nodded absently. He didn’t care, after all.

“What do you want, anyway?” he demanded. “I’m tired. I want to sleep.”

She looked at him appraisingly.

“I want you to take me away from here,” she answered coolly.

He smiled at that and shook his head.

“Wait!” she said, lifting her hand. “I will be faithful to you. I
will give you more than any woman has given any man. I will give you
strength ... which you lack, and intelligence ... which you lack, and
confidence ... which you lack, and.... Do you want love? I have an
eternity of it stored up inside me.”

She spread her arms and her ripe bosom rose with the gesture.

“I don’t want any of these things,” he said in a low voice.

“That little girl has befuddled you,” she said in an angry voice. “You
are like a somnambulist, a man walking in his sleep and afraid to wake
up. You are dreaming like a schoolboy of a little empty face. I tell
you I will take you up on the mountaintops of the world and show you
all the riches of Time. You can pick what you will and with me beside
you it shall be yours. I will pour strength into you and make you one
of the proudest of men.”

The lamp sputtered fitfully between them and Dreeme sat looking at her
sleepily. She was like a Sibyl now, muttering some incantation. All
that she did was in the vein of play-acting. Even her rolling sentences
seemed out of some old drama. Then, Dreeme thought of Westcott’s brief
delirium and wondered how many of them Martha Westcott had heard to
talk in this vein. Both of them were acting in life. Both of them were
archaic masks.

“I don’t want the riches of Time,” he said wearily. “I’m satisfied as I
am.”

He sat up suddenly.

“No!” he cried. “All I ask is to be let alone.”

“You don’t understand,” she said in a patient voice as though she was
speaking to a child. “You are frightened and you don’t understand. You
are frightened out of your wits at the idea of living life fully. You
want to spend it in little ways beside a little fire with a little
face in front of you. That is not life. That is merely a subterfuge for
living. Life extends beyond the lighted square of the fireplace. The
path leads upward to the high rocky places, to the granite cliffs, to
the place where the free winds blow. There is a continual excitement
there and no peace. The brain is sharpened in that rarefied atmosphere
and the will is hardened. It is there that living is its own reward.”

Still he shook his head.

“I know!” she exclaimed fervently. Then she paused and seemed to cast
about in her mind for some conclusive argument that might move him
from his sleepy lethargy. “Shall I tell you about myself?” she asked
at last. “Last night I tried to tell you what I thought, the sort of
philosophy that I had built up out of the dreariness of my days. Shall
I tell you who I am now?”

He did not answer but sat gazing at her weariedly. She took his silence
for assent.

“My people came from Salem,” she began, “but that was a long time ago.
It was back in the days of Cotton Mather. I was named for my first
ancestor,--Martha Carrier. When I was a young girl I used to lie in
bed and dream about that woman whose name I bear. Once I actually saw
her. I do not think it was a dream. She really came into the room and
stood beside my bed and there was a pale light all about her. She was
a tall dark woman with a secret mouth and she walked like a queen. She
leaned over the bed and said something to me but I forget the words
if, indeed, I ever heard them. When she bent above me I saw a red
stripe about her white neck and knew that she had been hanged. I was
frightened at the sight and hid my face in the pillow but not before
I heard a mingled sound of voices muttering and shouting and caught a
glimpse of shadowy shapes swinging against the moon. I didn’t know,
then, what it was all about but I know now. I was to learn all these
things in the years that followed while I grew up alone in the valley
here. My father died on the day that I was born, Peleg Carrier his
name was, and so, of course, I never saw him. My mother died when I
was three years old. She was a shadow, something that I cannot catch
in my memory, strive as hard as I may. When my father died Jeffrey
Westcott appeared in the valley and took charge of everything. He had
been a friend to my father in those days when he had been a student
in Germany. I was brought up by Jeffrey Westcott. We lived out on the
Leeminster Road in an old house very near where the farm is now.”

Her eyes softened and she appeared to be turning back in memory to
that house. Dreeme, whose faculties had quickened as her husky voice
proceeded with her tale, had automatically drawn his pipe out and was
filling it. She said:

“I carry that house about inside me. It was an old rambling structure.
It must have been centuries old. My forefathers had lived in it since
the first one came into the valley and raised it. It was a house
that was full of the Past, full of the essence of times gone. When
I wandered through the many rooms and the floors creaked beneath my
feet and the shadows leaped out of the yawning closets and the huge
stone fireplace. I seemed to be constantly accompanied by shapes in
steeple-crowned hats and muffling cloaks. These shapes were always
trying to say something to me, to whisper some secret, to tell me,
perhaps, of a treasure that was hidden somewhere in the musty recesses
of the building. There were so many things in that house, so many
reminders of the past, that it was a haunted house. Jeffrey Westcott
and myself lived there for thirteen years and it was rarely that we saw
anyone. There were not so many people in the valley then and Jeffrey
did all the house-work until I was old enough to take it over. Until I
was thirteen or fourteen years old I was free, free to roam about as I
pleased, and I became a wild creature. I loved to wander in the woods
and along the bank of the Saccarac River and down the muddy roads. I
was never lonely for I seemed to find living spirits in the river, the
trees, the few houses. I could sit and converse with these invisible
beings. Each season brought me something, a deposit of mystical
knowledge. In the winter everything was mantled in white and the trees,
covered with a crystal coating of ice, stood like crazy shapes blown
out of glass. The wind roared down the valley and the branches rattled
and clashed like pendants. The shivering deer trooped along the river
bank and there were bears in those days. The thought came to me that
the heart of nature was a frozen thing and that the natural state of
the earth was cruelty, that only light and heat and fructification
meant anything at all. Then the spring would come and the ice on the
river would crack, split into whirling sheets, and vanish, and the
earth became black again and tiny shoots of pale green would thrust
out on the stark branches. There were early flowers and the pale sun
would give out a thin warmth. Here, I thought, is the vague beginning
of passion, the indomitable urge to live pushing against the ice of
Time, the defiant gesture of the earth against itself. After that the
full-flushed madness of the summer would descend on the valley and
the wide fields would bear their yield and the heat would buzz in
the air. August was a feverish madman running through lush grass and
waving his fiery torch. This season became to me the end and purpose
of being, the complete passion of the sensual earth, the triumphant
vindication of self. The earth became a ruddy murderer standing above
the pale shadow of itself and sucking its warm passion from its own
secret heart. Out of the dead body came forth the living body. And then
came autumn wearing a colored blanket striped with red and yellow and
brown, walking through the flowers like a proud Indian chief in full
head-dress of tufted feathers. In his eyes was a gray sadness and there
was a mist about his mouth. The smoke from his pipe of peace curled
over the valley. He was a tired man stirred by the last embers of
passion. This was to me the period of weariness after the full flame
of passion had died down. It was in this way that I became a mirror to
the seasons, reflecting them in my moods, walking with them all the
way. I dramatized myself. I became the earth alternately dead, fecund,
full-flowering, and weary. You see how imaginative I was, how different
from other children.”

When she paused Dreeme lit his pipe and the sharp flare of his match
danced about the room. Martha Westcott’s cheeks were glowing with
the ardor of her memories. She seemed to take on a girlish aspect
as she spoke of her girlhood and her face reflected the seasons as
she enumerated them. When she spoke of the winter her cheeks were as
white as snow and when she described the summer they were flooded with
rich blood that glowed through her pale skin. She was like some rare
sensitive instrument reacting to the moods that flowed through her.
Dreeme’s antagonism to her began to dissipate and a creeping interest
manifested itself in his attitude, as, puffing upon his pipe, he leaned
forward and listened to her recital. If she noticed this weakening
on his part she gave no sign of it but continued to dwell among her
memories whole-heartedly, snatching out of the past whatever came
within the net of her words.

“Once,” she said, abruptly diverting the thread of her memories,
“I was wandering about in the old house, poking into odd corners,
opening forgotten chests, creeping under the stairs, investigating the
numberless tiny closets that occupied so many curious places in the
walls. It was a summer day and I can recall the buzzing flies that
hovered about me and the sound of Jeffrey Westcott’s footsteps down
stairs as he moved about the kitchen. I was running my hand along
an upstairs fireplace, thrusting my fingers between the bricks when
one of them moved. With an effort I pulled it out and discovered a
hollow into which I could force my whole arm. I fumbled about and
my fingers closed on something that felt soft. Drawing it out I
discovered that I clutched an old book in a soft black leather cover,
apparently a note-book for it was filled with a strange writing in
archaic characters and symbols and a map. I was sitting on the floor
investigating it when Jeffrey Westcott came upstairs. I could hear him
walking behind me and pausing and looking over my shoulder. Suddenly
he cried out, ‘Old Uriah’s black book!’ and snatched it from me. He
retired to his room with it and passed the rest of the evening there.
It was on that day that Jeffrey went mad. Old Uriah was my grandfather,
Uriah Carrier. He....”

“I know,” said Dreeme, removing his pipe from his mouth. He remembered
Humphrey Lathrop’s description of the old sea-captain. A hunter of
whales in the Pacific who had terrorized and robbed the natives of
Tahiti. A blackbirder off the African Gold Coast. A man with the devil
in his tobacco pouch.

“What was in Old Uriah’s black book?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“I did not find out till years later,” she replied. “I know but I will
not tell you. It is not part of my story.”

She dismissed it with a wave of her hand.

“Jeffrey Westcott changed from that day,” she said. “His relations to
me changed. He was no longer the kindly guardian but a silent malicious
man eaten up with a mad dream, with an idea, with a monstrous theory.
We met and ate in silence and he would have nothing to say to me. A
year or two after that the old house burned down. It was struck by
lightning one day while Jeffrey was in the fields working and I was
wandering by the river. I saw the smoke and flames rising in the dark
stormy air and then the storm burst. But it was too late. There was
nothing but a black gutted ruin after the rain cleared and the last
ember expired. For a while I thought my past had gone up in fire and
smoke and then I began to realize that houses may burn and people may
die but the past is indestructible. We carry it about inside of us
and nothing can smash it to pieces. Jeffrey was not too demoralized
by the fire. He said, ‘It was time. It is a symbol. It means there is
nothing for me to find here until I have studied there.’ He decided to
go away. I remember the long ride to Boston, the wait for the boat,
and the longer trip to Hambourg. It was in Hambourg that Jeffrey
married me. He said that it made things easier, that it smoothed the
difficulties of traveling. It was in Germany that I grew to maturity,
grew to a lonely maturity while Jeffrey dragged me from town to town
and city to city, wherever there was an old library or an old withered
man full of insane notions. He had been in Germany before, had studied
there as he had studied in other parts of Europe and Asia. He left me
much by myself and I read a great deal, all sorts of quaint old books,
philosophy, poetry, history, and the natural sciences. At first I loved
Germany. The little towns with their quaint houses delighted me and
the homeliness of German life soothed me. As time went on, however,
all this became an old story and a vast weariness descended on me. I
knew that I did not love Jeffrey Westcott and he knew that he did not
love me. I grew in upon myself, became silent and morbid, passed my
days revolving the various thoughts that came to me out of old books. A
reticence fell over me. I could not talk to people. I was eaten up by
a desire to be myself and I knew that I could not be myself as long as
Jeffrey Westcott dominated me. His will grew stronger and stronger as
the days passed and I could feel it concentering on me as the attention
of a doctor fixes itself upon a rabbit he is about to dissect. I found
that I could not fight against his will, that something iron in his
nature forced me to go the way that he wanted me to go. As his will
developed he grew more and more morose, absenting himself from the
society of people. Soon I was entirely cut apart from any common
intercourse. It was then that he returned here, bringing me with him--a
reluctant ghost. He bought the farm on the Leeminster Road and we have
been there ever since.”

Dreeme’s pipe had gone out and he made no attempt to relight it. He
felt a strange pity welling up inside of him for Martha Westcott and
yet a faint voice within the dark convolutions of his brain told him
not to pity too much. His mind, at the same time, was setting scattered
facts together and he began to realize the situation in the valley. He
felt now that there was only one thing left to discover--the placed
called Dagon. After that, everything would be made clear.

“My life here,” she said, “has been a waiting. The seasons have passed
by and I have wandered like a ghost about that lonely house waiting
for somebody to come, waiting for a rescuer. All these years Jeffrey
Westcott has sat immersed in his books or conducting his strange
experiments and his will has made me a part of those experiments. I
will not tell you what they are because I desire to forget them. They
must not be a part of my life in the future.”

She paused again and glanced at him curiously.

“Yes,” she said then, “I will tell you one thing so that you may
understand how he has dominated my mind. I will tell you this because
it concerns you indirectly, because it was the thing that brought you
into my life. One day he came out of his library and said to me, ‘I can
make you shoot me in the leg.’ He sat across from me at the table and
kept repeating it to himself. ‘I can make you shoot me in the leg.’ I
set my will against his and laughed. ‘There will be no pain,’ he said,
half to himself. ‘I shall will that there be no pain.’ He sat across
the table from me. He kept saying that. I thought I should go mad. I
rose up from the table to clear away the dishes and then I found myself
in front of him with the rifle in my hand and smoke curling from the
muzzle. ‘I will not,’ I said. ‘I will not shoot you in the leg but some
day I will shoot you through the brain.’ He laughed at that and said,
‘You have shot me in the leg and there is no pain. Send for the doctor.
Send Miles for the doctor.’ I looked down and there was blood running
along his leg. It was running into his shoe. Then you came.”

Dreeme believed every word she said. He put the cold pipe on the table
and pushed back his chair. Far away he heard a clock strike midnight.
Mrs. Slater’s window must be open, he thought. Perhaps Deborah was
lying awake listening to that chime that marked the end of a day. He
felt restive and stood up from his chair. Martha Westcott felt his
unrest and spoke rapidly.

“Then you came. We looked at one another and I knew that I might
be saved from this living grave by you. You were the first young
man I had seen to talk to since I left Germany. You were not like
these bent-backed farmers who scrape at the soil and bow beneath the
old horror that Jeffrey Westcott conjures up before them. You are
different, a man from the outer world. You knew that I was different,
too, for you trembled all over when I walked to the door with you that
night. I thought of you all the time. I thought so fiercely that my
thoughts brought you back to me the next day and you hid behind the
stone wall and watched me draw water from the well. Something began to
laugh inside me then. That was why I sent Wagner to you. That is why
you met me at the burned mill. That is why I am here now.”

The yellow lamp-flare was burning dimly but Dreeme felt as though the
little study was filled with a strange incandescence, a milky glow that
lighted up both of their faces. He who had been so sure of himself was
frightened again for he felt his pulses quickening in their beat and
that trembling that had assailed him before in her presence was upon
him like a palsy. He should not have listened to her. He should not
have permitted her to creep into his mind, to envelop him with the warm
mantle of her personality. He walked jerkily around the table toward
her and she stood up as he came. Her eyes became luminous pools as he
neared her and she half-raised her hands.

“I won’t have it,” he said in a grating voice. “I won’t have you say
these things to me.”

She dropped her hands but remained standing in front of him, very near,
her eyes studying his face.

“Are you entirely a stranger to passion?” she asked him. “Is there no
pulse of life in you?”

He tried to talk rationally, to shake his anger from him. He said:

“I’ve heard what you have to say about yourself and I’m sorry. You
have been the victim of a hard life and I pity you. But I do not feel
toward you in the way that you seem to imagine. I am not in love with
you and I shall never be in love with you. You surprised me, took me
off my guard, so to speak, when I first saw you that night. I had not
expected to see anyone like you. I was curious. You seemed to represent
something, some part of the secret in this valley, and I thought about
you a great deal. But that is all. If my emotions were stirred ... they
were the ... the....”

He fumbled for adequate words for his thought was slipping from him.
In the first place, he had never actually analyzed his emotions toward
her, never satisfied himself as to the reason why she could at times
make him tremble. It was certainly not because she was beautiful,
although he realized as she stood there in front of him that she was
very beautiful. No, it was not that. It might be ascribed to a certain
magnetism that flowed about her and drew him insensibly toward her. Yet
was not that a part of her beauty? Lost in conjecture he stood before
her and observed her with tired eyes beneath a frowning brow. She had
listened to him quietly, watching him closely all the time, and when he
faltered and became silent, she placed her hand on his arm.

“You are reasoning,” she said. “You are trying to destroy me by
reasoning, but you find that you cannot do it. I am in your mind and I
shall stay there.”

“I shall root you out of my mind quickly enough,” he said brutally.

“Is it that little girl?” she said. “Do you think that I am afraid of
that little girl?”

He shook his head impatiently.

“I will not discuss her with you,” he declared. “You have nothing to do
with her ... or me, either.”

“Good-bye,” she said then, and put both her arms about his neck. He
felt the heat of her long body against him, and instinctively held her
to him.

“Good-bye,” he muttered against her blue-black hair.

His arms tightened about her as he felt her body pulsing against his,
and he shut his eyes tightly. Waves of sunlit heat seemed to roar about
him. She was no more than a creature of flesh and blood, after all, a
warm breathing woman frantic with primitive urges, and unsuccessfully
disguising them in a web of pretentious phrases. The thought of her
lonely life crept into his beguiled consciousness, and a feeling of
tenderness, of pity, swept through his blood. If he could help her,
he would. But there was no way to it. She must go on and fight her
own battle against life, against the close prison of the valley, and
against the madness of Jeffrey Westcott. He was not a part of that
arduous struggle. He was but an onlooker, a non-participant, a traveler
who would shortly go away. And yet ... her body contained a kindling
heat ... the scent of her hair was about his face ... he could hear the
shuddering ecstasy of her breath.

