Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 1 (1925-01).djvu/99

98 self; surely there must be some truth in them, or they wouldn't have persisted so long."

"Well," I replied, "if what you saw really was a wolf-man, he'd better lie low while we're about. Frank Seabring is part Mohawk, you know. An ancestress of his was a woman of the totem of the bear; and the tribes claiming descent from the great bear, and those who had the wolf for their manitou, were always at war. If I remember my pre-colonial history rightly, the bear people usually came out ahead, too."

Shela twitched her shoulders as she rose, for all the world like a spaniel shaking the water from its fur.

"You'll be sorry if you dig in those hills," she warned.

"I'll be sorrier if the society's board of governors learns that I knew about them and didn't dig there," I countered. "Scientists of today are like bricklayers or carpenters, you know. So many bricks laid and so many nails driven, so much wages; so many scientific discoveries a year, a new appropriation; no discoveries, no salary. It's so much for so much, you know; and I think I'd rather brave your Welsh werewolf than the gaunt gray wolf that accompanies an unpaid salary."

With which bit of homely philosophy, I bade Alice adieu, got my hat and stick, and left to pack for the trip.

Oct. 10, 19— AG NA GITH. And a dreary little hole it is. Six or eight sad-looking cottages cling with despondent tenacity to the hillsides rising from the shabby little railway station. A nervous little train fusses up to the platform twice a day, always threatening to deposit a stranger in our midst, and never doing it. Even the loafers at the public house wear an air of settled gloom. The only thing of interest in the neighborhood is the great dolmen that crowns the tallest hill. There it stands, foursquare with the compass, frowning disdainfully upon these degenerate offspring of the once mighty Britons like an ancestral portrait regarding the family spend-thrift.

Carew has engaged a cottage a few minutes' walk from our digging grounds. A widow who boasts more wrinkles than I've ever seen in a human face lives a quarter-mile away, and, for a consideration, cooks our meals and otherwise ministers to our wants. The remains of an ancient stone-quarry lie about a hundred yards from the dolmen; here we have staked out a plot of promising ground. Tomorrow we commence digging.

Oct. 12, 19— OTHING remarkable. Our excavations have been more productive of disappointments than anything else. A few feet down we struck a stratum of coarse sand and gravel, and one or two bits of rough blue stone, clearly not indigenous to the neighborhood. After that, water. If nothing further develops in the next two or three days we shall move our operations to another hill.

Oct. 13, 19— O FURTHER discoveries of note.

A few bones, apparently canine, came to light in the moist sand today.

The weather is perceptibly cooler, and brisk winds spring up at dusk. Last night the breeze was so strong it rattled the doors and windows in a most annoying manner; once or twice my lamp flickered and nearly went out.

There is a chill quality in the air, too, which baffles all the efforts of our little fire to keep the room comfortable. Several times the gusts of air played so about the door I could have been certain a dog was snuffing at the crack. Yet when I flung the door open there was nothing there.