Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 1 (1925-01).djvu/105

104 I pressed the boy's shoulder, not so much to comfort him as to have the feel of something human under my hand, Then my fingers closed fiercely on him, as, high, and sweet, and very lovely, I heard Alice Frasanet's voice rising from the trail at the base of the hill. She had promised to look in on us before we left with Carew's body, and bring us a plate of biscuit. Now she was coming blindly to meet this waiting horror.

Perpetuating her old jest at Frank's Indian ancestry, she came singing up the path. The thing outside turned at the sound, its pointed ears cocked forward, the white of its teeth showing as its lips parted in anticipation of easy prey. Slowly, bending nearly double, it crept from the window, making for the clump of withered brush at the turn of the path, crouching to spring as Alice rounded the bend.

I looked, horror-frozen in my place, waiting the tragedy as the Christian martyrs must have watched the gratings lift from the lions' dens.

Balancing the tray daintily, Alice approached the knot of shrubs. Silently as a shadow the gray thing slipped into the path, barring her way with gaping jaws and red tongue lolling from its mouth. Slowly, jaws working with a horrible, chewing motion, it advanced its hellish face nearer and nearer her throat.

I tried to speak, to shriek my horror to the evening sky; but a paralyzing dust seemed to have gathered in my throat, and only a hoarse, inarticulate whisper came. Summoning all my strength, I took a step toward the window; next instant I went reeling against the wall as a dark object hurtled past me.

Dashing panes and sash to splinters, Frank took the window at a bound. The crash of falling glass was drowned in the yell he set up as he cleared the intervening distance with long, loose-limbed strides.

It was Frank who charged that gray horror; yet it was not Frank. As Jekyll metamorphosed to Hyde, so a subtile physical change was wrought in him. It was a man no one in ten generations had seen who rushed down the hillside. It was a cry no living white man had ever heard that he raised as he brandished his great knife.

"Aie, aie, tehn-yoh-yeh-roh-noh!"

Twice he repeated the blood-freezing yell, ending the second time with a crescendoed "Aie, aie, YAH!"

It was the Mohawk war whoop—the battle cry of the people of the bear.

T WAS a miracle of heredity I beheld; an atavism, a throwback, a reversion to type. Sleeping, but never dead, the long-forgotten character of his redskin ancesterancestor [sic] had awakened in Frank Seabring at the challenge of danger to his beloved.

Before us lived and breathed the personality of a Mohawk sachem—some warrior of the totem of the bear, whose moving passion was a hatred of the wolf people.

"Aie, yah! Aie, yah!" the battle whoop rang out again.

There was something horribly comic in the wolf-thing's expression as it turned. Such a look of astonished rage the Evil One might give at defiance from a lost soul.

They sprang together, meeting in mid-air. The man-wolf struck swiftly, seeking to bury its fangs in Frank's throat. Frank's free hand sank in the coarse fur at the creature's gullet; the great knife described a half-circle, disappeared; rose and sank again, and again, and again. Stumbling, reeling, spewing blood, the bug-wolf staggered from the clinch, the light of battle fading in its eyes.