Suddenly she drew away from him and stood in the center of the room,
breathing rapidly. He could see her dilated nostrils and her archaic
lips slightly parted. Her dark hair had fallen about her shoulders.
Her hand was raised to her shoulder. For an instant she poised like a
living statue, and then with a quick gesture, she tore the black dress
from her shoulders, and the snow-white flesh rippled to gold in the
lamp-light.

“Daniel Dreeme,” she gasped in a husky tone. “Daniel ... you ...
you....”

He stood rooted to the spot, staring at her right shoulder, at the
golden-white flesh that shone in the lamp-light and at the blue figure,
no larger than the palm of his hand, that disfigured the glossy
skin. It seemed to leap to his eyes at the instant conclusion of her
abandoned gesture. He could not take his gaze from it, for it seemed to
burn luminously by itself, a tracing of blue fire that writhed before
his strained eyes. It fluctuated, drew near, retired from him, grew
larger, and then diminished in size. He wanted to cry out, “What, in
the name of Christ, is that!” but he could not force a single word
through his lips. She had sensed the direction of his eyes the instant
she had torn the dress from her shoulder, and a horrified hopelessness
had swept across her face. She could see that the brief bond which
had held them together was instantaneously snapped, that the charm
was shattered. He was thinking no longer of her, no longer stirred
to tenderness by her, or to passion by the whiteness of her body.
Slowly she drew together the torn fragments of her dress and covered
herself. Without a single word she walked slowly toward the door. She
stood there with her back to him for a full minute and waited, but
he said nothing. He still stood by the table, his eyes on the spot
from which she had walked. His mind was an amazed welter of thoughts
through which constantly moved the cold dead hand of Wagner, and the
frail ghost-like figure of Deborah. He could piece nothing together,
make sense of nothing, find no rational explanation of anything. The
lamp began to sputter, shooting its thin protesting flame upward in
the chimney as the oil burned out of the wick. In a minute it would go
out and leave them in darkness. Every time the flame shot upward the
shadows lengthened in the room and every time it went down the corners
filled with curling pools of blackness. Dreeme walked slowly toward the
lamp. It needed oil. It should be put out. His mind strove to function
automatically as he stretched his hand out toward the lamp. He heard
Martha Westcott move in the doorway, and he turned toward her. She was
disappearing into the hall, walking slowly. Suddenly his voice came
back to him.

“The goat’s head,” he said. “Where did you get the goat’s head?”

He could hear her feet walking down the hall, and he stood listening
as the front door softly opened and then closed again. Leaning over he
blew the light out and stood in the darkness, frowning.




Chapter Eight


I

When Dreeme awoke late in the morning he heard the heavy roar of rain
on the roof, and, hurrying through his morning ablutions, he proceeded
downstairs to his breakfast, finding the covered dishes on the table
in the little study. Mrs. Slater had been there and had not waited,
and he was thankful for this. He did not care to see her standing
beside him, her eyes fluttering with excitement, and a repressed
rancor in her pursed mouth. She resented his interference on Deborah’s
behalf, and a strong distaste for her had grown in the young doctor’s
mind. A regular New England aunt. A narrow-minded, overly-righteous,
cold-hearted descendant of icy-natured forebears. The devil take her!
Dreeme raced through his breakfast, not minding that the eggs were cold
and coagulated on the heavy china plate, that the coffee was insipid
and luke-warm. He would probably never get good service again from Mrs.
Slater. Well, he would not need her services long. He would not be here
in this small two-storied, two-room building that whined in the strong
winds and drew in all the unpleasant heat of the summer. He would be
in some large city, Boston or New York, and Deborah would be with him.
There were lots of places where a young doctor could find a refuge.
Finishing his meal he rose from the table and strode through the hall
to the door and thrust it open. A wind-blown gust of rain dashed in
his face, and he drew back from it. The weather had changed all right.
Last night the largest moon he had ever seen had poured its silver
light over Marlborough, but some time in the night it had disappeared,
devoured by angry storm-clouds, and now the community lay prone beneath
a furious down-pour. The farmers would not complain at this. Here was
fecundation enough. Reaching for his rubber-slicker Dreeme adjusted it
about his shoulders and stepped out into the storm. The heavy drops
snapped against his face and drummed on his hat. The trees across the
road were mere misty shadows. It was dark, too. Dreeme noticed that the
lamps were lighted in the Slater house.

A New England rain-storm was a desolate phenomenon. It turned the
entire vista gray and sodden green. Great puddles widened in the road,
and the unceasing whir of falling water made a monotonous sound in the
ears. Dreeme supposed that he should have put on boots, but he did not
feel inclined to turn back into the house. He desired too much to go
on and to finish up the business that was in his mind. He was going to
face Humphrey Lathrop, and stay with the huge old doctor until he had
made everything clear to him. He would tell Lathrop everything that
had happened. Lathrop would help him, for, after all, Lathrop was a
wise man. Even if he did look like a swelling frog at times. Dreeme
sloshed through the puddles and mud on his way to the old doctor’s
cottage, his mind a chaotic mixture of problems and unasked questions.
He had all the facts now, but he could not put them together until
he possessed the key. With the key he could unlock the last secret
door, and when he did this everything would fall into order, and his
curiosity about Marlborough would be satisfied. He crossed the square
and saw nobody but the tall spare figure of Bidwell standing in the
shelter of the porch of the post office and general store. Bidwell did
not return his greeting, but stood immovable watching the young doctor
who proceeded on his way, head down against the driving rain and wind.
Dreeme smiled sarcastically to himself. He was certainly a popular man
in Marlborough. The rain dripped in an unceasing stream from the front
brim of his hat and got into his eyes. It flowed into the back of his
neck. It was in his shoes now. Every time he stepped he made a sucking
sound. But it was cool and not altogether unpleasant. It quenched the
restless fire of his body, and soothed his torn nerves. He felt as
though he could walk for miles with this heavy down-pour beating upon
him and that he would be all the better for it. The front of Humphrey
Lathrop’s cottage, small and gray in the rain, loomed before him, and
he opened the rickety gate and walked up the path. He would find out
everything now, and he would not leave Humphrey until he did.


II

Dreeme pushed the untasted tumbler of apple-jack away with an
expression of disgust, and stood up and pointed a questioning finger at
the old doctor. He demanded:

“Where is the place called Dagon?”

There was a finality in his voice that rang through the room. Humphrey
Lathrop’s jaw dropped and his three chins quivered like jelly. He
pushed back his reinforced chair from the table with a mighty effort
and an enormous scraping sound. For an instant Dreeme feared that the
old man’s eyes would pop out of his head. There was amazement in them,
consternation, something very like terror. For the first time since
Dreeme had known him the old doctor was completely taken off his guard,
surprised, and routed.

“Where did ... where did....”

Lathrop fumbled for speech unsuccessfully, his tongue sticking to the
roof of his mouth. He glanced cautiously about the room as though he
expected invisible foes to spring up on all sides. Dreeme, amazed at
Lathrop’s reaction, stood with outstretched hand and pointing finger,
awaiting his answer with an obvious determination that no beating
about the bush might distract. The rain dripped from the bottom of his
trousers, and made a dark pool about him on the round rag carpet. The
clock ticked desolately as he waited. Lathrop spoke slowly and with
evident reluctance. He said:

“Where the bones were buried.”

He appeared to have given up all hope of dissuading Dreeme from the
subject.

“Bones? What bones? What does that mean?” cried Dreeme.

Lathrop’s voice was monotonous.

“The bones of the Salem witches.”

A great light seemed to flood Dreeme’s mind, that light that had once
been so far away, but it was too dazzling for him as yet. A voice
deep inside him was talking feverishly, saying things, explaining,
indicating. He could not catch the sound of the words. The voice was
talking too fast. The words ran together. They were a febrile blur of
sound.

“You must explain everything, Humphrey,” he said in a calm voice as
he sat down. “I’m in this thing too deep now. Somebody I know ... is
affected.”

The old doctor nodded, and then, reaching for his tumbler of
apple-jack, drank the entire potion down in a single draught. He choked
and wheezed for a moment.

“You hit me amidships then,” he remarked soberly. “Where did you hear
of the place called Dagon?”

“Never mind,” returned Dreeme. “Don’t stave me off with questions. Tell
me things.”

“I’m going to,” answered Lathrop mildly. “I’m going to tell you things.
You’re going to have it all now, and much good may it do you.”

His eyes roved about the room. Then they reverted to Dreeme.

“Suppose you tell me everything first,” he said in a wheedling voice.
“I want to know what you’ve found out. There is no use duplicating the
few facts and suspicions that I possess.”

Dreeme eyed him impatiently.

“All right,” he said shortly, and plunged immediately into his tale. In
a rapid condensed form he told Lathrop of the first visit he had paid
to Westcott’s house, of the two conversations with Martha Westcott,
of the death of Wagner, of the strange fright of Deborah, and of
the goat’s head. He strove to reinterpret the theory of will which
Jeffrey Westcott had put forward in the burned mill. He explained
his suspicions of the Reverend George Burroughs. Lathrop listened
attentively, his head on one side, and his great lips pursed so that
they thrust out like the snout of a pig. Occasionally he would nod.
Once or twice his eyes opened very wide. In one instance he emitted a
triumphant cluck as though some suspicion he had carried in his mind
for years were verified.

“Will you fetch me down that big black book?” he said softly when
Dreeme concluded his tale, indicating the little shelf that was nailed
high on the wall behind him. Dreeme strode over and drew forth a bulky
volume that was covered with dust, blew it off, and brought it to the
table where he placed it. He deliberately read the title on the back of
the tome as he laid it down. The name “Cotton Mather” was printed there
in faded gilt letters. Lathrop smiled, a smile with no humor in it, and
drew the book toward him. Then he adjusted his spectacles and leaned
back very much like a judge about to give a decision.

“I tried to keep you away from this,” he said, “for good and sufficient
reasons, and chief among them was the peace of your own mind and the
degree of your success in Marlborough. Well, you have lost the peace of
your mind, and there is no longer any reason to suppose that you will
ever have any success in Marlborough. There is no reason, therefore,
why you should not know as much as I know. I will tell you, Daniel,
that what you have told me has made some dark places clear to me,
and verified certain suspicions which I have wisely kept to myself.
Therefore, in making plain to you what I know I shall adjust some of
your own information into the scheme of things.”

After this preamble he cleared his throat loudly, searched through the
huge volume before him until he found a certain place, closed the book
upon a pudgy finger that retained the page, and glanced soberly at
Dreeme.

“It’s witchcraft we have to deal with,” he said mildly. “It’s a cursed
madness that has ruled this valley since 1692.”

Dreeme nodded without surprise. He suspected this, indeed, he knew it.

“Yes, sir, witchcraft,” repeated the old doctor. “You probably don’t
believe in it. No more do I. But the outward forms of it exist just as
surely as the outward forms of the Christian religion exist. It has its
established hierarchy, although I believe today that it is the weapon
of madmen, charlatans, and fanatics.”

He sighed loudly.

“This is a mad world, Daniel,” he said. “We are all more or less
insane. Well, I’m getting nowhere. As I age I grow more discursive.”

Dreeme moved restlessly and the old doctor lifted a hand.

“Let me tell you this in my own way,” he said. “You’ll have it all
before I am done.”

Lathrop cleared his throat and fastened his eyes upon Dreeme.

“In 1692,” he said, “the little town of Salem went insane. You’ve read
your history and you know all about the witch scares and the hangings
on Gallows Hill. You know how the children cried out that they were
possessed, and gave testimony against various men and women in the
community, and how the judges and preachers strove to battle with
this strange outbreak of insanity. I don’t have to give you a resumé
of that history. It is enough to remind you of it. It is the common
conclusion of most scholars that all this was a form of religious
mania, and that the people who were hanged were not professed witches
but victims of hallucinations and enmity. I don’t believe it. I believe
those people belonged to a secret and blasphemous order that met all
over the world, that they were divided into covens or parishes, that
they each had their leader in the shape of a Black Man who represented
the Devil, that they worshipped Satan, and that they attempted to
practise magic. I believe that they were unhinged to such a degree that
they could imagine themselves flying through the air, that they were
addicted to hallucinations and delusions and visions, that, like the
whirling dervishes, they could fling themselves into hysteric trances
and dwell in the domain of their sick imaginations. They believed those
things, Daniel. They had faith in Satan. And they attained a malevolent
strength through their faith. They could superimpose their will on
innocent people and make those people sick by the power of suggestion.
There is nothing supernatural in that, after all. It is supernormal,
perhaps, but you know my views on these things. The trappings and
the ceremonies and the results might seem supernatural, but that was
because the people in those days did not know about such things as
thought-transference, auto-suggestion, and the impulsion of the will.
In a measure, these people were liberating themselves from time, moving
beyond the limitations of their days, subsisting in an arcane of their
own manufacture through the full strength of those fanatical beliefs,
which, after all, is saying no more than that they liberated their
wills and believed in the strength of their wills. Well, in 1692 all
this was brought to a halt by the hangings and the persecutions of the
witch-judges. The Salem coven was demolished and scattered. Do not
think, however, that all the witches were strung up on Gallows Hill.
Others fled into the woods and sought far places where they might
conduct their orgies and ceremonies in their own way. The larger group,
and now, Daniel, I am telling you something I read in a book of which
you have heard, hovered in the wilderness about Salem for some weeks,
living on roots and berries and what the Indians might give them, for
the Indians, too, believed in witchcraft. By night they ventured to the
desolate graves of their hanged companions and dug up those bodies and
bore them away with them into the thick forest. They pushed westward,
avoiding the little settlements in the clearing, passing north of
Springfield, crossing the Connecticut River, and eventually they came
to a valley and discovered it to be a lost cul-de-sac in the hills,
and there they settled down. With them they had the black book of the
order, a book filled with ceremonies and liturgies, and in which a
scribe set down the account of their wanderings. Can you guess where
they settled, Daniel?”

Dreeme nodded.

“Here,” he said. “They settled in this valley. These farmers are their
descendants. The black book they carried with them was the black book
of old Uriah Carrier.”

Lathrop wagged his head up and down.

“That’s right,” he said. “As a boy I looked into that book and was
frightened out of my wits. Yes, Daniel, they settled here, still
carrying on their frightful ceremonies, still calling upon the devil by
night and meeting in the secret forest clearings to dance in the light
of the moon. One place they kept sacred. It was a hidden place, known
only to the adepts. It was there that they buried the bones of the
hanged witches, those poor bodies that they had carried for two hundred
miles through the thick wilderness. There, too, they raised the Devil
Stone upon which the Black Man stood during the great ceremonies. They
called the place Dagon and strewed it with ashes. I can picture that
place lighted by torches at midnight. I can picture the rapt faces of
the witches and the compelling eyes of the Black Man as he stood above
them and called on Satan, on Beelzebub, on Asmodeus, the fiends that he
imagined served his purpose. I can hear the laughter of the women and
see their glistening eyes as the madness took them. By day they were
taciturn people, carrying on the quiet masquerade of pioneers, building
up homes in the clearing, pushing the forest farther and farther back;
but when the moon rose the madness that was in their blood swept them
out of themselves and they became other creatures employing pagan
symbols and ancient phallic ceremonials. They existed in a domain
out of place and time, then, a land of hallucinations and dreams and
primitive urges. It was a land where they celebrated the Black Mass
and the Witches’ Sabaoth, and gave full rein to the frenzies of the
blood and brain. I’ve never seen the place called Dagon, Daniel, and
I never hope to see it, but I suspect where it is. I suspect that the
Devil Stone is still there, and if one dug deep enough one would come
to crumbled bones, if, indeed, bones last that long.”

The old doctor drew a long breath and paused. He reached for the
apple-jack bottle and poured himself a drink.

“I’m developing into an old drunkard,” he remarked. “Imagine it. At my
age!”

He drank half the tumbler of amber liquor and set it down on the table.
The roar of the rain filled the room and Dreeme, gazing toward the
window, could perceive nothing but a silver opaqueness that ran and
glittered. He waited for Lathrop to go on, knowing that the old doctor
could tell his story best in his own way.

“Now then,” said Lathrop, wiping his mouth with a fat hand. “Where was
I? Where, for that matter, are any of us? That’s philosophy, Daniel.”

He summoned up a smile, but it was lost in the earnest attention of the
young doctor. He said slowly:

“I didn’t actually lie to you, Daniel, but I did conveniently forget
to tell you some things the other day. I thought there was no need
of spreading a story that had better not have existed at all in the
beginning. Well!”

He sighed wheezily. Then he resumed his story.

“It was not alone the descendants of the Salem witches who wandered
into this valley and established homes,” he said. “You’ve heard of
Thomas Morton of Merry Mount, haven’t you?”

Dreeme nodded. Of course, he had. Why, Deborah....

