Page:Weird Tales volume 11 number 02.pdf/103

246  did—he crouched there at the edge. The water was shallow there below, and he could make out the body of Chantrell, indistinct, blurred. At times it moved, for all the world like a thing endowed with life, but that was caused by the movements of the water itself.

Of a sudden these words of Chantrell flashed through Griswold's brain:

"But there is something—in the sky!"

Ha, ha! Ferdy had thought that he would fall for that old, old trick. Ferdy had thought that he would turn to look and that Ferdy could leap upon him. But he, Griswold, had been no such fool as that. Something behind you! That, whether spoken or looked, had brought many a man to grief; but it had not brought him. But—in the sky? Why had Ferdy said that it was in the sky?

Cuthbert Griswold arose and turned his look in the direction in which Chantrell had pointed.

What was that? There, there—in the sky! A dim, fading, hideous face, its look fixed upon him! A face!

Griswold dashed a hand across his. eyes. A face? He laughed aloud. There was nothing there! His eyes, his brain had tricked him. A face, a face dim and fading and hideous and in the distant sky there above the sea! He would be seeing spirits next, fairies and goblins. What a strange weakness of nerves and brain! He had never dreamed that he would go like that. Such things were for women. But it would not happen again. A face—and in the sky! Again Griswold laughed aloud. A momentary weakness. Yes, nothing more—only the weakness of a moment. But he was himself now—was Cuthbert Griswold, he of the steady nerves and the sober brain. This, too, his hour of triumph! And Flang would keep his secret well!

" said Griswold as he made his way back toward the Gorgon, "it's a little after 12; fine breeze, too, springing up now; but we won't get under way until the morning. Yes, we'll stay, tillicum—if for no other reason, just to show the spirit of Handsome Ferdy that we are not afraid to linger near his sepulcher. His spirit! Ha, ha! I wonder where the spirit of Ferdy is right now, Pluto."

And so it was, some hours later, that they found him there. Ships, Cuthbert Griswold had told himself, have a strange way of suddenly appearing in the most unlikely places and at most unlikely times. And there was the schooner Queen Mab, three-masted, white and beautiful, come to Flang, though Griswold did not know, what with the rock wall that shut off the view, until her little launch came putting in through the fissure. Of the six occupants of the launch, which came up alongside the sloop, two at once held the look and thoughts of Griswold. The first he knew at a glance to be a ship's officer—the Queen Mab's skipper, as he soon learned, Captain Spar. But it was the other man who really held Griswold's look. This individual was tall, lean to emaciation and with the blackest eyes that Cuthbert Griswold had ever seen in a human head, his look so impassive that Griswold wondered if a smile had ever touched a single lineament of that lean, swarthy visage of his. Cuthbert Griswold had not the slightest idea who or what this man was, but he distinctly felt, though he could not have told why, that the being before him was one amongst a million. And, in spite of himself, the murderer felt a chill pass through his heart when he learned that this man was the noted scientist, and (at times) criminologist, Guy Oxford.