Page:Weird Tales Volume 7 Number 4 (1926-04).djvu/66



LL day the March wind had been muttering and growling like a peevish giant with the toothache. As darkness fell it began to raise its voice; by 9 o'clock it was shrieking and screaming like a billion banshees suffering with cholera morbus. I huddled over the coke fire burning in my study grate and tried to concentrate on my book, to forget the wailing of the wind and the misfortunes of the day, but made very poor work of it.

Mingling with the wind's skirling there suddenly sounded the raucous bellow of an automobile siren, followed, a moment later, by a hammering and clattering at the front door as if whoever stood outside would beat the panels in by main force.

"If ye plaze, sor," Nora, my maid of all work, announced, poking her nose around the half-opened study door, "there's a gintilman ter see ye—an Eyetalian man, I think he is." Nora disapproves strongly of "furriners" in general and Italians in particular, and when they come, as they frequently do, to summon me from the house on a stormy night, her disapproval is hidden neither from my callers nor me.

Tonight, however, I greeted the interruption with something like relief. Action of any sort, even traveling a dozen miles to set an Italian laborer's broken limb without much hope of compensation, would provide a welcome distraction from the pall of gloom which enveloped me. "Bring him in," I ordered.

"Parbleu!" exclaimed a voice behind her. "He is already in! Did you think, my friend, that I would travel all this way on such a night to