“Morton,” said the old doctor, “was a rascal who headed a colony
of loose fellows. They sold liquor to the Indians, disregarded the
Puritanical laws of living, laughed at religion, and injected a
licentious scarlet into the gray cloth of the old New England. You can
imagine that carousing colony near enough to Boston to cause the good
Puritans a prodigious loss of sleep. It was something that they hated
and feared because it stirred in them the covered embers of their own
suppressed excesses, I suppose. Uncommitted sins that are buried in the
blood and brain are fearful things, Daniel. I imagine that most of the
Puritans sublimated their fleshly longings into a religious ardor but
this would make them fear the downright honesty of openly committed
sin more than ever. Anyway, when news reached Boston that the Morton
colonists had reared a huge May pole and were dancing about it with
their skins full of good liquor and debauching all the likely squaws
they could lay hands on, they decided that something drastic should be
done. So a body of armed men (crusaders of the Lord, Daniel) marched
to Merry Mount, cut the May Pole down, strewed the place with ashes,
cursed it and called it Dagon (you see how the name crops up?), and
scattered the befuddled revelers. What was more natural than that some
of these topers and lechers should push westward into the wilderness,
having, so to speak, their bellies full of Puritanical oppression? To
the west they came, then, following an old trail that led north of
Springfield and across the Connecticut River, and eventually they found
themselves in this valley. Leeminster was the town settled by them. So
there you have the two towns, Daniel. I don’t know which was settled
first. It doesn’t make any difference. They were near enough for daily
intercourse, and I suppose there was some inter-marriage. Whether the
witch-fever spread to Leeminster or not is a mystery. I am on dubious
ground now, for most of the opinions I have arrived at are the result
of deduction and there is no documentary proof to bolster me up. That
is why I am chary at giving vent to them. Some of the things that you
have told me seem to substantiate a few of the suspicions I have had.
My voice, Daniel, is getting awfully hoarse.”

He paused and finished his tumbler of apple-jack.

“You are going to be reeling in a minute,” said Dreeme impatiently.

Lathrop wheezed and chuckled.

“No, sir,” he said. “When you see me reel you’ll see a sight.”

He chuckled again. Dreeme observed an apoplectic glow on his fat
cheeks, however, and it made him uneasy. He was afraid that the old
doctor’s head would loll to one side, and that the continuation of the
story would be a series of stertorous snores. He had seen it happen
before for Lathrop plied the apple-jack not wisely but too well.

“Where was I?” inquired Lathrop mildly. He rolled his blue eyes at the
ceiling in thought.

“Oh!” he said in faint surprise as he unexpectedly lighted on the
thread of his conversation. “Oh, yes!”

“Marlborough and Leeminster proceeded on their solitary way while the
land developed,” he declared. “Towns sprang up on all sides of them,
but they were protected by their valley and the fact that no large
artery of travel cut through them. They were in a cul-de-sac. They
accepted the modernities of living suspiciously and in a gingerly
manner. Being farmers, the natives subsisted by themselves and without
too much aid from the outside world. As time passed on I imagine the
witch practices ceased, although the memories of them were handed down
from father to son, and mother to daughter. They were not so much
ashamed of these practices, at first, as they were reticently jealous.
The very fact of them made them different from other men and women.
When I came here I found no signs of secret practices. I did find a
dour reticence, perhaps a more antagonistic one than you have run up
against. But I paid no attention to it, and I minded my own business. I
did not ask questions. I did not watch people. I admit that I thought
a lot. I read a great deal of history, and tried to orientate these
people. It was from old Captain Uriah Carrier himself that I got my
clew, for, thinking me no more than a mere boy and being a boastful old
scoundrel, he told me that he was the last Black Man, and he even, in
a burst of drunken recklessness one night, showed me the book that had
been in his family for generations. It was easy enough for me to put
two and two together after that. Being wise though I put them together
by myself and kept my convictions to myself. I....”

Lathrop developed a choking fit and sputtered for a few minutes while
Dreeme waited impatiently. The old doctor made a half-gesture toward
the apple-jack bottle, thought better of it, and withdrew his hand
reluctantly.

“You see Marlborough today,” he said wearily, leaning back in his
chair, “and you see a community that has hugged a secret to its bosom
for centuries. These men and women are alive to the past, to the
terrible heritage which they possess, and they desire to eradicate it
from common knowledge, to bury it, as it were, in the dust-heap of gone
things. That is their first impulse. They do not want strangers to know
that they have descended from condemned witches. Now there’s Jeffrey
Westcott.”

He paused and blinked his blue eyes.

“Who is he?” he proceeded. “I don’t know. You don’t know. But we can
guess what his purpose is. You’ve told me all about his maunderings
about the mightiness of the will, the theory he hinted at to you in
the burned mill that night. Now this is what I see, Daniel. Westcott
fell in with Peleg Carrier in Germany, learned from him about the
witch-cult that had existed here, and came to find out more about
it. He had a theory of his own, a theory in an inchoate state, and
he fancied that witch practices might be subdued to the ends of that
theory. When he was settled here he found that he could start nothing,
for these people had ceased to practice the so-called Black Arts.
What he needed was a key, a weapon to drive the farmers before him.
He found that weapon in Captain Uriah Carrier’s black book. All he
had to do was to startle the morose inhabitants of Marlborough and
its outlying district with the testimony from this book, for the will
toward witchcraft was already a part of their blood’s inheritance. I
believe, Daniel, that he reinstituted witch meetings, formed a coven
here, and made himself the ruling Black Man. That’s why he’s avoided;
that’s why his farm is shunned territory. He commands the dark side of
the nature of Marlborough. These people lead two lives, and one of them
is the surface life that we see going on about us. The other is the
secret life that centers about the place called Dagon. Westcott drives
them through their fears and their secret weaknesses, weaknesses that
they might fight against and successfully conquer if he were not here.
When he goes the whole scaffolding of mummeries will break down, these
people will become normal inhabitants, and all this stuff will seem
like some wild dream. That’s what I think, Daniel.”

Dreeme nodded an assent.

“That’s it,” he agreed. “Now what can we do about it?”

Lathrop scowled heavily.

“_I_,” he emphasized, “can do nothing about it.”

“Something must be done about it,” urged Dreeme.

“Then you do it, Daniel,” said the old doctor. “And God be with you.”

He shook his head dolefully.

“I’m not a witch-hunter,” he explained mildly. “Neither am I Don
Quixote or Bayard or Sherlock Holmes or ... or....”

He continued to roll his head from side to side slowly.

“No, Daniel,” he protested, “I’m the man who sits in a chair all day.”

He reverted to the phenomena that Dreeme had adumbrated during his
story.

“The various things you’ve told me,” he said, “clear up, as I’ve
pointed out before, some of my suspicions. Let us take up the wax
figures first, those little puppets that Deborah Morton found behind
Westcott’s books. That’s an old witchcraft trick. A doll is made
and baptized with the name of some living person against whom the
witch desires revenge or evil. Then needles are thrust into those
places where the person is to be injured and charms are recited over
the little figure. Westcott, I believe, imagined this mummery would
sharpen and direct the invisible strength of his will. You say one of
the dolls had a needle thrust into its leg. Well, Westcott got shot in
the leg, didn’t he? I imagine that was his first charm, a charm against
himself. And it worked. Never ask me how it worked, but it did. The
other doll had needles through its eyes. Well, how about the wooden
pegs driven into Wagner’s eye-sockets?”

Dreeme shuddered as he recalled the disfigured face grinning up at him
from the bank of the Saccarac River.

“I don’t believe Westcott killed Wagner,” added Lathrop. “No, sir. I
believe he wanted the hired man dead because he found out that the poor
fellow was acting as a go-between for Martha Westcott and yourself. Now
into whose brain did Westcott force the thought of and will for this
murder? Find that out, Daniel, if you can.”

“I intend to,” said the young doctor, his mouth a thin line of
determination.

“But don’t forget,” remarked Lathrop, “that there may be a little doll
somewhere christened Daniel Dreeme with a needle through its heart.”

“I’ll take my chance,” said Dreeme.

“We come to the goat’s head,” proceeded Lathrop. “That puzzles me. I
know its origin but not its purpose.”

Dreeme was visibly excited at this topic.

“Here we sit like two Sherlock Holmes,” chuckled the old narrator,
“and we’re really two Doctor Watsons. Amateurs, Daniel, amateurs.”

Suddenly he sobered up.

“The goat’s head,” he explained, “was the seal of Thomas Morton of
Merry Mount. It is still extant upon legal documents which he left
behind him. I’ll venture to assert, Daniel, that your Deborah, who
wears that seal, apparently, about her neck, is a descendant of the
Morton clan. Old Thomas left enough illegitimate progeny, God knows,
and there is no reason why some of these women may not have taken
the rascal’s name. Why the goat’s head should have been clutched in
Wagner’s hand or why it is branded on Martha Westcott’s shoulder is
beyond my reasoning faculties. Those are things that you will have to
find out.”

Slowly he opened the bulky black volume before him.

“Daniel,” he said, “listen to this. I am reading from Cotton Mather.”

He bowed over the page and read slowly:

“... this Rampant Hag, Martha Carrier, was the person, of whom the
Confessions of the Witches, and of her own Children among the rest,
agreed, That the Devil had promised her, she should be Queen of Hell.”

He looked up solemnly.

“That, I take it,” he remarked, “is the fountainhead of the Carrier
family. You notice she had children. She was the Queen of Hell, Daniel,
the Queen of Hell. That’s a brave title for a Puritan lady.”

He turned back to the book and searched through a few pages. Finding
what he sought for, he cleared his throat and looked up.

“Now then,” he said, and began to read again.

“‘Richard Carrier affirmed to the jury that he saw Mr. George
Burroughs at the witch meeting at the village and saw him administer
the sacrament.’ And here’s another interesting bit. ‘He,’ ... that’s
Burroughs, Daniel.... ‘He was Accused by Eight of the Confessing
Witches, as being an Head Actor at some of their Hellish Rendezvouses,
and one who had the promise of being a King in Satan’s kingdom, now
going to be erected....’”

Lathrop closed the book with a snap and a puff of dust started up from
it.

“And there,” he said, “is the stock from which your sallow
preacher-friend, the Reverend George Burroughs, descends. I point these
things out to you, Daniel, so that you may understand how clear the
stock has come down from the Salem witch-days. There’s another place
in this book, if I recollect aright, where the witches accused George
Burroughs of bringing puppets with him and sticking thorns into those
puppets. Burroughs, I suppose, was the Black Man, or one of the Black
Men, who ruled the New England coven. There we are, Daniel. Now you
know all that I know and I imagine you can see why I wanted to keep
it from you. I thought the ancient fever would die out and that there
would be no need of all this speculation. It seems not.”

He wheezed heavily and shook his head.

“What must I do, Humphrey?” asked Dreeme.

Lathrop opened his eyes very wide and pointed a pudgy finger at the
young doctor.

“Do?” he said. “Why, be a wise man. Take your little Deborah Morton
with you and get out of the valley and settle elsewhere and live your
life without worrying about these things. This situation cannot last.
Westcott is undoubtedly mad, and he will blow himself up in some
devilish experiment, or some farmer will do for him. Why should you
stay here rooting into things that, after all, are no concern of yours?
If these fools want to play at being witches, let them. Much good may
it do them! Your life is all before you, and it moves on another arc
than the existence in this gray town of Marlborough.”

He sighed and glanced at the silver-streaked window where the runnels
of rain slid unceasingly.

“I’m anchored here,” he said sadly. “I’m an old hulk rotting in a
forgotten dry-dock. Time has forgotten me. All I can do is sit in this
chair and watch absolutely nothing go by and cogitate upon it. It’s a
bright prospect, Daniel, a bright prospect.”

“I shall go away,” remarked Dreeme slowly. “Just when, I don’t know,
but soon ... soon.”

He, too, watched the rain beating against the window-panes and listened
to the confused roar of the storm as it beat over Marlborough. It
was pleasant to sit in a dry warm nook and observe the elements
raging vainly outside. The valley was full of the grey smoke of the
down-pour, and the greedy soil, that had parched beneath the hot sun;
was drinking the cool water, bringing its measure of relief to the tiny
thrusting roots that fumbled about in the darkness for nourishment. It
had not rained since the night he had first gone to the Westcott farm,
since he had stood in the dark doorway with Martha Westcott listening
for the sound of wings in the air; and that had been but a brief storm,
a swift and vanishing interruption of the parched season that had
hovered over the valley. That had been but a few days ago, and yet how
far away it seemed. Wonderingly he watched the rain beat against the
window and listened to the whirring music that filled the cloudy air.


III

Walden Slater had drawn his rickety rocker back against the wall and
he sat just outside the curtain of water that dripped from the eaves
of the back piazza. He looked through the swinging silver hangings
of rain soberly, his empty corncob pipe drooping disconsolately from
his wide mouth. It was evident that he was deep in the concentration
of difficult thought for his brows wrinkled and his head bowed still
lower as he twiddled a small bit of wood in his hand and gazed blankly
at the whirring rain. Dreeme stood in the back door and watched him.
Behind the young doctor in the kitchen Deborah moved about, her small
clear voice raised as she attempted unsuccessfully to converse with
the reticent Mrs. Slater who paraded back and forth with dishes and
answered her in grudging monosyllables. There was an excited quaver in
Deborah’s voice that moved Dreeme, the note of a stifled excitement.
They all had something on their minds. They were all concealing
something from one another. The very atmosphere induced an ingrowing
that was unhealthy and unnatural. Dreeme coughed loudly and shifted
his position. Walden Slater did not stir. He still sat crouched in the
rocker rolling the bit of wood between his stumpy fingers.

“I should think the rain would cheer you up,” remarked Dreeme.

Walden Slater turned his head slowly, inspected the young doctor with a
blank eye, and then resumed his study of the rain.

“Won’t it be good for the crops?”

“Umph,” said Walden Slater. He twiddled his bit of wood and looked at
the sky.

“I’m going to marry Deborah,” announced Dreeme.

Walden Slater turned deliberately around and stared at the young
doctor. He looked first at his shoes, then his trousers, then his coat,
and finally into the doctor’s face. His eyes were opaque mirrors. He
cleared his throat. He said:

“Be you?”

His tone was mild and there was no surprise in his voice.

“I reckoned so,” he added after a moment.

“Any objections?” asked Dreeme.

Walden Slater watched the rain carefully.

“Do you ever whittle?” he inquired.

Dreeme laughed aloud.

“No,” he said. “I don’t even carry a knife.”

His mind flashed back to dour farmers seated morosely before the post
office and general store whittling away at small pieces of wood,
industriously carving nothing to pass away the endless time.

“No objections at all,” remarked Walden Slater mildly.

Both of them heard the humming of the Reverend George Burroughs as he
came through the kitchen from the dining room, and Dreeme drew back
with some distaste as the tall sallow figure pushed through the door to
the back piazza.

“The Lord gives plenteously,” intoned the preacher as his black
expressionless eyes roved from the faces of the two men to the gusts of
rain that swept across the green foliage beyond the house.

“Lend me your knife,” requested Walden Slater, twiddling the bit of
wood in his hand.

The Reverend George Burroughs extracted an old clasp-knife from his
pocket and passed it over to the farmer. Walden Slater began to
methodically whittle the bit of wood he held to a fine point. The tiny
shavings fluttered to the floor.

“A fine rain makes a fine crop,” announced the preacher.

“A fine crop makes a fine profit,” added Dreeme, saying the first thing
that popped into his mind.

“A fine knife makes a fine point,” declared Walden Slater. “This knife
is dull.”

He handed it back without any thanks, and the preacher stowed it away
in his pocket. Dreeme drifted back through the kitchen preparatory to
returning to his study. The conversation was altogether too dull.


IV

Dreeme was jerked out of a sound sleep by a strong hand grasping his
shoulder. He started up with an uncontrollable cry of amazement.

“Get into your clothes,” said a voice. “It’s time.”

He recognized Walden Slater’s voice. Without any questions he leaped
out of bed and hurried into his trousers and shirt. A heavy rain
pounded on the roof as he completed his brief toilet, and shook his
head violently to recover his partially benumbed senses. Walden Slater
moved before him as they hurried for the stair-case and ran down it to
the entrance hall. Before dashing out through the door into the rain
Dreeme flung his still soggy rain-coat about him. A moment later they
stood in the road where the heavens seemed to open and let down an
unimaginable flood upon them. Walden Slater snatched up a storm-proof
lantern from the ground by the gate, and as he stooped his heavy coat
gaped open and Dreeme caught a glimpse of the butt of the Smith and
Wesson revolver thrust into his belt.

“What is it, Walden?” gasped the young doctor. “For God’s sake, find
your tongue.”

“I can find my tongue when I want it,” replied the farmer. “You come
with me.”

They splashed through the puddles up the gradual rise of the Leeminster
Road, bowing their heads to the fierce blows of the frantic gusts of
rain that sought to thrust them back. Dreeme was running in his bare
feet.

“Walden!” he gasped. “Walden!”

“Deborah’s gone. Disappeared completely,” cried Walden Slater with
unwonted vigor. “So’s Burroughs. Does that tell you anything? Dreeme,
I’ve thought this whole thing out. You come with me.”

He ran all the faster, and Dreeme followed him while a mounting rage
seethed within him.

“I know what I know,” the farmer called back over his shoulder.

Dreeme seemed to be borne along by the furies within him. He
accelerated his pace and soon was abreast of the farmer. For a time
they ran doggedly, the breath whistling in their lungs. Under their
feet drummed the boards of the bridge that spanned the Saccarac River.
A moment later they were on even ground. Deborah gone! How or why she
had gone Dreeme did not know, but Walden Slater knew, and that was
enough. It would be time enough later to ask questions. Yet Dreeme,
leaning his head closer to the farmer, did ask something.

“Where are we going?” His voice rose in a shout. “To the Westcott farm?”

“Dagon, damn it, Dagon!” shouted back the farmer. “We’re going to the
place called Dagon!”

They ran all the faster through the relentless rain.




