Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 4 (1925-04).djvu/183

 from the churning froth where the hurtling waters reached the earth again. It came to him that he was not gone, after all. He had not considered the "saucer" which is always to be found at the foot of a fall, hollowed out by ages of falling water to a depth of many feet.

His courage revived by the turn of fortune, he began to figure his way out. From his knowledge of the locality, he judged that he was less than a hundred yards from safety, where the subterranean stream came finally to the light in the waters of Green River. If he could last for five minutes, life would be his. The woman seemed lifeless in his arms, now; but she did not hinder his movements—the sweeping waters carried them both like corks. He found, too, that in spite of the low roof of the stream's bed, his head more often than not emerged in a pocket of air that permitted him a long breath.

The passageway widened, narrowed again: then the waters, half joyfully, half vengefully, suddenly evicted him out of the bowels of the earth into the rocky bed of Green River. The woman was still with him, her hair floating on the cottony waters, the brilliant light of the high-riding moon tracing her features into a picture far from unlovely.

He dragged both her and himself to the sandy bank. Her features were Indian, but with a pleasant variant due to her unmistakable white blood. Her berry-brown skin and gipsy hair came from her aboriginal ancestry; the rotundity of chin and mold of cheek from her Nordic stock. Her clothing was a nondescript garment of skins and rags. And even the bruises about her body, and the clotted blood in cuts about her neck, arms and shoulders, did not mar the beauty of her maidenhood. Her body rested limply on the sand, the last of the curse of the Indian bloody moon.

He dropped to his knees by her and began chafing her hands. Between times he built a fire by flaking two flint rocks together, Indian fashion, and catching the sparks in rotten wood. Thereafter he worked with her to better purpose, and presently she was sufficiently revived for him to remove her to the house, where he turned her over to the tender ministrations of his mother.

rest of the story came by degrees over a long period of time, while the girl learned the language of her white ancestry. Much of what she recounted was merely her own tradition, but it pieced in well with the facts in young Pearson's possession, and was entirely plausible. The son of the Indian princess and old Alligator Pearson had taken to the caves after he became grown, wifing an Indian girl from a remnant of an allied tribe. In course of time he had killed his father. Passing the curse of his mother on to sons and daughters of his own, in course of time he had died. The charge had been carried faithfully out by each succeeding generation, usually with a poison made from the venom of a moccasin snake and certain plants whose identity had become lost to the girl. And so, because of the pressure of getting food, and the life under the earth, her people had all passed away, leaving her to complete the curse. She had lost the formula for the poison. In desperation she had worked out the present plan, hoping to get the last of the Pearsons into the cave and starve him to death, or drown him over the falls of Lost River.

The rest of this tale is another story. But so far as the house of Pearson was concerned, the bloody moon superstition became merely an old wives' tale. The next Pearson in line was a fawn-skinned boy who would never know a sense of dread when the month of May brought a blood-red moon in the evening sky.