Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 2 (1925-02).djvu/6



OR the second time since his arrival in Paris that day, Miles Cresson, of New Orleans, found that war-time comrades would flee at the mention of a name. There was something so sinister in the way they had stared and made off whenever he uttered it that the American was seized with astonishment. It was not strange, then, that he paid little heed to the carefree students, who crowded past on Boulevard St. Michel that August evening in 1923.

Cresson watched the gray-blue uniform of Captain Émile DeBray until it had vanished in the crowd, determined that he would demand an explanation, should they meet again. For insolence had shone in the officer's small eyes and in his pasty face as his back had turned in answer to a civil question. And that question concerned the fate of a fellow officer—Jules Chaumon. It was mystifying.

DeBray, an Alsatian, was both oily and ingratiating, and it was because of this that Cresson had disliked him from the first. The three (Cresson, DeBray and Chaumon) had been artillery students together at Le Valdahon in 1914. Cresson was one of those valiant, impetuous Americans who took up the cause of France in the beginning. He was the wealthy and adventurous scion of an old Louisiana family, with the twinkling, black eyes of his ancestors; one of those tall, dark, good-looking chaps one often meets in the Southland.

If he had ever held a barrier of reserve between himself and DeBray, Cresson did not know the existence of this, so far as Chaumon was concerned. They had been the closest of friends, drawn together by interests in common. Jules Chaumon reminded one of steel encased in velvet, having the blue eyes and tawny hair of a viking and yet the gentle features and intensity of a prophet. Indeed, he and DeBray were opposites. They differed as much in appearance as in tendencies—of the sort that had caused the stocky Alsatian to fling away his patrimony over gaming tables a few days before their paths had crossed.

Fluency in languages had cemented a bond between Chaumon and Miles Cresson, whose accomplishments in music and art were much the same as those of the young Frenchman. The fortunes of war sent them into different regiments before they had quite completed training—Cresson to