Page:Weird Tales Volume 3 Number 1 (1923-12).djvu/38



HE old Melotte place was a place of brooding mystery, of silence, and weird shadows crouching.

Never a sound of life came from within its mouldering walls; never a light gleamed from its vacant windows; never a sign in the dark silence told that the place was tenanted—except when the moon would reach a long finger of light down through the pines that crowned the ragged ledge across the road to point out a single window and a white face there, staring into the night; a white face watching—listening

Old Widow Melotte, a "furriner" to the entire countryside because of the thin stream of Spanish blood that ran through her veins, lived there alone with her crutch and the gaunt white cat of mystery that watched and listened with her at the window. He was a monstrous beast, as cats go—full twenty pounds in weight—and his green-yellow eyes flamed out from a smear of black that lay across his face like an evil mask. Queer tales were told in our countryside about the old woman and her cat. She called him Carlos; and those who claimed to know insisted that she would hold the beast in her arms and talk to him as if he were human and could understand her. She was judged crazy for that—for Carlos had been the name of her boy!

The woman—this I heard from the lips of my father, for I was only a lad of ten when she began her uncanny vigil at the window—had come to the neighboring village when a slip of a girl of twenty. She was beautiful then; beautiful with a charm and fire not often found in our quiet country girls. Her dancing feet, the sharp click of her castanets, her flashing smile of white teeth between red lips, called a challenge to the young men of the village.

Among them all, the keenest rivalry for her favor lay between big Joe Melotte and the ne'er-do well Vint Willis. She married Melotte. Willis was a poor loser. Others who had known the warmth of her smile, and had hoped for a time, wished them well and danced at their wedding; but Willis came at the height of the merrymaking with drunken threats in his mouth. In the glow of the moment she defied him, weaving a tantalizing dance before him and snapping her black castanets in his face, until he lost his head and would have laid hands upon her had Melotte not struck him down. They carried him away with his nose on the side of his face from the blow; and next day he left the village.