Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 4 (1925-04).djvu/14



T RARE intervals, usually in the spring of the year, a singular phenomenon known as the "bloody moon" occurs in the cavernous region of Kentucky. The Indians whom Daniel Boone knew in this section had a tradition in connection with the peculiar occurrence to the effect that "the bloody moon brings swift wo to him that sees it."

Henry Pearson sat on the steps of his dwelling just after the fall of night. Through the timber along the top of the ridge he caught the first glow of the rising moon. Suddenly the orb shot above the line of timber top. Then for the first time in his life he had a clear view of the old Indian bloody moon. It fascinated him, while it horrified him. Seemingly there was nothing about the sight to occasion fright; yet something about it, some magnetic uncanniness, seemed to freeze the very blood in his veins.

For a full minute it glowed at him, then the planetary face brightened to its normal tint, and the bloody moon vanished as suddenly and with as little apparent reason as it had appeared.

Pearson did not regard himself as a superstitious person. Still, he reflected, he had ample basis for his present unnerved condition. The timbers of the house of Pearson knew to quake at the recurrence of the bloody moon.

The thing went far back into pioneer days. A century and a half before, the land of which his home was a part had been secured to old Alligator Pearson, a first settler, by patent from the territorial government of Kentucky. The aboriginal title was held by an Indian chief named Eagle Fire. In spite of his terror-inspiring name, the Indian was a peaceful old man; and Pearson, brutal and fearless, with a handful of pioneers, dispossessed the harmless old man and his tribe by the simple expedient of killing them. Only one was permitted to live—the old chief's daughter.

She was a pretty, fawn-skinned girl of sixteen; and Alligator Pearson took her to wife by clubbing her into submission. When the child was born the princess died. But she never gave in to her white husband in the spirit, for she died with a curse on her lips for the father of her babe. Her last words, reported by the lean women who waited on her in her sickness, were: "Live on, my son, and