Chapter Nine


I

As Dreeme, racing close at the heels of Walden Slater, circled the
Westcott farm-house, he glanced up curiously at the windows. There was
no light. The building gloomed in its cluster of trees just as it had
that first night when he had stumbled after the boy Miles along the
uneven path and entered through the back door. It was like a house of
the dead, a dwelling-place from which the rose-colored actualities of
living had long ago vanished. Around it, the tall dark trees kept their
somber watch, standing like ghostly sentinels. The spark of Walden
Slater’s lantern sent strange beasts of shadows scurrying into the
underbrush that lined the hummocky path. At the back door the farmer
set down his light and hammered upon the wood with the butt of his
revolver. The sound seemed to echo inside the house. It was like the
echo that comes from a musty tomb when the iron grille that guards its
dead from the living world is shaken. If there was anything in back of
the wood against which Walden Slater was hammering so vigorously, that
shape or being or spectre was standing mute.

“Of course not,” muttered the farmer. With a fierce kick of his
heavy boot he crashed the door open and it smashed against the wall
on broken hinges. The intruder entered slowly, holding the lantern
before him in one hand and grasping his cocked revolver in the other.
Dreeme followed at his heels. The small beam of light darted about the
room reflecting the stuffed chairs, the wax flowers under glass, the
photographic enlargements on the wall. Dreeme’s mind automatically
swept back to that time when he had followed Martha Westcott through
this room trembling from the magnetism of her strange personality.
Walden Slater circled the sitting room slowly, lifting his lantern to
view the pictures and examining the tables and the chairs. He seemed to
be looking for something, some hint that might indicate the direction
that he desired. “Uriah,” he muttered, pausing before one picture, a
particularly large and atrocious piece of workmanship that hung above
the wax flowers. Dreeme caught a glimpse of a glittering eye highly
touched by the painter’s art.

“What are we searching for?” he inquired. “Shouldn’t we get on?”

Walden Slater said nothing but strode toward the door that led to the
library. He kicked it open unceremoniously and entered and Dreeme
followed close at his heels. It was just as the young doctor remembered
it.

“Light the lamp,” said the farmer. Dreeme fumbled at the chimney
and wick, and an instant later the pale yellow glow illuminated the
room. The crowded book-stacks leaned forward, and the ancient volumes
seemed to watch the intruders speechlessly. The young doctor walked
impatiently about the table where he had once seen Jeffrey Westcott
seated. He felt that they were wasting time, that Deborah was confined
somewhere in some secret place from which she should be rescued as
speedily as possible. He wanted to say this to the farmer, to get him
started on the way to the place called Dagon, and yet he refrained
from speech, for Walden Slater was obviously looking for something.
He, too, circled the room, inspecting the backs of the books with a
swift and keen eye. Dreeme paused near one case and read a few faded
titles. “Certainty of Worlds of Spirits” by Richard Baxter. “De la
Démonomanie des Sorciers” par Jean Bodin. “Sadducismus Triumphatus” by
Joseph Glanvil. “Daemonolatria” by Nicholas Remigius. “Discourse of the
Subtill Practises of Devilles” by George Giffard. He turned abruptly to
the farmer.

“What are we looking for?” he asked.

“The goat’s head,” replied the farmer. He had ruffled through the
papers on Westcott’s table.

“Do you know what that means?” exclaimed Dreeme.

Walden Slater nodded.

“Be patient,” he said. “It’s the signal for the Esbat.”

He continued to rummage about the room.

Suddenly he snorted in triumph, and started for the door. Dreeme
followed close at his heels. The farmer, still holding his lantern,
turned a corner and they began to climb a narrow flight of stairs.
Behind them in the deserted library the oil-lamp perched precariously
on the corner of the table and quivered at each gust of rainy air that
swept through the window.

They wandered through two bedrooms, the feeble flare of the lantern
illuminating neatly-made beds, and came to a closed door that
apparently opened into a room on the rear of the house. Walden Slater,
employing his usual tactics, kicked it open and they entered into a
small chamber that was entirely unfurnished except for a raised stone
slab on three perpendicular pillars of granite in the corner. The
farmer made his way immediately toward this strange bit of furniture
and held his lantern over it, inspecting the corrugated surface of the
stone. Dreeme, standing beside him, saw dark stains on the slab and a
small keen-bladed knife that appeared more like a lancet than anything
else. The knife glittered in the ray of the lantern and the young
doctor was overwhelmed by a sudden fear. He stared wide-eyed at the
farmer, and Walden Slater’s long upper lip quivered in the dim light.
Dreeme struggled between an absorbed excitement in their discoveries
and his intense concern for Deborah’s safety. She was somewhere not
far from them, her mind a riot of fear, waiting frantically for him.
He was sure of that. But what had happened to her in the meantime,
during those hours (and he was not sure how many they had been, for the
taciturn farmer had vouchsafed no specific information on this point)
she had passed since Burroughs enticed or kidnapped her from the Slater
house, he could not even guess. If any harm had come to her (and his
heart nearly ceased beating at the thought) he would not leave the
valley until he had killed Jeffrey Westcott and George Burroughs. A
cold determination seemed to freeze the emotions in him as he came to
this decision. His thin lips tightened and his eyes became like blue
steel.

“I shall go mad in a minute,” he said calmly to the farmer.

Walden Slater opened his mouth to speak and then, with a grunt that
expressed both surprise and relief, he pointed to the corner in back
of the stone slab. The dejected carcass of a chicken lay there in its
dishevelled feathers, its crop slit open and its blood dabbled upon the
floor.

“He’s been divining,” he said. Then he looked closely at the young
doctor.

“You perk up, Doctor Dreeme,” he added. “I know what I’m doing. There’s
no harm done to anybody ... yet.”

He bent over and fumbled about the limp carcass of the chicken and
then straightened his body with a grunt of satisfaction. In his hand
he held a small blood-smeared square of paper. Silently he turned and
strode down stairs, Dreeme close at his heels. He did not speak until
they had regained the comparative light of the library and then he
sank into Jeffrey Westcott’s chair by the table. The curtain from the
window fluttered inward, narrowly missing the chimney of the sputtering
lamp. Dreeme stood before the farmer, his eyes staring and his hands
trembling.

“I reckon I’ll have to explain a few things,” he remarked slowly, “or
you’ll be fainting on me, Doctor.”

“I’m not going to faint, Walden,” replied the young doctor, “but I am
mad to get on. I know Deborah’s in grave danger and I should be with
her.”

Walden Slater nodded gravely.

“Westcott is playing his last card to dominate the valley,” he said.
“He’s called an Esbat, a meeting, and he intends a sacrifice. I knew
it was coming ever since I saw that goat-head in Wagner’s fist. The
goat-head is used as an announcement for a coming event. Wagner was on
his way to somebody with the sign when he was smashed in the head and
killed. That’s when I started thinking. There hasn’t been an Esbat in
this valley since old Captain Uriah Carrier died, and my dad told me
all about him.”

He cleared his throat after this unexpectedly long speech. Then he
renewed his distasteful task of narration.

“We don’t want none of this stuff, Doctor,” he declared. “The farmers
want to forget what their grand-dads were. Westcott won’t let us
forget. He’s got Uriah’s black book and we’re all in it. He’s got some
of us fooled by stirring up feelings in us that we thought had died
out of us. It has died out of me. I don’t take any stock in this stuff
though my dad was befuddled by old Uriah and went to his Esbat.”

He cleared his throat again and held up the bit of paper. In the
lamp-glow Dreeme saw the tiny goat’s head carefully drawn in
blue ink and when Walden Slater slowly turned the paper he saw
“Dagon--two--nigger” written in small letters. He recalled now that he
had never turned over the bit of paper he had given to the coroner. He
recalled, too, the antagonism of the farmers who had stood so short a
distance from him when he had extracted the paper from Wagner’s stiff
hand.

“It seems that they meet at Dagon at two o’clock, and that Dagon is
somewhere in Nigger Swamp,” he said mechanically.

Walden Slater nodded his head in assent.

“That’s it,” he said. “Westcott sacrificed a chicken to see if the
signs were propitious. Apparently he decided they were, although what a
chicken’s crop has to do with it is beyond me.”

He stopped abruptly and turned his face toward the open window. Dreeme
listened, too, and he could hear the distinct sound of footsteps going
by the house. They apparently died away in the soft grass of the field
that stretched from the dwelling to Briony Wood.

“They’re gathering,” remarked the farmer simply. He stood up and
regained his lantern.

“We can’t know where they’ve hidden Deborah,” he said, “but we do know
that they’ll bring her to the place called Dagon. She’s to be the
sacrifice, Doctor.”

“They wouldn’t dare to kill her!” exploded Dreeme.

“There’s some things worse than death,” answered Walden Slater.

He moved toward the door and Dreeme followed him. Behind them the
forgotten lamp perched on the edge of the table, and as the wind
increased the curtain flapped ever nearer the yellow flame, a flame
that sputtered but, being shielded from the worst of the gust by a
protector, never went out. The two men passed through the sitting room
and out through the broken door into the storm which had now settled
down into a gusty drizzle.

“And, besides,” said Walden Slater slowly, “Wagner was killed, wasn’t
he?”

“Do you know who killed him?” asked Dreeme. “Was it Jeffrey Westcott?”

“I know that the pegs driven into his eye-sockets were whittled by a
mighty dull knife,” returned the farmer grimly.

They plodded on in silence after that, their heads bowed against
the driving wind and rain. Occasionally they stumbled over hammocks
of wet grass and once Walden Slater sprawled upon the ground, his
lantern rolling from his hand and blinking out. With a grumbled curse
he scrambled to his feet and picked up the extinguished lantern and
examined it.

“It’s busted!” he said vehemently, flinging it from him with an angry
gesture. They heard it clatter against a stone wall to the side of
them. After that they struggled on in the darkness across the field,
the black shadow of Briony Wood in its slight elevation looming nearer
and nearer against the faint glow of the stormy sky.

“If you meet anybody,” said the farmer suddenly, “don’t you say a damn
word. Keep your head down and trudge along.”

Dreeme muttered something in his throat. Mingled rain and perspiration
was streaming down his face and his naked feet were cut by the sharp
stones and twigs. He heard his heart beating violently in his bosom and
wondered if the farmer was as tired as he. They had crossed the greater
part of the field now and the ground was sloping upward before them,
sloping upward to tall spectral trees that stood with inter-mingled
branches and waited menacingly for their coming. It would be dark in
those trees and there would probably be no pathway. But they would have
to go on, for somewhere beyond the trees was the place called Dagon,
and it was at Dagon that he would next meet Deborah. Sobbingly he
climbed the slope at the heels of Walden Slater.


II

The trees reached out and took them in, circling about them in a massed
formation. They were in the darkness of Briony Wood now, a darkness
that was unrelieved by any light except the pale intermittent glow of
the sky that filtered through the bowed branches of the trees. The
unceasing storm rumbled in the leaves above them, and the incessant
drip of water sounded about them as they lurched over broken branches,
stones, unbared roots, and washed-out hollows. Far above the moist
darkness through which they struggled Dreeme thought he could hear a
faint humming, the sound of wind, perhaps, flowing along the tilted
tops of the taller trees. His labored breath chimed with it. Walden
Slater was lurching along doggedly beside him now, no longer ahead,
but shoulder to shoulder with him except when the unevenness of the
road they took caused them to stumble apart. It was good to feel his
sturdy shoulder as it struck against him occasionally. It was like a
tower filled with armed men who were always on guard. It was a fortress
against evil and chance. The farmer was silent, conserving his strength
for the difficult journey through the wood, and Dreeme, taking a lesson
from him, refrained from speech, although questions were beginning to
boil up in his restless mind. His intelligence was clarifying although
he was still in a riot of fear over the situation in which Deborah
must be. Images appeared and dissolved before his eyes. Deborah lying
on the rainy ground bound and gagged. Deborah insensible in some
secret retreat where George Burroughs, his sallow face aflame with
malice, bowed over her and blasphemously intoned Biblical phrases that
were twisted to serve the devil’s purpose. Deborah sitting wide-eyed
in an hypnotic trance while Jeffrey Westcott stood before her, his
cloven head bared to the rain and the wind. Deborah gazing into the
heavy-lidded remorseless eyes of Martha Westcott while the taciturn
farmers, muttering to one another, gathered about a great dripping
stone in the heart of Nigger Swamp.

The humming in the air increased steadily above the two travelers now
until it seemed as though a hundred and one far-away aeroplane engines
were singing their way through the darkness and rain like a swarm of
huge and unbelievable mosquitoes. Dreeme’s labored breath sucked in
his throat as he pushed the entangling spiky vines aside and thrust
his tired body forward. His bare feet were bruised and cut, but they
seemed devoid of all sensation, blotches of white meat that lifted and
fell with a maddening regularity. He was not sure that the humming he
heard was more than the blood pounding in his ear-drums and throbbing
in his temples. Yet it seemed to be more than that, to be, in fact, an
ominous and steadily-increasing warning of the approach of mysterious
and frightful things. It would not have surprised him to see a host
of devils and witches suddenly sweep through the tree-tops screaming
and laughing to one another. He could imagine them calling to one
another gross phrases, turning their red-rimmed eyes downward at him,
pointing with long-nailed hands and bursting into gales of infernal
laughter. Then he realized that his imagination was slipping from
his control and he strove to concentrate on Deborah, to save himself
from his own madness through the memory of her. He pitched forward
over oozy hummocks. The fierce thorns of clutching vines ripped along
his legs and arms. Malicious branches lashed murderously at his face.
Water sucked and gurgled about his naked feet. But he pressed forward
half-blindly, hardly conscious of the direction in which he was
proceeding, knowing only that Walden Slater’s shoulder struck against
his from time to time, and that a desperate and imperative necessity
was urging them into the depths of the marshy wood. Some small beast
scurried beneath his feet, and he screamed at the nervous tension of
the moment. He heard laboring branches crack and groan above his head
and the hollow sound where a dislodged stone rolled down an incline and
landed in a huge puddle. The humming had developed into a roar about
him. It was so dark that he could not see Walden Slater. He could not
even hear the heavy thud of the farmer’s boots. Suddenly he became
conscious that a devastating delirium of fear was engulfing him and
rendering him incapable of any action, “This is horrible!” he sobbed in
his throat. He stopped dead in his tracks, straightened his body, and
gazed upward until the faint glow of the stormy sky pierced his dulled
eye-sight. It came slowly, a gradual light, a milky hue against which
the silhouettes of the black branches cut sharply. Gazing steadfastly
he strove to quiet the tempest that shook his mind. He thought for
a moment that he could see small winking lights scurrying across the
surface of that milky sky, but, forcing himself to gaze fixedly, he
decided that these lights were no more than optical illusions or the
small sparks that rise in tired and over-strained eyes. His heart
was beating like a loud trip-hammer and he pressed one hand against
it tightly. Standing so for several seconds he experienced a slowing
of his nervous faculties, a sensation of again being master of
himself and not the victim of an unreasonable fear that was, perhaps,
self-implanted by a too imaginative mind. It was with actual surprise
that he felt Walden Slater’s sturdy arm about his shoulder urging him
forward. Clear-headed now he resumed the laborious toil of the journey.

This is New England, he thought. This is the tired land of forgotten
pioneer enterprises. This is the land of machinery and shoe factories
and canned goods and ice-skates. It is everything that is material
and dispiriting and “up-to-date” and unlovely. It is the land of lean
farms and thin mouths, too. It is a land of humming commercial cities,
of great businesses, of the New Day. But it is more than this, as
well. How if all this glittering commercial civilization is no more
than a huge shell, an incrustation of years, beneath which lurk the
old pagan madnesses that were corollaries of the Puritan repression?
How if the ancient Dionysiac urge did not perish but remained like an
ominous monster in a deep cavern biding its time and waiting its day?
Suppose that the May Pole of Merry Mount and the Witches’ Sabaoths of
Salem were to be reborn with disastrous consequences because of their
long suppression? Might not the humming wind be saying, “The day is
coming! The Black Man is coming! The May Pole of Merry Mount is to
be reared again on the site of the factory! The witches and warlocks
are to rule! The cities are to be laid waste for this huge shell of
civilization is no more than a pasteboard affair and it is only the
ancient furies and instincts that count in the long run!” Dreeme
permitted his imagination to go to whatever lengths it pleased as he
plunged through the forest with Walden Slater. He was fully aware of
the fancifulness and impossibility of his thoughts, but they seemed to
act as a release-valve for the feelings that boiled within him.

Walden Slater suddenly clutched his wrist in a huge gripping hand.
He drew the young doctor to one side, and as he did so Dreeme became
aware of the tiny bobbing jewel of light before them, a spark of yellow
that disappeared behind trees only to reappear again. The farmer did
not slack his pace but kept on rapidly, but Dreeme noted that there
was a tenseness in his walk. The light bobbed before them and they
gained on it. It grew in dimensions and before they had traveled many
rods Dreeme, by straining his eyes, perceived that it was a lantern
carried by a dark figure. He grew aware at the same time that other
figures were slipping noiselessly through the trees before them. He
even heard the subdued mutter of a voice somewhere to the right of
him. Still holding the young doctor by the wrist, Walden Slater made
a detour to the left and they circled the bobbing lantern. Keeping
their eyes turned toward the lantern they drew abreast of it, passed
it, and then Walden Slater uttered an exclamation as he bumped into a
sluggishly moving figure in the shadow of a huge over-arching tree.
“At Dagon,” said a low voice. An inspiration came to Dreeme. In a calm
subdued tone he answered, “For the Master.” The figure fell away into
the darkness of the trees and as they forged ahead Dreeme could feel
Walden Slater’s fingers tighten on his wrist in an approving manner.
The ground was growing more marshy and their feet sank into the soft
soil as they pressed forward. The young doctor suspected that they were
reaching that portion of Briony Wood that degenerated into Nigger Swamp
and that their objective was not so far before them now. Walden Slater
appeared to sense the same thing for his pace quickened automatically.
They moved rapidly now, their feet making a distinct sucking sound as
they lifted them from the muddy earth. The incline turned downward and
as its slope increased the two men found themselves wading through
good-sized pools of water and tall scratchy reeds that tore against
their legs. Their feet sank deeper in slushy mire and occasionally the
sleepy croak of a frog sounded in the darkness beyond them.

