Page:Weird Tales Volume 4 Number 3 (1924-11).djvu/95

94 Dick laughed at him and said the poor Chinamen were suckers to fall for his line.

And the magician was angry and rose up in all his ugliness and put a curse on Dick and on his family. Dick was going to fight him right there, and we would have been murdered, I'm sure, only I pulled him away and made him take me quickly back into the city.

"And that night," said Joe, "Dick had the first attack."

"Josephine!" cried my uncle. "Do you know what you are saying? I'm—Confound it, my dear, what nonsense! 'Put a curse on him?' You know better than to believe such trash, 'Curse,' the devil, my dear! Dick has got some low-down foreign plague. It don't matter whether the Democrats or the Republicans are in power, there's no place like the U. S. A. Confound these outlandish, God-forsaken, evil-smelling places, where all the pests and misery of the world are bred. Dick's got bubonic plague, or the beri-beri or some such fool thing."

Joe told us that Dick got over the first attack in a few hours, but two weeks later on the first night out at sea on the way home he had the second, and it was worse than the first. After that they became more frequent and more violent, and Dick was wasting away and poor Joe's heart was breaking.

"Fiddlesticks!" said my uncle. "Bosh and tommyrot! 'Curse,' my eye! I'm no doctor, but the lad's got some heathen disorder. But cheer up, little woman. We'll have your lover overhauled and in A 1 shape in a jiffy. It may take a month to get real sick in China, but that's China. You're home now, my dear, and it don't take all day to get a pain in the tummy here, nor all night to get over it. Just smile, little girl, and get ready to go to housekeeping. That's what."

It was two o'clock before the house settled down. It was three when I heard a noise outside my door. I went out to see what it was.

The light at the top of the stairs had been left burning, and as I opened my door there was enough light to show me the deformed creature that was creeping along the wall of the hallway, a hideous man, a weird beast, some terrible imp from hell, what I could not say, so awful was it, so unlike anything I have ever seen, or heard of, or fancied.

And this thing opened the door of the honeymooners' room and passed in.

I had no revolver, so I took up a dumb-bell that I used of a morning for exercise and went to the door of the room where the thing had entered. I opened it, and reached in and snapped on the lights. In the bed lay the travelers sound asleep. I went over and touched them go make sure they were only sleeping. I looked under the bed, in the closet and out on the porch roof under the windows. There was nothing there.

Joe, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, caused me to pull my head in from the window.

"What's the matter? What's the matter?"

"Nothing," said I. "Don't be frightened. I thought I heard the fire engines going down town and came over to look."

I went downstairs to look around a bit. The hall, the parlors, the dining-room were all empty, but in the little passage that runs from the dining-room to the kitchen I thought I heard a footstep. I was sure I did. I stood and listened. And then somebody sneezed. I pulled the swinging door open. There stood my uncle in his nightshirt.

"God bless my soul!" he said. "I was about to shoot you."

"You're catching cold," I told him. "Go to bed. What are you tramping around here for this hour of the night?"