Page:Weird Tales Volume 9 Number 1 (1927-01).djvu/12

 Crossed stream a number of times and once had to take to the woods. Reached the glacier about 3 o'clock—an enormous wall of dirty ice, four or five hundred feet in height, with the Nisqually flowing right out of it. Day had turned dark and threatening. Climbed the eastern wall of the canyon. Clouds suddenly settled down—a fog cold and thick and dripping—and we made camp by a tiny stream, near the edge of the canyon cut by the glacier. Soon had a good fire burning, and it was not long before it came—the shrouded figure and with it that horrible shape, 'if,' as old Milton has it in Paradise Lost, 'shape it might be called that shape had none.'

"At times the fog would settle down so thick we could see no farther than fifty feet. Then of a sudden objects could be made out two or three hundred feet away. At the moment the fog was about us thicker than ever. We were sitting there by the fire, warming ourselves and talking—White, Long and myself. Of a sudden there was an exclamation. I looked at Long, and what I saw on his face and in his eyes brought me to my feet in an instant and whirled my look up in that direction in which he was staring.

"And, there on the top of the bank, not more than forty feet from us, stood a tall, white, shrouded figure, a female figure, and beside it, seemingly squatting like a monstrous toad, was that dark, fearful shape that had no shape. But, though shape it had none, it had eyes—small eyes that burned at us with a greenish, hellish fire.

"White snatched up his rifle and thrust it forward, but I stepped over and shoved the muzzle aside. When we looked up there again, the woman—for a woman, a white woman too, it certainly was—well, she was gone, and with her that formless thing with the hellish fire in its eyes.

What was it?' exclaimed White.

"He rubbed his eyes and stared up there again, then this way and that, all about into the thick vapor.

Was it only a dream?'

It was real enough,' I told him. 'It was a woman, a white woman.'

Or,' put in Long, 'the spirit of one.'

I know one thing,' said White: 'she may be a flesh-and-blood creature, and she may be a spirit; but that thing that crouched beside her was not of this world of ours!'

"He shuddered.

Men, what was that thing?'

"That, of course, was a question that neither Long nor myself could answer.

"Of a sudden White exclaimed: 'Where's Sklokoyum?'

Not far,' I told him. 'Come, let's look into this.'

"I sprang up the bank. They followed. A moment, and we were in that very spot where the woman and the thing had stood so brief a space before.

It was no dream,' observed Long, pointing to the crushed purple flowers—a species, I believe, of aster.

No,' I returned; 'it was no dream.'

Maybe,' said White, peering about, 'we'll wish, before this business is ended, that it had been a dream.'

"Came a loud scream from above—silence—and then the crash of some body through the branches and shrubs.

Sklokoyum!' I cried.

"White's hand closed on my arm with the grip of a vise.

Hear that!'

"I heard it—the voice of a woman or girl!

She's calling,' said Long, "calling to it.'

"" ' [sic]Great heaven!' I exclaimed; 'it's after the Indian! Come!'