Although the journey was harder now, a painful lifting of one foot
after the other, Dreeme’s weariness seemed to fall from him. He was
like an eager hunter hot on the scent with the quarry almost in view.
Any moment, he thought to himself, I may turn a corner and see a ring
of dim lanterns about a huge stone and know that I am at the end of my
journey and that I have seen what no other stranger in this valley has
ever seen. The thought exhilarated him. So, too, did the memory that he
had passed other mysterious figures in Briony Wood, for it meant that
he was not late, that Deborah would be unharmed when he reached Dagon.
How she was to be taken away from the group of fanatics who gathered
in the swamp he did not know, but he trusted partially to the skill
of the silent Walden Slater and partially to the inspiration of the
moment. There would be a way, for he would make one. He was pleased
to think that there was no fear in his heart now, that his brain had
cleared, and that his nerves were steady. He had lost his madness in
Briony Wood, and that was good. There was nothing but a clear flame of
determination in him.

Walden Slater’s mouth was close to his ear.

“We’re not quite in the swamp yet,” he said. “There’s a road. We’ve got
to find it.”

He turned and started to walk rapidly at right angles to their previous
direction and Dreeme followed him.

There seemed to be nothing but swampy land, and in certain sunken
places the slimy water rose to their knees. The drizzling rain
continued to spit about them.

“We should have followed the lantern,” said Dreeme in a low voice.

“We’ll find the road all right,” replied Slater.

They trudged for some minutes through the water and mud and then Walden
Slater emitted a low ejaculation of satisfaction. At the same moment
Dreeme stumbled upward from the sucking mud to a firm elevation.
Turning again in the direction which they had previously followed the
two men followed this elevation which appeared to extend in a long
narrow ribbon into the darkness before them. It was the road all right,
and it ended at Dagon. Some distance ahead of them they could see the
bobbing lantern, and looking back Dreeme observed another lantern
coming down from the higher ground upon which stood Briony Wood. There
were farmers before him and behind them, and the only way in which
they might hope to avoid them would mean taking off into the swamp on
either side of the narrow road. Walden Slater, as though in answer to
an unasked question from Dreeme, said:

“The muck is up to your waist on either side. Don’t step off the road.”

The trees had thinned out, although a few grotesquely-twisted forms
loomed up about them. The eery glow in the sky swept across the long
desolate expanse, but it was not bright enough for the young doctor
to make out anything with any degree of accuracy. All that he could
see were great motionless shapeless shadows, bulks that squatted on
the marshy ground like prehistoric beasts. In the daytime they would
probably dwindle into nothing more menacing than bushes. But now
there was something sinister about them. They sat on huge haunches
and watched the two men travel along the narrow lifted road that ran
through the flooded land. Dreeme could almost imagine great sleepy
eyelids beneath which peered motionless eyes. He was neither frightened
nor moved by his thoughts. Instead of excitement the slow blood of
determination ran through his cold veins. He lifted his hand and
brushed the wet matted hair from his forehead and rubbed his straining
eyes. He could feel how set his face was, how the lines had deepened
in his cheeks, how tight his jaw was set. He could not make out Walden
Slater’s face in the deceiving rainy light, but he imagined that it was
set like his own, reflecting a determination that would be ruthless and
unescapable when the time for action came.


III

This was Nigger Swamp at last. The dark road ran like a pencil line
across the level expanse that waved in the rainy wind its monotonous
host of thin reeds. These reeds clacked together with a tiny rippling
sound that was half-drowned in the sturdier bluster of the lessening
gale. Rain still fell in a dispiriting manner, cold, large-dropped,
maddening in its relentless evenness. Dreeme felt the rain no longer,
for, soaked to the skin and numbed to the bone, the surface of his body
had lost all sensation. Even his feet were senseless now. He followed
the lurching beat of Walden Slater’s boots like a man in a trance. Yet
his faculties were alert. Though he experienced no physical sensation
he realized that his brain was clearing and capable of swift action.
It was like a live intelligence in a dead body. It was this live
intelligence that noted, even before the phlegmatic Walden Slater, that
the bobbing lantern ahead of them had stopped. The young doctor touched
the farmer on the arm.

“Look!” he whispered. “The man ahead has stopped.”

Both of them paused in their tracks and observed the stationary light
with some unrest. Dreeme glanced behind him and saw that the light
which was following them was steadily approaching nearer. He remembered
Walden Slater’s warning: “The muck is up to your waist on either side.”

“What shall we do?” he whispered to Walden Slater, indicating the
approaching stranger in their rear. The farmer said nothing but opened
his coat a bit and loosened the revolver in his belt. He glanced first
at the stationary light before them and then at the approaching light
behind them. After that, he spat reflectively into the swamp at his
side.

“We don’t want to kick up a fuss till we locate Deborah,” he said
mildly.

Even as he spoke the stationary lantern before them began to return on
its tracks, to approach them from the front even as the other lantern
approached them from the rear. They were caught between two fires now.

“Perhaps we can hide our faces,” whispered Dreeme. “Perhaps we can pass
them as we passed those other fellows back in Briony Wood.”

“Perhaps,” said Walden Slater noncommittally.

“Shall we stand out in the swamp?” asked Dreeme suddenly.

Walden Slater shook his head.

“You’d never pull yourself out of it again,” he said.

The light before them returned ten or twelve yards on its own track,
and then suddenly disappeared to the right, vanishing completely from
sight. Walden Slater grunted.

“They missed the cross path,” he said. “It’s a lucky thing for us.”

He started forward, accelerating his pace as much as the hummocky road
would permit, and Dreeme, suddenly relieved from the tenseness that
had held him like a coiled steel spring, followed with agility. It was
remarkable how refreshed he felt after that brief halt. He even forgot
the lantern that was following at his heels, perhaps fifty yards behind
him in the rainy gloom, a dancing midge in the deceptive air. The road
dipped a bit as they proceeded forward, and soon Dreeme observed low
bushes lining it, bushes that rose in height as they stumbled along
over the increasing unevenness. They were entering another expanse of
wooded territory, this time, without a doubt, the center of the swamp.
Trees shot up out of the mist about them and the road assumed the
aspect of a funnel that dwindled to nothingness before them. Walden
Slater walked very slowly now inspecting the bushes at the right of the
road. Soon the misty light vanished behind the climbing shrubbery and
trees and the farmer cursed softly to himself.

“Whereabouts did that lantern turn in?” he inquired of the night in
general. Dreeme did not attempt an answer, but went down and felt the
dark ground, fumbling about for possible footprints.

“You can’t find anything that way,” said the farmer ungraciously. He
blundered along close to the bushes, sometimes stepping through only
to catch himself just in time from toppling into the sunken mire from
which the soggy growths sprang. It was intensely dark now and they
could perceive nothing before them. Dreeme, lifting up his hand a foot
from his face, could not make it out. They were in an alley of small
trees and bushes that met above them.

“The lantern came back from here,” muttered Walden Slater. “I’ll swear
to that.”

He turned on his heel and retraced his steps.

“Look!” whispered Dreeme.

The lantern that had been following them was now less than thirty yards
before them. It approached slowly, its feeble spark illuminating a
small circle of milky haze. Who held it or how many were in the party
could not be made out. Walden Slater stopped by the side of the path
and Dreeme paused beside him. The lantern approached deliberately at
such a speed as to indicate that the person carrying it was walking
very slowly. The stranger, or strangers, were evidently studying the
right side of the road even as Walden Slater and Dreeme had studied
it, searching for an ingress into the swamp, for a concealed road that
would take them off at an angle from this main path.

“If they miss the road they won’t miss us,” murmured Dreeme.

The farmer said nothing but waited mutely for what might happen. When
the lantern was within ten yards of them it paused for an instant and
then disappeared. Walden Slater crept forward slowly. Dreeme followed
close at his heels. Reaching the spot where the lantern had disappeared
the farmer went over and fumbled at the ground. The charred trunk of a
tree met his hand. He grunted and stepped by it, almost sliding as he
struck a sharp incline, and then caught his balance on a narrow ribbon
of hard soil. The lantern had disappeared entirely, but the farmer and
Dreeme, stepping tentatively, discovered that the tiny footpath they
were now on curved steadily. They walked very silently now, stepping
as gently as they could along the path, a path covered with the soaked
dead leaves of many seasons. Their instincts told them that they were
reaching the end of their journey, that the time would soon come for
any action that they might plan. Dreeme felt a momentary inclination
to ask the farmer what he intended to do, but he repressed it, feeling
that Slater desired silence now. Like two Indians they stole forward
through the bushes and small trees, disturbing only an occasional
frog that croaked dismally from the swamp about them. A musty smell
of rotting vegetation was in their nostrils, of green-scummed water
disturbed by violent rains, of disintegrating animal life.

After some minutes walk the underbrush thinned sufficiently to permit
the pale reflection of the cloudy sky to reach them. It had practically
stopped raining, the unceasing drizzle dwindling into no more than an
occasional flutter of large cold drops that dashed against their faces.
The few trees dripped disconsolately, however, and whenever the uneven
road caused them to lurch against a bush they were covered by a tiny
unpleasant downfall. Some distance ahead of them they caught unfrequent
glimpses of the tiny lantern, glimpses that immediately winked out as
the road turned and followed the narrow ribbon of raised territory.
Something hard and cold cut against Dreeme’s naked foot and he bent
over and picked it up. Holding it up to the faint light he could dimly
make it out. A surprised and agitated exclamation broke from him, and
he turned to Walden Slater who had paused.

“Look,” he said, handing the object to the farmer.

Walden Slater turned it over slowly in his large dripping hand. His
long upper lip drew downward as he recognized it and handed it back
without a word to Dreeme. The young doctor stared at it again. It was
a brooch. A brooch upon which was the finely-cut cameo of a goat’s
head. Deborah’s brooch. The brooch he had seen hanging on her bosom
that evening before when they had walked through the quiet street of
Marlborough and had told each other so much. She had passed along ahead
of them, then, and was already at the place called Dagon. There could
be no time to lose now. Walden Slater, who had not said a word, was
walking along as rapidly as he could on the narrow uncertain road.
Dreeme, close at his heels and sometimes abreast with him when the road
permitted, kept pace with the farmer.

They were back among trees again. The young doctor had never realized
the extent of Nigger Swamp before. He had always pictured it as a small
circumscribed area of loathsome water and rotting bushes but now he
understood that it covered a vast expanse of territory. It was either
very large or the deceptive path they followed wound round and round
it in a spiral. Perhaps they had circled Dagon. Perhaps the path was
a maze that took the ignorant wanderer round and round until, by some
lucky chance, the riddle was solved and he stood at the heart. As
Dreeme labored onward his imagination drew into the dark void about
them the first descendants of the fugitive Salem witches who had
settled in this part of the world. He pictured to himself a breed of
silent, mad-eyed men in steeple-crowned hats and baggy knee-breeches
and homespun stockings and square-toed buckled shoes lurching along
this immemorial road. On their shoulders they bore heavy bell-mouthed
muskets and stands upon which to rest these muskets when they fired
at enemies. Powder horns swung from their shoulders and bags of round
bullets. There were women, too, sharp-faced, hawk-nosed women in white
caps and dull gray dresses, hurrying along and laughing hysterically
at the storm for there was no secrecy in those days, no reasons for
quietude in the unspoilt wilderness, no one to watch them except the
lean Indians in their breech-clouts of deer-skin, their proud fierce
faces crowned by the scalp-lock and the turkey-feather peering from
behind the trees in superstitious wonder. The startled deer crashed
through the underbrush and the brown bears lumbered away from the
flares of the torches and the old-fashioned lanterns. All this had died
away, had been erased by Time, had vanished into the nothingness of
dead and unwritten history.

Then, decades and decades and decades later, Uriah Carrier, by the maps
in his black book, had found the lost place called Dagon and he had
worked on the slumbering instincts of the people about him, appealing
to the madness that slept in their subconscious memories, bringing
them again to the secret stone and the place where the crumbled bones
rested. He had probably promised them dominion over their days, the
power of exerting their wills and destroying their enemies, the joys
of the liberation of their darkest instincts. It sounded impossible
enough on the face of it, like some insane fairytale that a sick
imagination might bring forth, and yet it must have been a fact for
here he was, a sane doctor in the twentieth century, stumbling through
the rotting vegetation of an untraveled swamp in search of a madman and
the fanatical minds he had released from the kindly bondage of reason.
It was like a nightmare.

Walden Slater halted abruptly. The road had grown somewhat wider
now and they had been walking abreast. About them the trees rose to
an imposing stature and the ground to right and left of them seemed
higher and firmer than that through which they had toiled for the last
half-hour. Dreeme imagined that they had reached a sort of island in
the middle of the swamp and his conviction was intensified when, after
peering right and left, before him and behind, Walden Slater stepped
from the road and began to thread a slow circuitous advance through
the trees. The ground as he stepped on it seemed softer than safety
might desire but the young doctor followed with alacrity. His bare
feet sank to the ankles in the soft ooze but following Walden Slater’s
example and stepping close to the trunks of the trees he discovered
that the walking was not so difficult after all. They appeared to be in
a tall woodland now where the thin trees rose straight out of a soggy
soil, a soil in which the rotting stumps of lightning-blasted growths
and scattered boulders cluttered up and made difficult any swift
passage. The boulders seemed unusual and Dreeme wondered about them.
They possibly were evidence of a strata of rock, the slice of some
prehistoric glacier, that thrust upward out of the marshy soil here.
Walden Slater walked warily, taking care to step on no dead branches or
to crash through none of the small undergrowths that sprang up between
the slender trees. Dreeme followed suit.

They had walked through this woodland for a few minutes only before the
young doctor observed a faint glow among the trees that faced them. He
instinctively hastened his pace a little and soon was several feet in
front of Walden Slater. The farmer plodded along doggedly exhibiting
no excitement or unrest. Dreeme, clutching Deborah’s brooch in his
hand, was about to break into a stumbling run when the wiry hand of
the farmer jerked his shoulder back. A trifle angry but aware of the
wisdom of the rebuke the young doctor adjusted his pace to the farmer’s
steady progression and they moved forward toward the faint glow, a glow
that brightened perceptibly as they neared it. The rain had stopped
altogether, even the large infrequent drops disappearing into the mist
of the night. In those few minutes while Dreeme crept forward beside
the farmer a dozen and one thoughts flashed through his mind, plans of
rescue, schemes of attack, possibilities of tactics to be employed.
Would they rush into the group of farmers, and, while Walden Slater
held them back with the menace of his revolver, would he snatch up
Deborah and make away with her along the exhausting road which he had
been traveling for nearly an hour? What could they hope to do against
a dozen or more men who were mad? He wanted to ask Walden Slater what
he thought but the farmer was so evidently bent on silence that he did
not venture a word. The glow was quite bright now and it seemed to come
upward from the earth, from a hollow beyond them that was masked by
crowded tree-trunks. There were many lanterns in that hollow and there
were many men. Deborah was there, too. Perhaps at this very moment she
was a part of the unclean ceremonies that were taking place. It seemed
an eternity to the young doctor while they crept slowly and silently
through the last ring of trees, stepping gingerly over the protruding
boulders and rotting branches and mouldering stumps. Walden Slater now
carried his revolver in his hand. Leaving the last of the trees behind
them and facing the yellow glow of the invisible light that formed a
strange fan of color against the milky atmosphere they crept up an
inclined bank toward a ring of low intertangled bushes. The subdued
hum of voices reached their strained ears. Walden Slater carefully
pushed aside one of the branches of the bushes against which they
now rested and cautiously thrust his face forward. For a second he
looked downward. Then he drew back and putting his mouth very close to
Dreeme’s ear said:

“This is the place called Dagon.”

The young doctor, his blood beating furiously, crept up to the bush,
drew the branch aside, thrust his face forward, and looked downward.




