Page:Weird Tales Volume 12 Issue 05 (1928-11).djvu/48

 with the priest's obsidian knife raised above my breast.

"Vaguely I remembered seeing Clara to her own tent, and after piling more wood upon the fire, falling exhausted upon my own cot beside Seton. There are few states, I suppose, which exact so severe a toll from one's nervous system as the anticipation of calamity. And it came soon enough."

I studied the man's face attentively. He was at least candid. But it never came home to him how wholly he was caught in the spell of this woman whose real character was so inscrutable, whose beauty and charm masked the cunning of a serpent.

I watched him light a fresh cigarette and exhale a heavy swirl of smoke.

days later we were in the higher altitudes," he continued. "We had not yet reached the part of the country we sought, but decided to rest here a day or so before moving on. We could, perhaps, pick an easier access to the plateau above.

"The morning of the third day Seton and his wife set out together. It was noon when Clara returned alone. Disheveled and torn, she came running toward me with a wild look in her eyes. It was patent at a glance that something had happened—something horrible. There was an ashiness in her cheeks that even her rich coat of tan could not conceal. It was the one time that I noticed, for all her amazing beauty, she was sinister! There was cruelty about her quivering mouth, in the terror of her speech—not conscious cruelty, but the more terrifying, careless cruelty of nature itself.

"'Quick!' she gasped; 'he is being killed!'

"Her very looks and speech demanded action, and quickly procuring my automatic I prepared to follow her at once without further questioning. Clara still carried her own lightweight 30-30. She led off through the thick foliage of cane which seemed to be the particular vegetation at this altitude; off to where the side of the mountain sloped to a steep pitch that dropped far below to the valley floor; across a tangle of interlacing stems and offshoots that reached a height of three or four feet and was in some places strong enough to bear our weight.

"As I struggled along behind Clara I seemed to sense a subtle change in her attitude toward me—a new intentness, a doubt plainly tinged with apprehension. What was it? What had happened to Seton? But it was no time now to ask questions. I set down her expression of fear and bewilderment as the result of her husband being in danger.

"It was rough going. On hands and knees we could crawl along for a few yards over the tangled mass of bamboo, then strike a weak place and mash through to the ground in a smother of tangled leaves and hampering tendrils—scramble out and go on. By the time we were five hundred yards across that slope we were soaked with perspiration and nearly fagged out.

"It was nearly sunset when we reached a comparatively level stretch beyond which the mountain dropped away suddenly as though to make up for lost time. Across this place the cane was unusually thick, and it was here, a few yards short of the steep slope, that Clara, her face blanched to the hue of dirty parchment and her forehead dewed with cold perspiration, stepped and pointed.

"I reached her side and looked down into a sort of pear-shaped cave perhaps a dozen yards in diameter and about half as high. Daylight filtered through a ragged hole at our feet, pitifully weak, but enough to disclose the mingled rocks and earth that formed the walls of the enclosure and the whitish, diseased-looking vines that twined up them