Page:Weird Tales v01n02 (1923-04).djvu/174



HEN you're rolling along through the country at forty miles an hour, and have been so doing for several hours, any excuse to stop and stretch is a welcome excuse. It gives you an opportunity to light a longed-for pipe and takes the kinks out of your back. I lighted mine.

My friend, Doctor Wilbur Hunneker, whom I have never called anything but Hunky, vaulted from the driver's seat without the formality of opening the door.

"Judas Iscariot!" he grunted, slapping the dust from his shoulders and digging at his eyes. "Some dust and some breeze!"

"What you stop here for?" I asked him, propping my feet up on the windshield. "Not that I don’t welcome any hesitation in the fierce procedure which you call touring. But why here?"

He grinned and pointed toward a tumbled-down, decrepit-looking cottage, almost entirely covered with woodbine. In front of it grew the most magnificent clusters of Golden Glow I have ever seen. There were hundreds of these beautiful yellow heads swaying in the sunlight, and they were in strange contrast to the drab and weather-beaten background of the house.

"Going to pick you a nosegay," he said. "You haven't energy enough to gather wild flowers for yourself, so I'll do it for you."

"Go to it," I said, relieved, and sank back on the deep cushions in a cloud of my own smoke. "But look out for the pooch. Also day-time ghosts. That old shack may have both."

"I'm not afraid of either," he replied, and moved through the high grass toward the house.

Lazily, I watched him selecting the choicest blooms. Then my gaze wandered over the old squatty-looking house.

It was indeed a derelict, a perfect example of the abandoned home. I couldn't imagine anyone having been near it or in it for a score of years. The small window-panes were covered with cobwebs and the marks of falling leaves and pelting rains of many years. The door in the center was innocent of paint, and great seams ran down and across its sections, witnesses of the battles it had put up against the roaring storms.

The stone slabs, slanted and sunken, which served as steps to the door were moss-covered and almost hidden from sight by the luxuriantly growing grass. Not a sound came from the place, or indeed from anywhere else.

Hunky returned to the car, grinning at me with a huge bunch of the golden flowers. He presented them