Chapter Ten


I

He stared into a hollow that was filled with shifting forms, moving
figures that were slices of darkness before the lanterns. Faces passed
and repassed before his curious gaze, paused, bent forward, turned,
leaned toward one another, disappeared, and it was some minutes before
he could make them out, could recognize them as human faces that he
had once viewed vacantly in the quiet lanes of Marlborough. He had not
expected so much light, so much action. As his eyes adjusted themselves
to the scene before them he began to perceive the spectacle as a whole,
almost as a painting whose component parts might be observed and then
relegated to their proper order. He sensed Walden Slater creeping into
the bush beside him but he made no gesture of comprehension, merely
shifting his position a trifle so that the farmer, too, might see
what was going on in the hollow. For his own part, he was intent on
the spectacle before him, watching eagerly for the one face of all
faces and subconsciously deliberating in his mind what he should do
when he did see that face. The hollow was large and level and the
ground upon which these people walked was dark and firm. There was
no grass, no growths of any sort. It stretched like a black carpet
to the ring of bushes that hemmed it on all sides. It was a natural
amphitheater, an arena formed by chance. Circling this expanse of
black soil was a series of lanterns, perhaps twenty of them, placed
at regular intervals and lighting up the scene as though it were a
stage and they were footlights. The beams of yellow glowed upward,
striking the lower portions of faces and distorting them. Chins and
nostrils and the undersides of cheek-bones were crazily illuminated
in this unnatural light. In the center of the hollow loomed a large
flat-topped rock, perhaps five feet high. It was black stone glittering
now with moisture, with the rain that had fallen so steadily on it
all through the day and night. There was something ominous about this
stone, something unclean, and the young doctor studied it with intense
loathing. Its slimy black sides were like the skin of some great horrid
toad, smooth yet studded with offensive warts that caught the glow
of the lanterns and flung them back again to the misty night. Dreeme
wondered if it were true that crumbling bones were buried in the dark
soil beneath this rock which seemed so immovable, so placed there by
time in the center of this secret amphitheater. The rock appeared as
old as the ages. It seemed riven immutably into the earth. Yet it was
unmistakably the Devil Stone and from its moist toad-like surface the
Black Man had preached his blasphemous sermons in times past, had
conducted the orgiastic liturgies of the Witches’ Sabaoth and the
Esbat. There was no one near the stone now. It stood malevolently, a
shunned phenomenon in the hollow. “Rock of Ages.” Yes, this was the
Rock that George Burroughs meant when he hummed monotonously the old
church tune.

Dreeme’s eyes drifted over the faces that moved about in the hollow.
There were, perhaps, twenty people present, all men. The low hum
of their subdued voices reached him distinctly. They walked about
slowly, clutching their rain-coats closely to their tall bodies, their
heavy boots falling heavily on the dark soil. Something feverish and
repressed in their movements injected a tense note into the assemblage.
They seemed uncertain of themselves, a little hysteric and desperately
straining to conceal the hysteria that quickened their blood and
plucked at their nerves. There was doubt here, a doubt that sickly
denied itself. Sober faces gazed blankly at one another and sunken
fanatical eyes glittered in the lantern glow like wet beetles. The
young doctor observed one tall figure that walked round and round just
within the circle of lanterns ceaselessly, pausing before no one but
moved apparently by an interior restlessness that would not permit him
to stop. As the man passed a short distance from where the young doctor
lay hidden he recognized him as Bidwell, the farmer whose land adjoined
Westcott’s toward the Saccarac River. Bidwell’s mouth was moving
steadily as though he were talking rapidly to himself. And now as
Dreeme’s eyes became accustomed to the scene he recognized more faces.
There was Lacy, the post-master and proprietor of the general store,
a stork-like man with a carbuncular nose, and Winship, one of the
selectmen, stout, worried-looking, and somewhat at a loss, and Titubit,
the dark hawk-nosed farmer who was supposed to have Indian blood in his
veins, and Corey, the tanned white-haired owner of Corey’s Acres on the
lower road. Dreeme had attended all of these men at some time or other
for minor ailments and he viewed them now with a disbelieving wonder,
half-suspecting that any minute the whole scene would vanish in thin
air and he would wake up in bed sweating from a nightmare. Yet here
they were, and others whose faces he dimly recognized but whose names
he could not place, strolling nervously about the dark hollow, waiting
restlessly and suspiciously for some evil thing to happen, stirred by
some daemon of hereditary madness that had been wakened in their blood
and brains after sleeping for years. Dreeme crouched lower in the
bushes and watched them attentively. His few garments were saturated
with water and the cold wind blew across his back yet his pulses were
beating fast enough and the warmth of excitement shuddered along his
drenched flesh. Beside him he could feel the heavy shoulders of Walden
Slater.

It was all a psychological riddle, something to be unravelled at
leisure and explained after the event. Some power had frightened
these men out of their taciturn ruts of living into the mockery of an
ancient superstition. A legend had come down with uncommon vividness
through the centuries and the will of a madman had resurrected it to
terrible life. Old impulses, too powerful to resist, had been set free
and they were following these impulses suspiciously yet absolutely.
Dreeme studied the face of Corey and wondered. White-haired, almost
saintly-looking, the farmer walked slowly about in low conversation
with Lacy who lifted his round uneven knob of a nose like a wolf about
to howl at the moon. The fever was growing on these men now and their
movements became faster and jerkier. They stared about them expectantly
and as they stared their hands quivered. The yellow lanterns flung
fantastic blossoms of light into the bushes, colored blossoms that
glowed on the wet branches.

Dreeme caught his breath suddenly. Silently, almost stealthily,
Jeffrey Westcott had appeared from behind the black stone. He stood
observing the score of men with expressionless dark eyes, watching
their movements as they shifted to and fro, saying nothing, waiting for
them to see him. Immediately the group approached him, standing within
a few feet of the Devil Stone. They gathered silently, standing in a
half-circle, their backs to Dreeme and Walden Slater. Westcott observed
them coldly and when they had achieved their half-circle and were
motionless he climbed to the top of the black slimy stone. Standing
so, five feet in the air, Dreeme could see him perfectly, a stocky
figure garmented entirely in black, his cloven head bowed slightly, the
yellow glow from the lanterns catching the lower part of his face--the
blue shaven chin and heavy cheek-bones. In his hands he held a square
black book which he lifted slowly. The men before him seemed to sigh
and sway back. Westcott held this book high in the air for a full
minute. Then he looked up into the misty night air intently and cried
in a suppressed hoarse voice:

“Asmodeus! Asmodeus!”

The men stood fixedly, their heads thrust slightly forward as though
they were listening. After an instant’s silence Westcott said:

“He stands at Dagon. He enters into me.”

A shudder shook his heavy frame and the black book slipped from his
hand, falling to the surface of the stone with a dull slap.

Dreeme, listening as intently as the men, heard nothing but the
infrequent spatter of rain-drops as the tree-tops swayed and the wind
that shook them, a husky sighing wind that sounded like the hoarse
breathing of a giant. He wanted to shout, “You fool! There is nothing
to hear but night sounds!” The aspect of Jeffrey Westcott fascinated
him, however. The farmer’s face was lighted with an evil smile, his
eyes glittered and danced in the lantern-light, and his heavy hands
were clasped before him. A tenseness held his bulky body and he
seemed to grow with this tenseness, to enlarge until Dreeme could not
say whether he were six feet high or twelve. It was an illusion but
an illusion so well maintained that the young doctor automatically
understood how easily Westcott could sway these superstitious farmers
who stood before him, a strained expectancy on their weather-beaten
faces, their hands clenched, their bodies visibly quivering. It was an
evil transfiguration wrought inwardly. Nothing but the most dynamic
belief in one’s self, in one’s own powers, could cause it. The farmer
was in a rapt state now, in a moving and speaking trance. He lifted his
hands up to the night. In the same suppressed hoarse voice he cried:

“Enter in to us, Asmodeus! Enter in to your heritage! Were we not sold
to you by the bond of blood by Salem Village two hundred and thirty
years ago? In the deep forest you accepted us and made a pact with us.
We forsook all other gods but you for you were the eternal will of man.
Though we have slept for generations the ancient pact still holds.
Under this rock lies the testimonial of the bones. The bones cry out to
you, Asmodeus. We cry out to you.”

A murmur like a sigh swept through the cluster of attentive men.

“By the aching of the bones, we call upon your strength,” cried
Westcott.

“By the aching of the bones, we call upon your strength,” murmured the
men.

“By the secret head of the Sacred Goat, we call upon your strength,”
the farmer cried again.

“By the secret head of the Sacred Goat, we call upon your strength,”
repeated the men.

The litany went on.

“By the Black Book that our fathers owned we call upon your strength.”

“By the Black Book that our fathers owned we call upon your strength.”

“By the Hidden Face in the rock we call upon your strength.”

“By the Hidden Face in the rock we call upon your strength.”

“By the Cloven Hoof that walks in the darkness we call upon your
strength.”

“By the Cloven Hoof that walks in the darkness we call upon your
strength.”

“By the Lost Road that our fathers followed we call upon your strength.”

“By the Lost Road that our fathers followed we call upon your strength.”

“O Asmodeus, give me my purpose.”

“O Asmodeus, give me my purpose.”

Beads of perspiration stood out on Jeffrey Westcott’s forehead. His
body shook violently. He cried loudly:

“Asmodeus! Janicot!”

A thin white froth appeared on his lips and his face writhed. The
farmers before him were swaying from side to side excitedly and
suddenly one of them, little more than a boy, screamed and fell upon
the wet ground, his talon-like hands clutching at the black soil.

“Aie! Aie!” shouted the boy, his white face tossing from side to side
and his eyes tightly closed. Westcott leaped from the rock and knelt
for a moment by the boy. Then he lifted him up and bore him to the
great stone, placing him beside the black book. The farmers surged
forward, some of them moaning, all of them shaking as though in an
intense ague. Their hands were outstretched and quivering.

Dreeme watched the ceremony with amazement, noting that Westcott by the
power of his will, apparently, had lashed these people into a mystical
fury that was close to the trance-state. They would believe whatever
he had to say implicitly now for their individualities were lost and
they were a mingled mob madness. The swiftness of the whole proceeding
was the surprising part of it to the young doctor. Then he realized
that these men had gathered here for some time, that an overpowering
realization of helplessness inborn in their blood weakened their powers
of resistance, and that Westcott’s powerful personality had sapped
their independence and reason long before this. They were a poisoned
and hysterical breed.

Westcott stood beside the possessed boy, his hand upon the heaving
chest of the victim. He stared about the half-circle with glittering
eyes, his yellow teeth--yellow as the flames of the lanterns--bared in
a smile.

“He sleeps,” he said, indicating the boy, “he sleeps in the arms of the
Master. Dagon is filled with the Master. The ground cries out and the
bones tremble.”

Even as he spoke the scene darkened and a gust of wind blew so heavily
that the lantern-flames behind their heavy glass protectors slanted
sideways. It was like the descent of a sudden cloud, an abrupt eclipse
in answer to Westcott’s solemn speech. For an instant it paralyzed the
watching doctor and trembling chills, icy-cold, ran up and down his
spine. He felt the surge of something huge and shapeless and black and
irremediably evil, a presence that was beyond description and vision
filling the hollow. A soft hand seemed to tap tentatively at his face
and then, without warning, sharp talons clutched at the back of his
neck. For an instant he dared not move. He fought fiercely with an
intense desire to scream. Then, summoning every iota of his will power,
he cautiously raised his hand and thrust back the thorny branch of
the bush that the gust of wind had blown against his neck. A flood of
relief poured through his tired wet body and as he felt the released
blood throbbing through his arteries the gust of wind died away and
the lantern-flames lifted their flattened spears of yellow. He thought
to himself how easily the imagination could drive the nerves before it
in riotous debacle. It was fear that was the great enemy, fear of the
unknown, fear of the stronger will, fear of the old wife’s tales that
thousands of years of self-preservation against mysterious phenomena
had planted in the feeble mortal body. There was no safety in life
except by the deliberate massacre of one’s fears. Well, he would
throttle these unworthy spasms and surmount the horror of these cruel
tricks. He fastened his entire intelligence again upon the scene before
him.

The inanimate boy on the Devil’s Stone had ceased to breathe
frantically. His bosom no longer rose and fell furiously. Instead
of this he seemed to be quietly sleeping. Westcott, placing his arm
beneath the boy’s head, raised the body to a sitting posture and the
pale unconscious face with its closed eyes gazed out blindly upon the
assembled farmers. For an instant Westcott’s hand rested lightly upon
the boy’s white forehead. Then he said:

“Are you one with the Name?”

“With the Name,” answered the boy. His voice was high and clear.

“Is the Master with you?” went on Westcott.

“With me,” responded the boy.

“Is he saying things?” proceeded the farmer.

“Saying things,” repeated the boy.

The farmers listened avidly although they still swayed slowly from side
to side and now and then one of them would whimper softly as though he
were in pain.

“What do you see?” inquired Westcott. His own eyes were shut and he
appeared to be undergoing a fierce mental reaction.

“See,” said the boy.

There was a pause while the wind soughed softly in the trees and bushes
and the infrequent spatter of great rain-drops fell in the shadows. The
boy’s mouth opened and closed speechlessly. He half-raised one arm. His
throat throbbed. Then, in the same clear tone in which he had spoken
throughout, he said:

“The bones move together. The dust assembles. I see a skeleton. Flesh
comes out of darkness like an army of white ants and clusters upon the
bones. A body lies beneath the rock. It opens its eyes and lifts its
hands. It is the body that is speaking to me.”

He paused. The farmers waited expectantly. The boy’s lips moved again.
This time the startling voice of a deep-chested man issued from his
mouth. It was like a great voice calling from a tomb and it struck upon
Dreeme’s ears with dismay.

“At Dagon we set the Rock for our children’s children’s children. We
marched through deep trees and the feathered men watched our fires from
the darkness beyond the rings of light. We caroused and danced through
the virgin land and the Master walked before us with a smiling face. We
raised our rooftrees in the valley without doors and our fires went up
to an alien sky. When the moon walked on the farthest hills we traveled
the long path to the Rock and danced before the Master. We beat upon
cymbals and drums. We whistled and cried lewd words to the naked women
who laughed in the bushes. We felt the fever of life in our veins
and knew that it was well with us. We were unhumbled and proud and
possessors of time. We devoured our enemies for the Master’s will was
our will. We set no bounds to life for all life was within our bounds.
We bowed only to one law and that was the law of the Master and though
the pale faced priests harried us we existed beyond them in a free land
of the Master’s conceiving. The Master took us up to the mountain top
and showed us the riches of the world and the cities of the plain and
we said ‘yes’ to him and all those things became our own. Our farms
prospered in the valley without doors and the rain came and we saw that
it was well with us. And we knew the Master to be the living god of the
free will, the voice that spoke in the darkness to us and said, ‘do so
and so,’ and we did these things and we prospered and lived long years
and the sun shone upon us.”

The great voice died away and the boy fell back limply upon the stone,
his head resting upon the black book. Westcott lifted him quickly and
bore him to a side of the circle where he placed him upon the wet
ground. The farmers stood motionless now. They were like figures in a
trance. They made no gestures as Westcott walked slowly back to the
rock and mounted to it. His dark eyes swept over the gathering and from
where Dreeme lay he thought that he could see the thin ghost of a smile
flit across the farmer’s determined mouth.

“You have heard,” he said. “You have heard the voice from the bones,
the voice of your ancestor, speaking. You have heard how good life was
when the children of the Master first came into this valley. And how
have you fallen away from that high estate! How have you lost that
greatness when you walked like the sons of the morning! The years have
come between you and the Master and you have fallen away from that
source of all power. You bend weary backs over meager farms and live
from hand to mouth and your heritage is just beyond you in the shadow
of Time. You have but to reach out your hands and take it. Instead of
this, you deny the impulses that are in your blood and avoid the final
gestures that would liberate you from the entangling bonds of fear and
superstition and false gods. There is no other god but the Master! He,
alone, exists and he, alone, is the tower of your strength. The Master
sums up all things in himself. He is the will, the invulnerable will,
the will to power, the will to happiness, the will to self-realization.
It is only by symbols and liturgies and ceremonies that you may induce
the Master to enter into you. I bring the Master to you. I bring the
key to the door, the lantern to the darkness, the will to the deed.
I am the Black Man. I am the prophet possessed by the Master. I do
not bring you a god that you may see, a god that you may touch. I
bring you an essence, an invulnerable essence that speaks through the
mouths of living people, that rises in trances, that permeates time,
that joins the dead with the living, that is called evil but is yet
beyond evil, a god that is strength and food and determination and
skill and craft and understanding and self-realization and power. This
is the god I bring you and because he has no other name you may call
him what you will, Asmodeus, Janicot, Beelzebub, Satan, Lucifer, any
name that stands for the opposite of the cold power that destroys the
eternal will within you. He is a jealous god and he will endure no
other rivals. He speaks in thunder and he walks upon the mountaintops
by night. His face is hidden in darkness and his hands hover over the
cities of the plain. The brightness of his face is turned only to
the adept. If you desire that complete emancipation from obligations
and hardships and the domination of alien things you will turn
whole-heartedly to him. Your fathers did it before you and they lived
in a Paradisal valley and fulfilled themselves completely. But you must
cleanse yourselves of old weaknesses if you would be like your fathers.
The will is buried in you but you must excavate it, must dig it out of
the dross of many days and many years. To do this you must pass through
rituals and ceremonies, must give yourselves whole-heartedly to the
Master. Then, and not till then, will you feel the dark flower growing
in you, the intense inward ecstasy that lifts you through deliriums to
that plane where the Master walks and controls the events of the ages.
The rituals are but the outward symbols of the interior miracles. The
flesh is a weak and uncertain thing and it must be driven upward into
the mystical regions by visible signs and ceremonies. It is for this
that I have called you here, calling each one by the sign of the Goat’s
Head which your father used before you, that we may establish, or
rather renew, the coven of Marlborough, the coven that was driven from
Salem Village in 1692 and which has slept with all its symbols beneath
this rock for so many years.”

