Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 6 (1925-06).djvu/30

 forest can be called silent that seems to contain a thousand whispering voices.

Dawn came at last. To Stark Laurier it seemed considerably delayed. He rose to his feet, surprized that he was not frozen stiff. His body contained less warmth than a snowman. For half an hour he walked briskly up and down to get his sluggish blood back into circulation.

The sun climbed gradually higher and higher. The roving bits of fog vanished. The warm rays sucked up the night dew. Even his spirits emerged from their depression as the charm of the morning grew. Suddenly as he passed the main entrance of "The Castle", he was surprized to see Nona Ledyard standing pensively in the doorway.

"All night I have worried," she said. "I was miserable. I pictured you killed, lying broken on the rocks of some ravine. I knew it would have been impossible to get safely away in the blackness."

"I could not have gone in any case," he said. "The thought of you held me here more completely than even the darkness."

She smiled wistfully.

"Then you are not angry with me?" she said.

"I could not be angry with you," he answered; "only if it is all the same to you, the next time you intend to drive me out of doors, choose a warmer night."

He was in excellent, spirits now that his worry over Nona was lifted from his shoulders.

"However," he continued lightly, "I suppose I should be thankful that we didn't have a blizzard."

"Father is full of remorse this morning," she told him, "so you must have breakfast with him and give him an opportunity to explain his peculiar actions of last night."

Stark Laurier needed no second bidding. Curiosity had ever been his weak point; besides, he was ravenously hungry. His appetite was a very good friend. It never deserted him. So he entered the house.

He found Cass Ledyard already seated at the table in the dining room. As Stark Laurier approached, he rose and held out his hand.

"My shame is boundless," he said, and it was hard to realize that this calm-faced man was the maniac of the night before, "and yet it is not sufficient to make me unhappy, for I have been a virtual prisoner for ten years, a prisoner of fear, but now I am free at last. I have lived through an inferno worse than Dante ever pictured."

He walked over and opened the window.

"It is a beautiful morning," he said. "I do not know when the countryside has seemed so perfect. Those mountains to the east I like to think of as 'The Mountains of the Morning'. Beyond their purple ridges the sun goes into camp at night."

Then he returned and seated himself at the table.

"I owe you an explanation," he said. "If you will let me tell you the story of the Golden Buddha I am sure many of my fanatical actions of the last few weeks will be clarified."

He did not wait for Stark Laurier to assent, but plunged at once into his story.

about the Golden Buddha," he began thoughtfully, "I will have to carry you in revery away off to the interior of unexplored Tibet, where the Dalai Lama rules as absolute and merciless as any tribal chief in darkest Africa. Whatever drew my footsteps to the bleak and bare wilderness of Tibet in the first place I cannot explain. Perhaps it was the lure of forbidden lands, the desire to walk through cities to which no other Christian had ever penetrated, to gaze upon mountain ranges,