Page:Weird Tales volume 30 number 06.djvu/68

718 can escape in it, the Master will call us as he has done the others who tried to eescapeescape [sic]. But if we just sit here, it seems that sooner or later we'll be called to the same fate anyway. So why not try to get away?"

"Sure, and why not?" echoed O'Riley. "We've got nothin to lose but our lives."

Halfdon Husper said slowly, "I say, try it then. I have a wife in Oslo, if she still lives. And I am weary of waiting for death here."

They all looked at Von Hausman. After a moment, the German said quietly, "I have been here longer than any of you. I am quite certain that this attempt to escape will mean death for all of us. And not quick, easy death, but some horrible fate at the Master's hands. It is sure that, before we can ever launch that boat, we shall be called up there to that fate." His keen eyes smiled. "Yet I also say, let us try it. I too am weary of waiting idly for death here."

"Then we four will go down and start work on the yawl in the morning," David declared. He added troubledly to his young wife, "Christa, you're going to stay here while we work. No one here will bother you now, and if you do not go with us there is less chance of the Master's doom falling on you, if it does fall."

"I want to be with you, David!" she cried. But after a little, at David's anxiety, she gave in and consented to remain in the hut while they worked.

passed quickly, a strange, starless and moonless night, with only the unceasing flickering visible in the dark sky. And when dawn came it was a gray, sunless dawn, a slow, gradual increase in light. Leaving Christa in the hut, the four made their way quietly out of the village and through the forest to the beach.

The yawl still lay; on the rocks where it had been tossed. David fished axes, saws and other tools from its hold, and they began the work. Halfdon Husper, most experienced of them, took charge as they rudely patched the holes in the hull.

Ever and again through the day, David glanced tensely over his shoulder at the distant cliffs and castle.

Von Hausman noticed that and said quietly, "Do not fear, mein freund, the Master is watching us. That is sure."

"Let him watch!" rasped David desperately. "We'll get away—we will!"

But when they returned into the village that evening, they saw that the ragged motley mob there now looked at them with awe and dread. These others had discovered during the day that they were working on the yawl.

"They already look on us as doomed by the Master, as dead men," commented the German.

O'Riley bristled. "Anyone who tries anything on me will find out that it's a damned tough dead man I am," he declared. "And that goes for the old devil up in the castle, too."

Christa cried softly in David's arms that night. "David, I feel that something terrible is going to happen to you. And if it did, I wouldn't want to live."

"Nothing's going to happen to me," he insisted despite the fatal foreboding in his heart. "We'll get away."

By the end of the next day, the four men had completely, if crudely, patched the holes in the yawl's hull. They got it afloat, secured it by cables to the rocks. Halfdon Husper regarded their work with satisfaction.

"Tomorrow we will cut and fit new spars," the Norwegian said. "Then"

was beginning to fade eerily as they returned to the village. It looked stricken, deserted—no one was abroad in it, but from the doors of the