Page:Weird Tales Volume 12 Issue 05 (1928-11).djvu/46

 He came out walking rapidly and was well past the hotel when I caught up with him. He stopped and looked at me patiently while I was trying to think of something to say, but I hesitated and he walked on. I kept up with him and finally suggested we might dine together. My idiotic mumble seemed to please him. He surprized me by accepting. I don't pretend I understood him. His views were not mine—yet in the end he rang true.

Graves with Seton and his wife had gone into South America on some hare-brained rumor of a lost civilization. A Philadelphia museum had sent them as a scouting party, that could move swiftly and cover the ground. If they found what they sought, an elaborate expedition could go in later, equipped to meet the conditions that existed.

Graves and Mrs. Seton had returned—alone. They brought back some story of spiders. At least Mrs. Seton did. And Graves corroborated her. Yet I knew Seton to be a reliable man, painstaking and methodical in the field. This I had learned from the museum. I had only met him twice myself. He was older than his wife and of a more quiet bearing, and there was a noticeable difference between them. There had been talk, too. Breath of scandal! But their story had been accepted by all—except the museum.

I knew Mrs. Seton was in love with Graves, or pretended to be. Since their return they had often been seen together. On one occasion as I was leaving the apartments where Graves was staying, I heard a soft rustling on the stairs—intimately feminine. There in a darkened corner of the landing she cowered, a slim figure in a clinging silken gown. Her hat shadowed her face, but could not hide its startling beauty, could not mar the brilliance of her skin, nor dim the wonderful eyes of this modem Delilah.

I paused and looked at her sharply as she took a step forward, her eyes filled with defiance, her lips parted.

"Oh!" she panted; "why don't you let us alone?"

It is with some shame that I confess her charm almost enveloped me like a magic cloud. Her beauty was wholly intoxicating. But I had thrust her away.

"You have no claim to mercy," I replied unfeelingly. "Do not count upon any." I left her pale and trembling.

I had returned to the States shortly after the collapse of the ill-fated party, and was staying at the Jefferson House. Graves dined with me there. He talked soberly, with a sort of composed unreserve and quiet bearing that might have been the outcome of manly self-control or of gigantic deception. Who could tell? He seemed of the right sort, and he had been one of us.

Guayaquil," he spoke slowly in answer to my question, "and went down into the disputed territory of northern Peru. Toward the end of that semi-arid plateau which stretches for miles between two spurs of the Peruvian Andes lies a land that God forgot. High in the air it is, as men measure things—a matter of two vertical miles above the slow lift of the Pacific out beyond the sunset. Tumbled and stark, too, a dumping-ground of the Titans, a scrap-heap from which the world was made.

"Up toward this sky-top world we rode on a day as glittering and telescopically clear overhead as it was harsh and soggy underfoot, up through the green rankness of the jungle coast toward a land of illimitable space. To the condor swinging a thousand feet overhead we must have seemed like ants