Page:Weird Tales volume 31 number 02.djvu/73

Rh with an expression in which relief and fear struggled almost comically for supremacy.

"Either he's a damned good actor, Tony, or else he drank too much last night."

But Henderson, fumbling with the combination to the safe, did not hear me. Presently, he closed the safe's door and turned around with a small jewelry box, which he handed me opened. The stone itself was a misty blue green, something like the powdered opaqueness of costume jewelry. About half an inch in diameter and not quite a perfect circle, it was as insignificant an object as one could find.

"It seems innocent enough," I said judicially, returning the box. "It looked more promising when I saw it on the statue."

Without answering, Henderson led me into a small study that opened off from his bedroom, shutting the door behind him.

"Sit down there." He pointed to a chair by the center table. He took the stone from its cotton bed and laid it on the empty table at my elbow. "Now watch it."

He turned off the center light from the switch by the door. I waited in the blackness of the curtained room for perhaps thirty seconds. Then quite suddenly a little blur of light appeared where Tony had laid the stone. It was only a misty blur at first, a fuzzy mistiness that seemed to waver in its own half-light. The colors, blue and green, came out as I watched, but instead of defining the stone they served rather to increase its indefiniteness. The light itself was larger than the stone, but was a part of it, as though the darkness drew from the stone an inner glow. No wonder those child-like jungle creatures had taken it for the eye of their god of death.

"Interested, Mac?" he asked. Then, picking up the stone and replacing it in the cotton-lined box, "Strange rather, isn't it?"

For a minute there in the dark I had felt that same awed wonder, but now I shook it off as absurd.

"No, as a mater of fact, it isn't strange. Any geologist could explain that light for you."

"Yes, but no geologist could explain the hands."

"A glass of whisky may have been the answer to those."

"Is that a hint, Mac?"

"No, thanks. And you're not to drink any either. We'll dispel this ghost theory tonight."

"I drank nothing last night," he said.

"Really? Indeed!"

He left the room for a minute and came back with an armful of magazines and newspapers. "Try some of these. They'll interest you more than I will."

Without denying that likelihood, I opened a weekly and was soon feigning deep absorption in an article on salmon fishing, but my thoughts were for ever straying to the figure opposite me. His pipe in his hand, he had not once put it to his lips, but sat with it clenched between his fingers until the white knuckles stood out. His under-lip, drawn between his teeth, seemed strangely red against the grayness of his face.

quiet as long as I could, then laid down the article as though I had finished and enjoyed it.

"You ought to take up salmon fishing; Tony. It's as interesting and much more profitable than ghost-stalking."

He turned with a start as though just wakened from a sound sleep.

"Salmon what? Mac, do you remember how Milroy's little dog howled when that