Page:Weird Tales Volume 09 Issue 02 (1927-02).djvu/73

 Science, science! This was the age of science, the age of the airplane, the submarine, radium, television and radio; and yet here was a scene to make Science herself rub her eyes in amazement, a scene that might have been taken right out of some wild story or out of some myth of the ancient world. Well, that ancient world, too, had its science, some of which science, I fear (though this thought would have brought a pooh-pooh from Milton Rhodes) man has lost to his sorrow. And, like that ancient world, so perhaps had this strange underground world which we had entered—or, rather, were trying to enter. And perhaps of that science or some phases of it, this angel before us had fearful command.

One moment I told myself that we should need all the courage we possessed, all the ingenuity and resource of that science of which Milton Rhodes himself was the master; the next, that I was letting my imagination overleap itself.

My thoughts were suddenly broken by the voice of Milton.

"Goodness, Bill, look at her hand! I forgot!"

He stepped toward the angel and gently lifted her blood-dripping hand. The chain had sunk right into the soft wrist. The angel, however, with a smile and a movement with her left hand, gave us to understand that the hurt was nothing.

The next moment she gave an exclamation and gazed past me down the pillared cavern. Instantly I turned, and, as I did so, I too exclaimed.

There, far off amongst the columns, two yellow, wrathful lights were gleaming, and dark hurrying figures were moving toward us.

help is coming, Bill," said Milton Rhodes. "And that reminds me: I haven't reloaded my revolver."

"I would lose no time in doing so," I told him.

He got out the weapon and proceeded to reload it. It was not. by the way, one of these new-fangled things but one of your good old-fashioned revolvers—solid, substantial, one that would stand hard usage, a piece to be depended upon. And that was what we needed—weapons to be depended upon.

The angel was watching Rhodes closely. I wondered if she knew what had killed her demon—knew, I mean that this metal thing, with its glitter so dull and so cold, was a weapon. It was extremely unlikely that she had, in that horrible moment on the bridge, seen what actually had happened. However that might have been, it was soon plain that she recognized the revolver as a weapon—or, at any rate, guessed that it was.

With an interjection, she stepped to Rhodes' side, and, with swift pantomime, she assured us that there was nothing at all to apprehend from those advancing figures.

"After all," Milton said, slipping the revolver into his pocket, "why should we be so infernally suspicious? Maybe this world is very different from our own."

"It seems to me," I told him, my right hand in that pocket which contained my revolver, "that we have good cause to be suspicious. Have you forgotten what Grandfather Scranton saw up there at the Tamahnowis Rocks (and what he didn't see) and the horrible death there of Rhoda Dillingham, to say nothing of what happened to us here a few minutes ago? That we