Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 1 (1925-01).djvu/97

96 turing some hapless victim in the audience.

The half-mythical story of some remote ancestor of Frank's who married a Mohawk woman in the days when Boston Common was a cow pasture is a standing joke among his friends, and Alice declared she was addressing the charming little ballade to the drop of redskin blood in him.

Certainly she succeeded in making him a temporary aborigin, for he was red as a boiled lobster from collar to hair before she brought the song to a close.

Another incident that helped me through the dreary rounds of weak tea and vapid conversation was a story Shela Tague told me, which directly concerned Cag na Gith. I chanced to mention my plan to go there with Frank to help Carew in his digging, and at the village's name she turned as white as though a chill had suddenly come on her.

Thinking she was sickened with the fetid air, I was about to fetch her a glass of water, when she begged me to sit with her and listen to an experience she had near the place three years before.

"I was stopping at a farmhouse, about half a mile from the railway station," she began, "doing some sketching at times; but mostly walking over the hills and moors about the village.

"One afternoon, near sunset, I had set up my easel a few hundred feet from the station platform, and was painting away industriously, trying to make my colors and the daylight come out even. I chanced to glance behind me, and saw a queer-looking man sitting on a luggage truck near the station, gazing intently at me.

"There aren't more than half a dozen houses in all Cag na Gith, you know; and anything in the shape of a stranger, even a tramp, is a sensation in the place. I thought I knew everyone, human and canine, in the village; but this loafer was new to me.

"I went on with my painting until the sun had gone behind the big hill where the dolmen is, and the air began to take on the twilight chill. Once or twice I glanced back out of the tail of my eye, to see what my companion was up to, and each time I saw him sitting in the same stiffly upright position, gazing fixedly at me.

"As I folded up my easel and camp stool, and started across the tracks for my boarding place, he rose and began to walk in the same direction.

"There was no hurry in his gait, Dr. Warrener, but I felt that he was all a-tremble, and terribly eager to overtake me, I began to hasten a little, and with two long strides—positively, they were like an athlete's standing leaps!—he lessened the distance between us by fifteen feet, and I saw he'd be abreast of me before I could pass the water pit lying on the farther side of the railway. I hadn't noticed him particularly, and couldn't see him very well in the gathering dusk, but there was something about that man that horrified me, though I couldn’t say exactly what it was. He was tall, very tall, well over six feet, and startlingly thin, and seemed to be wearing a tight-fitting suit of shabby, fuzzy gray cloth. And though he walked directly on the gravel ballast of the roadbed, his feet made no sound.

"I hurried a few steps; then, when I saw I couldn't possibly shake him, I determined to brazen the thing out, and turned on him, asking angrily, 'What do you mean by following me?'

"Professor Warrener, if I live to be a hundred years old, I'll never be able to forget that face. It was small and narrow, and drawn to a point, almost like a dog's, and the teeth protruding from the great, wide mouth were long and yellow and hooked, like an animal's fangs. But the eyes were the most horrible part of it. They