Page:Weird Tales Volume 24 Issue 4 (1934-10).djvu/69

 and in the end (as you already know) she paid the price of her devotion with her life. She was returning to the house at dusk when the Terror pounced upon her, no doubt mistaking her for me. She received no wound beyond a slight bruise, but she must have had full sight of the thing, and what she saw killed her as surely as a bullet in her heart. One shriek—I shall carry the echo of it in my brain to my dying day—and she never spoke again.

"After I had seen her laid to rest in the shadow of the little gray church on the hill, I returned to my empty, desolate house nursing a hatred in my heart such as I pray that you, my friend, will never experience. Till then I had fought the Terror with much the same feeling as a soldier might seek to outwit and slay a soldier of the opposing army; now I resumed my quest with a fierce and unholy joy. Before, I had been content to remain on the defensive behind barred windows and bolted doors, awaiting the attack; now, I flung caution to the winds and boldly sought the attacker instead. Day and night I roamed the great moors, armed and watchful, asking—praying—for nothing more than to meet the cloven-footed man-monster face to face.

"But well has it been said that the Devil protects his own! For a whole year I pursued my self-imposed task in vain. Vague and wild stories of a demon stag came to my ears now and then. Once it was an old crone, gathering dry sticks for her cottage fire, who fled screaming at the horned apparition she glimpsed amid the trees. Now it would be a benighted shepherd who had cowered in a ditch while a herd of wild deer thundered by, led by a four-footed creature that was neither beast nor man. A gamester who openly boasted that he would get to the bottom of the mystery was found next morning with the life choked out of him. 'A poacher's revenge,' the papers hinted, but I knew better. Time and again I found the devil footprints beside some stream, or crossing some marshy hollow, but the Thing itself I never saw—until the night you came.

"With the memory of your own experience still fresh in your mind, you can imagine what happened to me. I heard the sound of hoofs on the gravel path, threw wide the door, and charged die shape that loomed dimly through the mist, firing as I ran. Three shots—misses—then it got me. The rest you know.

"And now, my friend, you understand something of the nature of the quest on which you have embarked. You will know that there is more in your strange legacy than a mere desire for revenge on the part of an old man whose race is almost run. If, knowing all, you decide to take up the task which I shall have laid down ere you read these lines, the whole of my wealth and property is yours. Accept it without scruple, for I have neither kith nor kin to dispute your claim; and, large as it is, it is no more than an adequate reward for the extermination of the monster I have unwittingly brought into being.

"The rest is on the knees of the gods. Farewell!"

was a long silence after Hugh had come to the end of the strange epistle. Hugh looked at each of his companions in turn, endeavoring to gage their thoughts. The expression of unwonted gravity on Ronnie's usually humorous features showed that his interest had been aroused, though the somewhat mocking glint in his half-closed eyes seemed to hint that he was not wholly convinced of the truth of die narrative.