Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 4 (1925-10).djvu/128

 minutes in spite of the ever-present danger from earthly enemies. It was the end! She could not longer flit through the twilight with her living burden!

There was the bitter alternative, and this she finally accepted. In spite of angry, stuttering protests, in spite of shrill pleadings, in spite of the ties of affection, the tired mother pried loose one of her brood and pushed him away from her. In order that the other three might have a chance to live she discarded one, the backward little imp of the lot. It was nature's law: to outcast the weakling.

However, nature sometimes relents! For as the brown bat dropped from a gum weed where she had climbed to start her flight, another bat appeared upon the scene.

It circled low over the outcast, who bounced and fluttered on the hard stones like a distraught child. Twice the strange bat darted above the crying youngster. The third time it paused long enough to permit the batlet to fasten his thumb hooks in the thick breast fur. Then out through the trees into the dim distance winged the rescuer and its adopted waif.

Who knows? Perhaps the male parent was repentant! Or perhaps this was some other mother who had lost her entire family and could not resist the maternal instinct so strong in wild life, particularly the life of night's nomads!



 SCAR WILDE might have gotten his theme for the from Paul Benoit if he had known him, although if he had, the poem could not have been called a symphony. For although Paul Benoit was as yellow as saffron, he presented a far from harmonious appearance. He was out of tune with the color scheme of life. He was about sixty years old but the marks of a peculiarly eventful though unhappy life were indelibly stamped upon him. His sickly-yellow face, straggly, filthy-yellow beard, yellow shirt (once white), and trousers yellow-green with age—all served but to accentuate his horrible expression. His laugh was a leer showing toothless gums, yellow-red, a laugh not easily forgotten. When he was keenly pleased, it rose to a shrill pitch, weird and wild, but even odder than his laugh was the far-away look in his eyes. He lived in one world but heard and saw in another. He was like a man who dwelt in yesterday. He never talked of the present, or of the future, but only of the past. He liked to linger about the shadowy, forbidden corridors of unpleasant memories.

Many people are color-blind; they can not distinguish one shade from another; but Paul Benoit was color-mad; he was madly in love with 