He paused and gazed about him. A few muttered words passed between
the farmers, who, while Westcott was talking so persuasively, had
recovered in great part from their emotional excitement. Dreeme, from
his secret place of vantage, had listened with a reluctant admiration.
He could understand that, given the blood impulses of these men and the
dark shadow of ancestral urges and one-sided fanaticism, the speech
just delivered would seem reasonable and convincing. This was what
they had been fighting against half-heartedly for so many decades.
The young doctor instinctively thought of all the crazy cults that
permeated American life, the free love colonies, the Holy Rollers, the
theosophical circles, the Rosicrucians, the Spiritualists, the esoteric
societies, and he understood how easy it was to lead the secret wish
into the deed. Westcott controlled these men now and he could do with
them what he willed. They were ripe for a fanatical outbreak. As the
young doctor observed the farmers he noted that there was no opposition
whatsoever, no desire to question the truth of what Westcott was
saying, no antagonistic rationalism. Even the white-haired Corey
seemed to grow in stature to the farmer’s words, to take into himself,
as it were, the essence of will of which Westcott spoke. As for the
dominating farmer he stood upon the Devil Stone with sparkling eyes,
an image of self-contained power, gazing down at the men before him.
Bidwell’s nasal voice rose in the stillness.

“What must we do?” he asked.

Westcott shut his eyes. He appeared to be communing with invisible
powers. Then he picked up the black book and held it against his
breast. He said:

“We must throw all our strength into a sacrifice. Into this sacrifice
we must wish all our weaknesses and when the ceremony is accomplished
we shall be cleansed and bound together by an awful and secret
knowledge.”

He paused and glanced about him as the men gazed fearfully at one
another. Then he said:

“We must abolish fear. We must destroy the conscience. We may only do
this by a terrible sacrifice.”

He shut his eyes and turned his face upward to the night.

“Asmodeus!” he cried. “Is this well?”

Suddenly from the recumbent body of the boy which lay near the circle
of lanterns came the deep voice that they had heard before.

“A sacrifice!” he cried. “A sacrifice!”

At the same instant the bushes opposite Dreeme’s haven of concealment
parted and the Reverend George Burroughs, tall, sallow, serious,
stepped into the light of the lanterns. He walked slowly toward the
rock, his eyes expressionless wells of darkness. Dreeme’s pulses beat
faster at the sight of him for he understood that the presence of
the preacher meant also the presence of Deborah. Beside him he felt
Walden Slater cautiously move. The farmer seemed to be extricating
something from beneath his coat. Burroughs paused by the rock, his
long yellow hand resting lightly on the toad-like surface. He gazed
about him calmly. Dreeme, as far away as he was, could sense the
impalpable atmosphere of malevolence that emanated from the preacher.
It was a still icy restrained power confident of itself and supremely
indifferent. For the first time the young doctor saw the preacher
as he was, a creature of vindictive strength and sly calculation, a
quiet creeping madness that permeated Marlborough. If Jeffrey Westcott
was the self-appointed god of this impossible fanaticism then George
Burroughs was the high priest, the militant Satanist, the tactician who
hid behind a veil of holiness. The man’s sallow horse-like countenance
dominated the assembly although he had not spoken a word. Even the
repressed hysteria of Jeffrey Westcott faded before this still horrible
strength that poised lightly by the Devil’s Stone and with a single
glance read the minds of the perturbed and chaotic farmers before him.
Dreeme crouched lower in his place of concealment. Beside him he could
feel the tense form of Walden Slater coiled like a heavy steel spring,
ready to dart forth at the slightest gesture. There was strength in
Walden Slater and it seemed to seep mercifully into the cold body of
the young doctor. Burroughs opened his wide mouth and his neighing
voice broke the shifting silence. He said:

“In the beginning there was nothing. But the Will moved on the face
of the flickering gases and the Will established the earth and the
vegetation on the face of the earth and the beasts and men who walked
upon the face of the earth. And there were two gods. And one was the
god of that weakness called good and the other was the god of that
strength called evil. But the god of goodness was an invisible god who
lived in a mist. The god of evil made the world and all the things that
are in the world. He fashioned all our pleasures and placed the seed of
his eternal Will within us. It is that god who calls us to the place
called Dagon that we may worship him and enter into our heritage.”

He paused and stared before him. For an instant Dreeme thought that
the piercing black eyes of the preacher threaded the heavy leaves
of the bush behind which the young doctor lay and he tightened his
muscles, preparing to spring forward at the first word. Burroughs made
no gesture, however. His eyes reverted to the farmers before him. He
was patently searching for new words, for further demonstration of his
Manichean doctrine of an evil god controlling an evil world. Apparently
he found the words for his neighing voice rose again in the stillness.

“We have been chosen out of all the people in this land for we are the
children of our fathers. I am the child of my fathers and if you will
read the withered records you will find that my name is not unknown
among the disciples who followed the Master. I have lived and died many
times. I have walked through many centuries. I have listened to the
Voice in many lands and the Voice has told me many things. I carry the
wisdom of the decades within me. I have told you these things before,
in your houses, in the fields, in the dark places of the forest. You
have listened to me. You are here. Together we shall discipline our
wills until they become a part of the major Will that controls all
things. We shall persecute our enemies in the darkness. We shall
achieve our ends, our desires, through the malefic intensity of our
wills. We shall dance at the full of the moon and sink into divine
trances where we shall discover all things. The Past and the Future
will become like open books to us. To reach this desirable plane we
must murder the pale sick consciences, inheritances of the god of mist,
that murmur weakly within us. We shall cleanse ourselves by charms and
sacrifices.”

His voice changed to a deeper tone and he gazed significantly at the
absorbed farmers.

“The one sin in our decalogue is weakness,” he said. “There was a
man amongst us who was weak. He was shaken by qualms. Through his
stupid brain crept the faint messages of conscience. He listened to a
woman and became her willing tool. He drew into our secret circle a
stranger, an obtuse fool from the outer world whose curiosity was like
that of a gossiping woman. What became of that man?”

He glanced savagely about him.

“The will of the Master came into me,” he cried, “and I struck him down
by the river. With my own hands I drove the pegs into the eyes that had
seen too much!”

Dreeme heard Walden Slater’s suddenly indrawn breath.

“And the obtuse fool!” neighed Burroughs, “What about the obtuse fool?”

“Let him leave the valley,” said Jeffrey Westcott suddenly. “Let him
leave the valley and forget us.”

“Too late!” cried Burroughs, still facing the farmers and paying no
attention to Westcott. “He must not leave the valley. He must be buried
in the valley.”

Dreeme’s mouth was a sharply drawn line. They would have to catch their
bird first.

“The will of the Master is ruthless,” declared the preacher, stretching
out a long skinny hand toward the silent group of farmers. The men
mumbled and muttered among themselves. Dreeme could see that they were
still crazed, that they were like men in a trance half-knowing what
they were doing but without the power of asserting themselves. Both
Westcott and Burroughs had these victims semi-mesmerized. They had
ceased to be rational men but were fanatics oblivious of consequences
and moved by a common spirit.

The insensible boy lying near the circle of lanterns moaned. He lifted
a hand weakly and it fell with a wet thud to the dark trampled soil.

“Sacrifice!” he cried, “Sacrifice!”

The glittering-eyed farmers surged about the rock. They lifted up
their hands to the night and bayed like lost hounds. Bidwell began to
shake rapidly and then to perform an awkward dance before the Devil
Stone. His eyes were closed. Suddenly Lacy lifted his snout up and
laughed, a long high-pitched mad laugh that sounded like a scream.
The white-haired Corey was clapping his hands together rhythmically.
Neither Westcott nor Burroughs moved. They stood by the rock watching
the insane farmers and once Dreeme thought he caught a significant
glance that passed between the two men. It was impossible to tell how
sincere these two leaders were, how much faith they placed in the
crazy doctrine they enunciated. Dreeme was certain that Westcott was
driven by his theory of the omnipotent will, that it had unhinged him,
that one half of his brain was diseased, but Burroughs was different.
He might just be a great charlatan, a born criminal who saw a way of
controlling the community by urging it into crime. Ostensibly he was
a minister of the gospel but inwardly he was a ferocious beast, a
furious figure all the more to be feared because of his saintly mask so
well worn in public. There was a blood-lust in him but whether or not
this blood-lust was propped up by the knowledge that he was a direct
descendant of the Salem witches was a mystery. Perhaps one would never
know. As Dreeme watched the swaying madness of the farmers he recalled
how, for two years, he had sat at a common table with the Reverend
George Burroughs and given him no more attention than he had the back
of the chair against which he had leaned. It was amazing, something
that either gave proof of the preacher’s skill at self-concealment
or his own stupidity as an observer. However, it was too late now
to wonder at these things or to berate one’s self for failing to
read character as it loomed before one’s nose. As Dreeme watched the
gyrations of the farmers his glance traveled beyond them to the line
of bushes opposite him, drawn, as it were, by some invisible power and
there, hanging bodiless on the wet green leaves, he saw the white face
of Martha Westcott peering into the circle. He was not surprised to
see her, indeed, he had expected her to put in an appearance sooner
or later. Just what her status was among these men, however, he could
not say. He did not believe that either Westcott or Burroughs trusted
her too far or permitted her to go any great distance beyond their
scrutiny. Her appearance seemed to be a signal for Burroughs walked
rapidly toward her and disappeared into the bushes with her. Dreeme’s
attention now concentrated upon that spot in the bushes for he was sure
that behind it was the woman he loved, the woman for whom he would
fight until the last drop of blood in his body had been spilled. The
farmers, too, were watching this spot in the bushes through which
Burroughs had disappeared. But they were watching with a mad laughing
expectancy, their tanned hands stretched out, their faces twisted and
their eyes glittering.

The bushes parted and Martha Westcott walked through them very slowly.
Her eyes were shut and she seemed to be in a trance. Holding her arms
straight before her she held in her hands a long thin-bladed knife.
Gazing neither to right nor left she proceeded straight to the Devil
Stone and stood by it holding the knife outstretched. Jeffrey Westcott
took the shining blade from her and placed it upon the rock. An awful
silence had fallen upon the hollow. The rain-drops had ceased and even
the wind, that had soughed so hoarsely through the leaves, had died
away. The farmers stood like wax figures, their faces frozen into
twisted smiles, their arms stiffly outheld. Dreeme felt the flesh
crawling upon his body. He stared fixedly at Martha Westcott, noting
how like some strange priestess she stood in her long black garment,
her white insensitive face an oval of clear luster in the light of
the lanterns, her heavy eyelids partially lowered over the great wide
eyes, her archaic mouth a mystic hieroglyph. She was like a being from
another world, a spectre from some pagan land. Though her smooth white
shoulder was garmented in black he could sense the blue goat’s head
burning upon it, shining through the close fabric, the goat’s head
that made her one with these maniacs who gathered in the darkness of
Nigger Swamp. Conflicting thoughts rushed through the young doctor’s
head. This woman had desired him. This evil goddess had come to him in
the middle of the night and she had shaken his will. If they were both
in another world perhaps.... He swiftly put the thought from him. No!
No! He must not weaken. He must not think of her in any way except as
an ominous reality that would steal his soul from him.

The bushes parted again and Burroughs strode forward swiftly carrying
in his arms a limp form. Dreeme recognized the preacher’s burden as
soon as he appeared with it and sprang up from the ground. It was
Deborah. She hung limply from the long black arm of Burroughs, like
some fragile white bird that had been shot down but not killed. Even as
Dreeme sprang to his feet Walden Slater’s resistless arm, the muscular
arm of a giant, dragged him down again and held him in the shadow of
the bush with a clutch like iron. “Wait!” the farmer whispered. “Wait!”
Burroughs advanced rapidly to the Devil Stone and laid Deborah’s body
upon it. The head of the girl fell sideways and Dreeme could see her
thin face and the blue circles of her closed eyes. Her bosom was rising
softly and regularly. She appeared to be in a calm sleep. Burroughs,
his black eyes fixed on the recumbent figure of the girl, reached for
the long knife and took it up. He climbed slowly to the top of the
Devil Stone and stood towering above the assemblage. He opened his
mouth to speak. He raised the knife. It glittered wanly in the light of
the flickering lanterns.

“Asmo...” he began.

A thunderous report over Dreeme’s head pitched him forward. In the
single instant when he sprang down the bank he saw the preacher’s eyes
wide with amazement and the dark gush of blood out of his neck. Then
the Reverend George Burroughs fell forward as a log falls, the knife
clattering from his hand upon the Devil Stone, and landed with a heavy
thud upon the dark soil. His skull crashed against an iron lantern
with the sound of a bursting cocoanut. Dreeme, already in the circle,
leaped over the body and rushed toward the rock. Behind him he heard
Walden Slater kicking the lanterns over as he stumbled forward, the
smoking revolver in his hand. The amazed farmers had scattered in all
directions and as Dreeme gathered Deborah up in his arms he caught a
moment’s glimpse of Westcott, the black book clutched to his breast,
darting through the bushes. The farmer was heading straight into Nigger
Swamp. All of this was observed automatically for the young doctor’s
sole concern was for the girl who had lain so helplessly upon the Devil
Stone. As he staggered along with her he gazed anxiously into her face
and listened to her breathing. She stirred a trifle and moaned and a
second later one thin arm slid over his shoulder blindly. He understood
that she was slowly coming out of an hypnotic sleep. He wanted to
shout, to laugh, to burst into tears. He clutched her all the tighter
to him in his delirium of joy and hurried forward striving to find the
narrow ribbon of road that would lead him back to the Westcott farm
and the highway to Marlborough. He had forgotten the maniac farmers,
Westcott and Burroughs, Martha Westcott, even Walden Slater. It was not
until he had plunged one leg up to the knee in the slime of the marsh
and knew that he was off the road that he reconsidered his predicament
and knew that only Slater could guide him through the swamp. He turned
and looked directly into the farmer’s face. There was a light of
victory in Walden Slater’s countenance and his eyes glistened. In his
hand he still held the revolver.

“Here,” said the farmer. He reached down a burly arm and hauled both
Dreeme and the girl back to the road. Then, without a word, he took
Deborah from the young doctor’s arms and stepped ahead. They circled
the hollow partially without gazing through the bushes and soon struck
the path by which they had come. Then, at a dog-trot, the sturdy farmer
started back to town with Dreeme at his heels.

“What ... happened?” inquired the young doctor breathlessly and
bewilderedly.

“Judgment Day,” replied Walden Slater. His voice was grim.

Behind them they could hear confused voices.

“Will there ... be more ... fighting?” panted Dreeme.

Walden Slater cleared his throat.

“Nope,” he said.

He coughed loudly and spat into the darkness.

“Nothing to fight about,” he added. “Nothing to make these fool farmers
mad now. It’s all over.”

They went on in silence after that. It was not until they had left the
swamp, climbed the open stretch into Briony Wood, and were once more
among the trees that Walden Slater spoke again.

“Westcott got away,” he said significantly. His voice was the voice
of a trial judge. He was the law personified. Dreeme understood him
perfectly.

“You’ve got five shells left,” he said.

“We’ll stop at the Westcott farm,” replied the farmer.




Chapter Eleven


I

The twisting path through Briony Wood had never been traveled at such
a speedy pace before. Walden Slater, carrying Deborah in his arms
much as he might carry a small baby, maintained his dog-trot over the
hummocky path, through puddles, across deceptive roots. As Dreeme,
close behind him, running, too, in his bare feet, observed the square
back of the farmer, a back against which the water-soaked shirt clung
tightly and so revealed the contours of the great sliding back-muscles
much as a skin might, a feeling of wonder and intense indebtedness
crept over him. He had never known Walden Slater but now he knew him,
knew him for a determined and relentless machine bent on justice. He
had seen him in previous years bowed by the killing toil of his stony
acres, eating gluttonously at table, sagging in his creaking rocker on
the back porch, always silent, always (now that he came to think of
it) self-contained. The young doctor’s mind swept back over the past
few days. Walden Slater eating cabbage. Walden Slater rocking in the
darkness. Walden Slater finding words with difficulty, announcing that
Deborah might stay with him as long as she pleased. Dreeme knew now
that this statement was a secret challenge to Westcott and Burroughs.
Walden Slater whittling on the back porch, asking the preacher for
a knife. The knife was dull. How easily he had achieved this bit of
detective acumen. Walden Slater thinking, reaching conclusions in that
slow dogged mind that was, after all, so far from stupidity. Walden
Slater watching night after night, keeping guard under the bright moon.
Walden Slater like an enormous hound on the scent. Walden Slater rising
like justice with the smoking gun in his hand. The figure of the farmer
grew to colossal dimensions in the young doctor’s estimation.

All this while they were hurrying through Briony Wood, hurrying through
trees that were no longer malevolent spectres of a diseased fancy but
merely slender birches and pines. Though the branches whipped across
his face, though he stumbled into muddy hollows, though sharp thorns
tore at his soiled and soaking garments, Dreeme no longer experienced
that instinctive fear that had haunted him so short a time before.
His body was emptied of fright. It was almost emptied of exertion as
well for a growing hollowness within him, a tightening at the pit
of his stomach, a painful numbness in his legs informed him that
he was approaching the end of his endurance. Still, an implacable
nervous energy pushed him forward, a febrile comprehension of one
more important thing to be done. He knew what it was but he did not
permit his mind to dwell upon it too fiercely. After all, what had he
to do with the peculiar ideas of justice in the valley. He had seen
what could be accomplished by established authority during the day
following the murder of Wagner. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. There had
been evasion, then, a deliberate slowness, a maddening deflection of
proper proceedings. But this time it would be different. Justice would
secure its own and would even the balance. He hurried on at the heels
of Walden Slater serious but determined. He could see the loose hair of
Deborah resting against the stout shoulder of the farmer and the sight
of it filled him with a vast pity. It would be justice accomplished for
her sake so far as he was concerned. She, the innocent victim, would
be furiously avenged. Walden Slater might have the future of the whole
valley in his thoughts, its complete release from an evil domination,
but the safety of Deborah was enough for him to think about. There was
only one way in which to fight madness.

