Page:Weird Tales Volume 2 Number 2 (1923-09).djvu/46

Rh known better than that. You can't blame the Indians for being mad So they were back again last night, were they?"

"That's what the cook says. He saw them." Courtney stood staring at Weatherford. "The cook saw them. Yet the night-watchman couldn't see them at all," he added. "The two of them stood shoulder to shoulder, looking; and the cook could see them, and the night-watchman couldn't." Courtney laughed shrilly. "What d'y' think of that?"

Weatherford gazed at him steadily for a moment.

"I think we had better change the night-watchman," he said quietly.

But Courtney was not so easily diverted.

"Strange, the cook could see 'em and the watchman couldn't," he mused, abstractedly. "Yet they were there! Snooping around among the graves, like their feelings had been hurt, and they hadn't power to mention it. Say! Do they ever come back like that, I wonder? I remember once"

But Weatherford cut him off sharply.

"Pshaw, now!" he said disgustedly. "That's a foolish line of talk for a business man. They've all been dead a hundred years Haven't they?" he added; and he gazed about at us slowly, impersonally, as if he expected an answer to his question.

Courtney turned suddenly to Eaglefeather.

"What do you think about it, Charley?" he asked, with a little twisted grin.

Eaglefeather stared at him for a moment intently, without speaking; then his gaze wandered off into the gathering darkness.

"I don't know whether they're dead or not," he said. "But I don't believe they are!"

"Oh, pshaw!" Weatherford laughed his provoked laugh again. "That's all foolishness, Eaglefeather. Get the idea out of your mind. It's that bunch of Indians over by Lost Creek—juse them, and nothing more."

"I guess you're right," argued Courtney. "I ought to know! The darned fools kept banging around on their tom-toms, last night, and doing their war chants, over by Deadman's Hill, till I couldn't sleep a wink. Getting onto my nerves, too, I guess."

"The Kennisaus were not beating tom-toms last night," said Charley Eaglefeather. "Nor doing any war chants, either."

"You mean to tell me they weren't beating tom-toms from ten o'clock till midnight, over by Deadman's Hill?" Courtney's face had taken on a look of positive alarm.

"They were not," said Eaglefeather, quietly. "I was with them until after midnight myself, at their camp in the Elk Creek Basin, many miles from the place you mention."

"Then who was it beating tom-toms, I'd like to know?" Courtney almost shrieked. "What in the—"

He paused with a sudden intake of breath, his face frozen in a look of utter stupefaction.

"There they are, now!" he whispered tensely, and pointed toward the distant top of Deadman's Hill.

The sun had slipped behind the western rim; the valley beneath the ridges lay swathed in the gathering shadows. Yet the top of Deadman's Hill, a half mile distant, still caught the last rays of upper light.

And there, among the scattering pines, upon the abrupt shoulder of the precipice, stood the milk-white horse and its rider, silent and erect like a statue of William II. at Coblenz; while behind this apparition ranged a group of horsemen, blanketed, and with war accoutrements, standing at attention.

For a moment they remained thus, as if frozen into their background of scenery, standing out clear and distinct under the last rays of the setting sun:—a chief and his warriors, ready to move forward—as if a spotlight had been turned suddenly upon the final phase of a tableau, out of history.

Then the light waned, faded, disappeared entirely, leaving the whole earth wrapped in deeper opaque shadows. And the apparition was gone—vanished with the light.

It was the voice of Eaglefeather that aroused us from our stupefaction. He had uncovered, suddenly, and he stood thus, facing the top of Deadman's Hill. Across his darkly expressive features there had come the wrapt look of a zealot; his eyes burned with an unnatural fire.

"Pohontihac!" he whispered, reverently. "Pohontihac! The Chief has returned!"

"Silence, Eaglefeather!" cried Weatherford, shaking him by the shoulder. "Cut out that sorcery, man! Nobody has returned, there's nothing unnatural"

But the Indian gave no heed to this command; for Eaglefeather had begun to talk, at last.

"They have returned," he echoed in a hollow voice, twisting his hands together. "The Kennisaus have come back to claim their ravished lands. This is the final move. There's trouble on the wind, tonight."

"Calm yourself, Eaglefeather!" Weatherford's voice took on a pleading note. "It's only the Kennisaus, I tell you—the remnant of the tribe. They haven't come back. They haven't"

"The north wind blows," the Indian ran on in a sing-song voice, rocking himself gently back and forth with his chant—"The north wind blows. The cicadas have ceased to call. The crows fly in long lines to the mountain tops: There's a ring around the moon, tonight!"

The look on Weatherford's face had changed suddenly to one of alarm.

"Man, you're beside yourself!" he begged. "Don't carry on so—don't do it, I say! You know there's nothing unnatural about it. You know"

But the Indian had passed beyond the pale of argument; he was back again in the paleolithic age; the superstitions of a thousand years had returned upon him, multiplied.

"The gods of the Kennisaus are angry tonight," he ran on, swaying himself back and forth rhythmically, in a weird half-dance, tossing his arms above his head. "Their souls are wracked with sorrow—they hear the sounds of much weeping. The spirits of the dead make medicine. The north wind will rage for a sign; the forests will moan for the sorrows of those who weep. The spirit of the great Pohontihac comes for revenge. Beware of the north wind! Death rides through the heavens tonight"

Thus he raged on in his hideous incantation, eyes wide and staring, head erect, shoulders squared, rocking himself luridly back and forth, the look of seer upon his tense and agitated face.

We stood staring at him, amazed and speechless, there in the gathering night. No one within our little group held the power of further utterance. For the cycle of life stood inert; the very earth itself loomed forth, devoid of perspective. The groove of time seemed suddenly to have slipped back and left him once more a savage, among his savage ancestors. For Charley Eaglefeather, abruptly and without warning, had returned to Idolatry.

HE storm broke about ten o'clock at night—a high, dry wind blowing out of a half-clear northern sky, under a fitful moon.

It set the tall grass singing like Aeolian harps, moaned through the scattering clumps of buckbrush, and roared in the tops of the cottonwoods