Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 01.djvu/48

62 Julia?" Cliff winked at his wife, ladling out a liberal helping of cold chicken for the child. "Young man name of Tommy—or so I've been told."

"Who told you?" Virginia's clear cyes clouded with suspicion. The bantering tone was evidently not to her liking.

"Who told me?" Cliff mocked his small daughter. "Well, now—is it a secret?"

"Yes," the child answered, with a scowling glance at her mother. "Sort of."

"Oh! Well, since the secret's out now, might we be told where the young gentleman lives? Seems to me he must do quite a cross-country hike to get out here from—well, wherever he's from."

"Oh, no!" The child's eyes, round and serious, were vaguely troubled. She hesitated, then as though under some dim necessity to make herself somehow understood, added quietly: "You wouldn't understand. He lives right nearby, you see—"

"Oh—some little boy staying at the Jackson farm?"

"Daddy, don't be silly! He lives right here on our place—in the pond. That's where he goes when he goes back in again—and I know 'cause I've seen him."

again that evening did they make any reference to Gin's queer obsession—for otherwise the child behaved normally enough. Cliff played checkers with his small daughter and allowed her to beat him twice. After that, she went happily and triumphantly to bed.

Afterward, with the child asleep upstairs and the eerie moonlight glistening like frost on the clipped lawn, Julia abruptly drew the curtains over black panes.

"Heaven knows," said Cliff, amused, "we've no lack of privacy out here!"

"I—was just jittering," Julia confessed, unable to tell him just then how she had felt—that overpowering warning instinct of being watched, of not being alone. That the moonlit lawn had been bare, without blur or shadow, had only made the feeling somehow more terrible. "Cliff—what are we going to do?"

"About Gin? Well—I think she's lonely. You ought to send for one of her friends. Having some other kid around will chase this funny idea out of her head quick enough—what say?"

"I've thought of that," Julia told him. "I've already sent for Elsie. She's at the seashore now, but her mother wrote that she can come out and stay with Gin for a week or two. Oh, Cliff—you don't think there's something wrong? I mean, that she really sees things and—"

"Sick, you mean? Naw! She's healthy as a chipmunk, eats like a little pig and sleeps like a log. Say, old girl—did it ever occur to you the little tyke might, after all, be real? Up the road apiece, past Jackson's, there's a Lithuanian family—plenty of kids, all assorted ages. See, it must be one of them—"

"But, Cliff—three miles away? And besides—"

"What's three miles to a country kid? And you've never seen him because he's shy, see? But you act as if everything's natural and maybe he'll show up one morning with his paw out for a cookie!"

"Oh, Cliff! You think so?"

"Well, it might be so! Personally, I think we've been letting Gin's well-developed imagination run away with us scaring ourselves, and without any reason. Now, look—there's only one sensible view to take: either he's a myth—and she'll out-grow it—or else there really is such a kid, but he's scared and over-shy. In either case, what's terrible about it?"

Cliff's reasoning steadied her, but only for a moment. For it was not only that Julia had watched the child racing across the lawn, followed apparently by none but the wind—gleefully shouting and calling to someone who never answered. It was not only that, for countless days now, Gin