They were at the height of Briony Wood now and the soughing wind was a
cold lance against their faces. It was remarkable how swiftly they had
proceeded on their return journey. The way to Dagon had seemed much
longer. As they pressed forward the heavens seemed to split apart like
two halves of a dark shell and out of the break sprang the moon like
a great white seed. A milky light flooded the black shining leaves
and the tall thin tree-trunks. It was like a miracle, a glittering
phenomenon that translated the dripping environment into a place
of mingled silver and tossed diamonds. There had been a moon like
this when he had held Deborah’s slight figure close against him and
understood that she was an absolute part of his life. He had walked
home that night from Humphrey Lathrop’s cottage and phantoms had
walked on either side of him. One of them had said: “I had a very good
lawyer, Mr. Stopes.” He had forgotten what the other phantom said. It
did not exist any longer. It had been a world of glittering jewelry.
It was marvelous, the way in which the earth changed. It was the slave
of imagination, the willing Genie that brought whatsoever the dreamer
desired. Though he was surrounded by trees and following a path that
permitted no view of the country on either side he yet experienced the
sensation that he was on a sort of Mount of Vision, that everything was
being made clear to him here without words, that the answers to all
he had been asking were in the sparkling moonlight and among the dark
wet green leaves of the trees. He felt immeasurably grown in spiritual
dimensions, enlarged so that he might contain all the love and wonder
that abounded in the world. The uneven stones cut his feet but he was
oblivious of them. Malicious branches lashed across his face like small
whips but he laughed to himself as he thrust them aside. It was all
right now.

The path turned and slanted downward and he understood that they were
on the final stretch that led into Jeffrey Westcott’s land. The name
sprang back into his intelligence ominously and his lips tightened at
the thought. There was still justice to be accomplished. Glancing back,
he wondered vaguely what had become of the score of farmers who had
gathered about the Devil Stone in that hollow which he should never see
again. What justice could there be for those deluded men? He strove
to remember what had actually happened but all he could recollect was
the report of a gun, the log-like fall of Burroughs, and his own mad
rush when he had snatched Deborah up from the stone and darted into
the bushes with her. A vague idea of scattered running forms lingered
in the back of his consciousness but he could not verify it by any
reasoning. Had those men fled into the swamp or were they now slowly
returning along the path which Walden Slater and he had followed?
Were they, even now, lurking among the trees to the rearward of him,
watching him with fanatic eyes, planning among themselves some secret
onslaught? He could not tell and he did not care. He knew that the
head of the serpent had been crushed in the Reverend George Burroughs
and that the heart of the serpent would be stilled when justice was
accomplished on Jeffrey Westcott. After that, the blind body could
do what it desired. He understood that the frenzied farmers had been
controlled by a malicious power of will and that when that will was
destroyed there would be, as Walden Slater had said, “Nothing to fight
about.” Comforted by this thought, he plodded on, Walden Slater’s
dog-trot having dwindled to a fast walk on the downward grade.

The last stretch of woods passed swiftly and as the path turned and
they faced the thinning trees Dreeme became aware of a reddish glow
that lit up the heavens before him. It was not the light of the moon
for that great white miracle hung directly above his head in the wide
cleft of the split storm-cloud. It was something else, something
that glowed upward from the ground, and as they burst through the
final fringe of bushes into Westcott’s back meadow, he saw that the
mysterious farm-house was a mass of high leaping flames. At the same
instant Walden Slater started forward in a run and the young doctor,
accelerating his pace, followed closely at his heels. As he ran his
mind automatically snapped back to a lighted lamp with a protector and
a flying end of curtain that ever blew closer and closer to that lamp.
Had they put that lamp out? He knew that they had done nothing of the
sort, that, in their hurry, they had left it burning just as they had
left the window open regardless of the wind that puffed the curtain
inward. His first thought was one of relief that the farm-house, a
hive of malevolence, was burning up with its books, its sacrilegious
altar, and its memories. The lair of the serpent was destroyed. Then
he remembered the purpose that brought them back here. Where would
Jeffrey Westcott be? Would he hide in the swamp while his years of
evil knowledge went up in thick smoke and spurting flame? Walden Slater
shifted Deborah from one shoulder to the other and ran all the faster.


II

A few men and women were gathered about the Westcott farm-house,
gazing helplessly at the flame that thrust sudden tongues of fierce
yellow through the shattered windows. Mrs. Slater, among them, moved,
a small fluttering-eyed plump woman, back and forth, gesticulating
but saying nothing. Her mouth opened and shut, a round black hole in
the light of conflagration, but no sounds issued forth. In the first
place, she could find nobody with whom to converse. There was Lucinda,
sitting awkwardly in Humphrey Lathrop’s old buggy, holding the somewhat
startled horse tight-reined, as she watched the burning house, but
Lucinda was speechless. She had nothing to say and she conveyed this
to Mrs. Slater by a cold vinegary downward stare whenever the plump
little woman wandered near the buggy. She was there to observe and then
to report to Humphrey Lathrop who sat at home, a helpless mountain,
waiting eagerly for news. As Dreeme and Walden Slater circled the house
and came out on the Leeminster Road below it Mrs. Slater ran toward
them.

“Where in the land’s sake....” she began.

Walden Slater silenced her with a look.

He brushed by her speechless and she followed in his wake, a small
fluttering-eyed creature. Behind them came Dreeme, unshaven,
mud-splashed, soaked, bare-footed. The farmer walked directly to
Humphrey Lathrop’s buggy.

“Get out, Lucinda,” he said.

Lucinda turned her thin face down at him in wrathful amazement. She
opened her mouth to retort and then she saw the senseless form of
Deborah. Without a word she climbed from the buggy and, turning, lifted
a rug to draw over Deborah as the farmer deposited her in the seat.

“I’ll drive her down to Humphrey’s,” said Lathrop’s housekeeper.

“Will she be safe?” interposed Dreeme hastily. He had visions of men
leaping out from the side of the road. “Perhaps I’d ...”

“She’ll be safe,” snapped Lucinda.

Without another word she climbed back into the buggy, picked up the
reins, clucked to the horse, and the revolving wheels grated on the
road. Dreeme stood watching the retreating carriage dubiously until he
felt Walden Slater touch him on the arm. He turned with the farmer and
they walked up the road toward the burning house.

“What time?” said Slater laconically to the group of watchers.

“’Bout two-thirty,” answered one of the men.

“What time is it now?” questioned the farmer.

“’Bout three,” the man returned.

Dreeme turned with Slater and watched the fire.

The flames, darting out of the windows, licked upward against the
walls and the white paint sweated and bubbled in the fierce heat. A
low roaring like the roaring in a wood-furnace reached the ears of
the watchers. It was obviously too late to do anything. The entire
interior of the farm-house was burning. Dreeme could imagine the books
in the library blackening in the smoke, their pages flaming along the
edges and then spurting up furiously as the tomes tumbled forward to
the floor. Small fiends screamed in the heat of those books. The wax
figures were melting, running into mere blobs, then vanishing as the
fire ate them up. The table at which Westcott had studied night after
night was festooned with a dazzling magic. Even the window through
which Martha Westcott had gazed was ringed with a bright frame of
splendor. Low crashes reached the ears of the helpless watchers as
objects within the cauldron of the building fell before the buffets
of victorious flame. The wind blew; the flames darted up to heaven; a
bellying scarlet-hued balloon of heavy smoke seemed attached to the
house by ropes of yellow flame. It tugged at the dwelling, strove
to lift it upward with an enormous strength. The house groaned and
cracked. The rumbling of destruction continued within the white
blistered walls.

It seemed as though any minute the house would be torn from
its foundations and lifted high in the air leaving beneath it a
flickering-tongued bonfire, a bonfire gigantic in size and unbearable
in heat. The long ell of the kitchen was a mass of ochre flame now,
a dancing madness against the darkness of the sky. Showers of sparks
shot upward, dipped, and veered downward again like fire-works. With a
rumbling crash the roof of the kitchen fell in and the detonation of
the collapse was like a discharge of cannon in Dreeme’s ears. These
old houses burned quickly. Time had seasoned the wood for destruction,
dried it out, honeycombed it with the tiny tunnels of wood-borers so
that the bright spirit of destruction might dart along it. It was
all going now, chairs, tables, wax flowers beneath glass, family
portraits. The spirit of things was turning all this into a heap of
smoking débris, of blackened jagged beams and heaps of fuming ashes.
Dreeme stood in the glare of the flame beside Walden Slater and his
face burned with the heat. His few garments smoked and dried. His
skin seemed crawling and parched. He felt as though he were watching
the fires of Tophet. He glanced about him at the group of sober-faced
observers and suddenly caught his breath in his throat. Leaning
sideways he struck his hand against Walden Slater’s arm and when the
farmer turned his slow eyes toward him he indicated an eddying knot
of men some distance from the conflagration. The farmer studied them
with narrowed lids but said nothing. Then, with the utmost calm, he
resumed his attention of the burning house. He seemed to be watching
the second-floor windows, windows through which wisps of curling smoke
projected like lost snakes. Dreeme was faintly astonished at his lack
of interest in the men toward whom he had directed Walden Slater’s
attention. For his own part, he continued to keep a watch on them,
observing them sideways through the corners of his eyes.

These men were not so far away but what he could recognize them.
They were muddy and distracted in demeanor, uncertain of themselves,
self-conscious of their presence in the light of the burning building.
They clung together as though for common strength. In the center of the
small group Dreeme could see the lanky figure of Bidwell and beside
him was the white-haired Corey. Threading the clustered group, talking
first to one man and then to another, was Lacy, his carbuncular nose
glowing in the fierce light of the flames. How they had emerged on
the road, whether they had followed along the narrow path from Nigger
Swamp or found some secret passage directly across the sunken marsh
were mysteries to Dreeme. He did not care greatly how they had reached
this spot. The main thing was that they were here, that they dared
show themselves in public. He wondered if others in that mad group
had followed Lathrop’s buggy to town and this conjecture aroused an
angry fear in him. He stared boldly at the group and scowled. These
men were equally aware of him and Walden Slater for they persisted
in glancing toward them as they continued their nervous conversation.
Once Bidwell gesticulated openly toward the young doctor. They were
strong men, broad-shouldered, browned by changing seasons, hard-sinewed
and tight-lipped. Still Dreeme felt no fear, nothing but a righteous
fury. A loud crash before him diverted his attention to the farm-house.
The right wall of the kitchen had fallen in. When, after observing
the shower of flame and sparks, he resumed his observation of the
self-conscious knot of men the white-haired Corey was walking slowly
toward him. The grave old man continued his approach until he was
within a yard of Dreeme and then he turned and surveyed the fire. The
young doctor, trembling at the nearness of this man whom he had seen
so shortly before in the grasp of a mystic delirium, said nothing
although a flood of recriminatory words rose in his throat and quivered
on his lips. He thought it peculiar that Walden Slater made no gesture
of recognition, that he stood so easily with his attention apparently
confined to the blazing building before him. Corey moved a single step
sideways toward Dreeme and still keeping his eyes directed before him
began to speak. He said:

“Doctor Dreeme, after a great madness comes a great sanity.”

Walden Slater, beside the young doctor, was listening, too, although
his expressionless face did not shift from its steadfast inspection of
the burning farm-house. Dreeme made no answer to Corey. The old farmer
spoke again. He said:

“You have evidently seen what you have seen. You can never see it
again.”

He extended one hand as though he were discussing the fire. At a
distance the little knot of farmers observed them fixedly. Corey said:

“There are no explanations. The chain is broken. I am an old man,
Doctor Dreeme, and I know what I am talking about. I am speaking for a
score of men who were lost and who, through a great shock, have found
themselves. I cannot tell you what dominated us but the domination has
ceased. The valley is cleansed. We are cleansed. We ask for silence.”

There was something behind his words that impressed Dreeme. He opened
his mouth to speak but Walden Slater forestalled him. The farmer said:

“We lost our tongues in Nigger Swamp.”

Corey observed the fire fiercely.

“What’s done is done,” added Slater mildly.

“Let what’s done rot with the body by the stone,” said Corey softly.

After a moment he withdrew quietly and a second later Dreeme saw
him back among the little knot of perturbed men. There was a brief
conversation and then calm blank faces resumed their observation of the
flame-wreathed Westcott farm-house.

“What does this mean?” inquired Dreeme of Walden Slater.

The farmer shifted his feet.

“It means what it means,” he said. “Let that be enough for you, Doctor.”

Dreeme wondered if it meant no retribution for these men who were
willing to connive at the destruction of a human being. He opened his
mouth to say something to this effect when the farmer snatched at him.
At the same time an exclamation of mingled surprise and horror rose
from the group of people in the road. Dreeme turned hastily toward the
burning house.

In one of the upper windows through which the thin snakes of curling
smoke had crept stood a man. There was flame in that window now and he
was silhouetted against the bright flare. He seemed just about to leap
for one foot was on the sill of the window and one heavy arm was raised
against the side of the house. Dreeme saw the fierce light play over a
cloven skull and lowered forehead. He saw, in the man’s other hand, a
black book clutched tightly. All this he saw in an instant for even as
he looked the window-sill seemed to cave inward to crumbling fire and
the figure, black against the light, fell backward, one hand snatching
desperately at the air. The next instant a great puff of flame
surged through the vacant window. There was nothing there, nothing
but a roaring cauldron that devoured its own. The destroyed building
seemed to emit a great sigh of relief, a hoarse gasp that soared
upward and spread out over Marlborough. Dreeme imagined that sigh of
relief permeating the air as far as Leeminster, sweeping through the
moonlit heavens and driving the intangible mists of mystery before it,
cleansing the valley of an old horror. He even pictured a calmness and
relief on the attentive and wide-eyed faces that watched, as he did,
this instantaneous tragedy. There seemed to be nothing left to say,
nothing to do but watch or go home. Walden Slater, after his first
instinctive grasp at the young doctor, had said nothing. He stood with
his great shoulders bowed, his long lip dangling loose, his coat gaping
and, through its opening, the revolver glistening. Dreeme suddenly felt
exhausted, a complete exhaustion that was flesh-weariness and great
relief mingled.


III

Humphrey Lathrop put his tea-cup down and wiped his huge pursing lips.
He nodded slowly.

“Yes, sir,” he said, “Walden’s right. Walden’s a great fellow. He knows
where justice is due.”

The bright sunlight of the early afternoon plucked at the curtains.
A refreshed and neatly shaved Dreeme sat before the ancient oracle,
toying with his cup of tea.

“Perhaps you’d like apple-jack, Daniel?” The old doctor was solicitous.
Dreeme shook his head slowly.

“No,” he said. “I don’t understand it all.”

“You never will,” replied Humphrey Lathrop. “You are too young to
understand anything.”

He said it pleasantly.

“And why shouldn’t the farmers get off scot-free?” asked Lathrop,
pursuing the thread of the conversation. “They haven’t done anything.”

Dreeme opened his eyes very wide.

“No, they haven’t,” persisted the old doctor. “Corey was right. Corey
is a good man. They’re all good men.”

Dreeme sat looking at him in amazement. Humphrey Lathrop chuckled
wheezily, leaned over, and prodded the young doctor.

“Use your head, Daniel,” he said. “Use your head even if you have lost
it.”

He wheezed again merrily at that.

“Do you hold a sick man accountable for what he does when he’s out of
his head?” asked the old doctor.

Dreeme shook his head negatively.

“All right,” said Humphrey Lathrop conclusively. That seemed to settle
it for the old doctor looked in his empty tea-cup, wheezed mournfully,
and then chuckled.

“I never felt so young in eighty years,” he remarked blandly to the
room in general.

Dreeme had to smile at that.

“Now, _say_!” exclaimed Lathrop. He pounded vigorously with his
cane. An instant later Lucinda’s vinegary visage thrust itself through
the door.

“The apple-jack bottle and two glasses,” ordered the old doctor.
Lucinda’s visage wrinkled into an absurd map. She started to withdraw
her head when Lathrop shook his huge cane.

“Y’d better make it three glasses,” he declared, winking in a knowing
manner at Dreeme.

“I’ll bring four,” announced Lucinda in nasal tones. “I believe a teeny
mite ’ud do me good.”

She withdrew the wrinkled map of her visage after strangely contorting
it. Lathrop stared after her with his mouth open.

“I believe the old fool was laughing,” he said in a husky whisper. Then
he chuckled. He beamed. His three chins shook waggishly. He added:

“Well, well, well!”

It seemed a period to Dreeme’s adventures. Suddenly Lathrop’s crinkling
face sobered. He leaned forward and said to Dreeme hastily:

“I heard this morning from young Barnson. He’d been over to Leeminster.
He saw a tall dark woman come into town. She had no luggage. She
engaged a buggy to take her over to Pittsfield. She....”

Dreeme raised his hand.

“She’s gone,” he said. “And that’s that.”

“That’s that,” agreed the old doctor cheerfully.

The door was pushed open and Lucinda stalked in balancing a tray on
which reposed a bottle and four tumblers. Dreeme did not see her. He
had risen to his feet and was gazing past her at the slight figure
that came smilingly at her heels.

The girl’s eyes were like wet violets, a soaked blue so deep as to be
astonishing.


FINIS.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

  - New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
  public domain.

  - Some clear typographical and spelling errors have been corrected.

  - The table of contents was created for this edition.


*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79055 ***