Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 5 (1925-11).djvu/65

Rh "Oh, yes, oh, yes! Don't know what room. I think third floor somewhere."

The man turned angrily back to the desk. "Where's the manager?" he asked.

In a moment the manager stepped smilingly from the private office. The woman, at last finding the man's eagerness infectious, bent forward, holding out the print. "I can't, for the life of me, remember the name of these people," she said. "Who were they?"

The manager took the print and nodded his recognition. "Oh, yes, that was Mr. and Mrs.—. Well, that's funny. Ah Fat, what was the name of these people?"

The quiet clerk smiled and shook his head with a little protesting movement of his slender yellow hands.

The manager snapped his fingers. "Oh, I know the name just as well as I know my own; but I just can't speak it for the moment;" and he began to flutter the leaves of the register. "They came by way of the Orient and were here for three or four weeks;—why, they just went away a short time ago. Well, isn't that strange, that I can’t think of their name? The woman had a white scar on her neck. A queer, old-fashioned little thing, she was, and sort of sweet-pretty, too. Let me see, we must have passed that name a half dozen times here, and I was sure that I would recognize it at a glance."

The man turned and looked at the woman strangely, then he faced the desk again. "You can't any of you remember their names nor where they roomed, nor find it on your books; and they gone only three weeks!" he said with exasperated incredulity.

The manager began to speak, but the woman broke in: "But I can't remember, either," she said; "and I don't have nearly so much to think of as they do—not nearly."

The strange look remained in the man's face; it was a whiteness, almost a grayness, and his eyes looked curiously dusky. He turned to the woman and took hold of her arm. "Never mind," he said, in a strained voice; "Let us go back to the hau tree."

the woman's white fingers were playing with the scarlet seeds again; raising them and dropping them in red drops into a white fold of her dress, with a little drip, drip, drip—over and over and over. The man, leaning far back in the low chair, his eyes away beyond the purple-blue horizon, shielded them from the shimmer of the red drops and was silent. After a long time he spoke, and his voice had returned to its habitual level calmness. "Tell me about those people," he said.

She raised a handful of the seeds and let them fall in a slow stream from her fingers. "There isn’t much to tell," she said; "only they were queer people. They came from the Orient, as I said; had been around the world, and reached here about the middle of March. They saw everything and 'did' everything, just as all of the tourists do: went to Haleiwa for a few days, and to Hauula to see the sacred gorge, and to the volcano; and then they went away, just as the rest do."

"In what way were they 'queer'?" asked the man.

"Well—they were sort of Rip Van Winkles," said the woman. "That is the only way that I can describe them. They had been asleep for exactly twenty years."

"Twenty years?" said the man, sharply.

"Yes, just twenty years. I know, because her clothes were exactly like my aunt’s wedding clothes; and Auntie was married just twenty years ago, and kept her whole trousseau for sentiment's sake. She let us take some dresses once, for an 'old