Page:Weird Tales volume 30 number 06.djvu/69

719 huts, horrified faces stared silently at them. Christa was not in the bark cabin. Nor did she answer David's calls.

"Something's happened to her!" he cried. "Some of these brutes"

Gripping the ax he had brought back from the yawl, he ran wildly down the rude street. He plucked a man out of the door of one of the huts, a loutish Breton sailor who stared at him with ignorant, horror-widened eyes.

"What's happened to my wife?" snarled David, raising the ax menacingly. "If some of you have harmed her, I'll kill you!"

The Breton, gasping in David's furious, choking grip, stammered an answer.

"It was not us—the girl is gone for ever. An hour ago the call of the Master came upon her, and she climbed the cliff and passed up into the castle. She did not want to go—she screamed as all they who feel the call scream, but she could not help herself."

David felt the blood leave his heart as the ghastly truth penetrated his mind. He saw infinite pity on the faces of his three friends, and heard Von Hausman whisper, "Gott, the Master has summoned her. We shall never see her again."

"I will see her again!" raved David wildly. "I'm going up there and try to get her out, if I have to go alone!"

He suddenly turned on the ragged, motley men staring from the huts, and lashed them with raging words of volcanic fury. "You men—are you really men or are you sheep, that you sit here and let whatever creature is up in that castle kill you at his will? Whoever the Master is, he must be living, and that means that he can be killed! Why don't you try to kill him, instead of submitting humbly to his will? Why don't you storm the castle and destroy him, instead of waiting for him to destroy you one by one?"

A fierce yell burst from the men before him, hard-bitten, brutal men from all the seven seas, whose smoldering hate and fear of the Master had been fanned to a quick blaze by David's raging words.

A flashing-eyed Italian sailor waved his spear aloft and cried, "By the saints, he speaks truth! Why do we not pull down the demon that crouches up there?"

"That's the stuff, lads!" cried Red O'Riley exultantly.

"Aye, death to the Master!" boomed Halfdon Husper's great voice, the huge Norwegian's eyes flaming with long-repressed hatred.

"Death to the Master!" burst a raging chorus of two hundred voices, as rude spears and swords waved thick from the maddened men.

David, his face half crazed with rage, shook his heavy ax and cried, "Up the cliff, then! We'll storm the Master's castle before he can claim my wife as another victim!"

poured out of the village, a roaring, raging mob of savage sea-men from every nation, every man with his weapon, every man afire to destroy the mysterious being whom they had dreaded so long.

David ran at their head, his face white and set, his ax gripped in his hand, with the exulting O' Riley and the blazing-eyed Norwegian and Von Hausman, curiously calm, behind him. Close after the four streamed the wild mob. David led them straight to the cliff and up the steep, narrow path in single file. He knew that if they had time to recover from their rage, the old dread of the Master would rapidly repossess them.

Above them bulked ominously against the dusky sky the mysterious black castle. It seemed to David that as they neared