Page:Weird Tales volume 33 number 04.djvu/100

 end to the Devil's rule in this country."

It had all sounded logical, but Lanark, listening, had been hesitant until Enid herself agreed. Then it was that Jager, strengthening his self-assumed position of leadership, had made the assignments. Enid would make the journey, as before, from her house to the gulley, there strip and say the words with which her stepfather had charged her four springs ago. Lanark, armed, would accompany her as guard. Jager himself would circle far to the east and approach the ruins from the opposite direction, observing, and, if need be, attacking.

These preparations Lanark reviewed mentally, while he heard Enid's bare feet splashing timidly in the water. It came to him, a bit too late, that the arms he bore might not avail against supernatural enemies. Yet Jager had seemed confident Enid was speaking, apparently repeating the ritual that was supposed to summon the unnamed god-demon of Persil Mandifer:

"A maid, alone and pure, I stand, not upon water nor on land; I hold a mirror in my hand, in which to see what Fate may send" She broke off and screamed.

Lanark whipped around. The girl stood, misty-pale in the wash of moon-light, all crouched and curved together like a bow.

"It was coming!" she quavered. "I saw it in the mirror—over yonder, among those trees"

Lanark glared across the little strip of water and the moonlit grass beyond. Ten paces away, between two trunks, something shone in the shadows—shone darkly, like tar, though the filtered moon-rays did not touch it. He saw nothing of the shape, save that it moved and lived—and watched.

He drew his revolver and fired, twice. There was a crash of twigs, as though something had flinched backward at the reports.

Lanark splashed through the water and, despite his limp, charged at the place where the presence lurked.

been some minutes before eleven o'clock when Jager reined in his old black horse at a distance of two miles from Fearful Rock.

Most of those now alive who knew Jager personally are apt to describe him as he was when they were young and he was old—a burly graybeard, a notable preacher and exhorter, particularly at funerals. He preferred the New Testament to the Old, though he was apt to misquote his texts from either; and he loved children, and once preached a telling sermon against the proposition of infant damnation. His tombstone, at Fort Smith, Arkansas, bears as epitaph a verse from the third chapter of the first book of Samuel: Here am I, for thou didst call me. Jager when young is harder to study and to visualize. However, the diary of a long-dead farmer's wife of Pennsylvania records that the "Jager boy" was dull but serious at school, and that his appetite for mince pie amounted to a passion. In Topeka, Kansas, lives a retired railroad conductor whose father, on the pre-Rebellion frontier, once heard Jager defy Southern hoodlums to shoot him for voting Free-state in a territorial election. Ex-Major Kane Lanark mentioned Jager frequently and with admiration in the remarkable pen-and-ink memoir on which the present narrative is based.

How he approached Fearful Rock, and what he encountered there, he himself often described verbally to such of