Chapter VII: Part 7

“Morton,” said the old doctor, “was a rascal who headed a colony of loose fellows. They sold liquor to the Indians, disregarded the Puritanical laws of living, laughed at religion, and injected a licentious scarlet into the gray cloth of the old New England. You can imagine that carousing colony near enough to Boston to cause the good Puritans a prodigious loss of sleep. It was something that they hated and feared because it stirred in them the covered embers of their own suppressed excesses, I suppose. Uncommitted sins that are buried in the blood and brain are fearful things, Daniel. I imagine that most of the Puritans sublimated their fleshly longings into a religious ardor but this would make them fear the downright honesty of openly committed sin more than ever. Anyway, when news reached Boston that the Morton colonists had reared a huge May pole and were dancing about it with their skins full of good liquor and debauching all the likely squaws they could lay hands on, they decided that something drastic should be done. So a body of armed men (crusaders of the Lord, Daniel) marched to Merry Mount, cut the May Pole down, strewed the place with ashes, cursed it and called it Dagon (you see how the name crops up?), and scattered the befuddled revelers. What was more natural than that some of these topers and lechers should push westward into the wilderness, having, so to speak, their bellies full of Puritanical oppression? To the west they came, then, following an old trail that led north of Springfield and across the Connecticut River, and eventually they found themselves in this valley. Leeminster was the town settled by them. So there you have the two towns, Daniel. I don’t know which was settled first. It doesn’t make any difference. They were near enough for daily intercourse, and I suppose there was some inter-marriage. Whether the witch-fever spread to Leeminster or not is a mystery. I am on dubious ground now, for most of the opinions I have arrived at are the result of deduction and there is no documentary proof to bolster me up. That is why I am chary at giving vent to them. Some of the things that you have told me seem to substantiate a few of the suspicions I have had. My voice, Daniel, is getting awfully hoarse.”

He paused and finished his tumbler of apple-jack.

“You are going to be reeling in a minute,” said Dreeme impatiently.

Lathrop wheezed and chuckled.

“No, sir,” he said. “When you see me reel you’ll see a sight.”

He chuckled again. Dreeme observed an apoplectic glow on his fat cheeks, however, and it made him uneasy. He was afraid that the old doctor’s head would loll to one side, and that the continuation of the story would be a series of stertorous snores. He had seen it happen before for Lathrop plied the apple-jack not wisely but too well.

“Where was I?” inquired Lathrop mildly. He rolled his blue eyes at the ceiling in thought.

“Oh!” he said in faint surprise as he unexpectedly lighted on the thread of his conversation. “Oh, yes!”

“Marlborough and Leeminster proceeded on their solitary way while the land developed,” he declared. “Towns sprang up on all sides of them, but they were protected by their valley and the fact that no large artery of travel cut through them. They were in a cul-de-sac. They accepted the modernities of living suspiciously and in a gingerly manner. Being farmers, the natives subsisted by themselves and without too much aid from the outside world. As time passed on I imagine the witch practices ceased, although the memories of them were handed down from father to son, and mother to daughter. They were not so much ashamed of these practices, at first, as they were reticently jealous. The very fact of them made them different from other men and women. When I came here I found no signs of secret practices. I did find a dour reticence, perhaps a more antagonistic one than you have run up against. But I paid no attention to it, and I minded my own business. I did not ask questions. I did not watch people. I admit that I thought a lot. I read a great deal of history, and tried to orientate these people. It was from old Captain Uriah Carrier himself that I got my clew, for, thinking me no more than a mere boy and being a boastful old scoundrel, he told me that he was the last Black Man, and he even, in a burst of drunken recklessness one night, showed me the book that had been in his family for generations. It was easy enough for me to put two and two together after that. Being wise though I put them together by myself and kept my convictions to myself. I....”

Lathrop developed a choking fit and sputtered for a few minutes while Dreeme waited impatiently. The old doctor made a half-gesture toward the apple-jack bottle, thought better of it, and withdrew his hand reluctantly.

“You see Marlborough today,” he said wearily, leaning back in his chair, “and you see a community that has hugged a secret to its bosom for centuries. These men and women are alive to the past, to the terrible heritage which they possess, and they desire to eradicate it from common knowledge, to bury it, as it were, in the dust-heap of gone things. That is their first impulse. They do not want strangers to know that they have descended from condemned witches. Now there’s Jeffrey Westcott.”

He paused and blinked his blue eyes.

“Who is he?” he proceeded. “I don’t know. You don’t know. But we can guess what his purpose is. You’ve told me all about his maunderings about the mightiness of the will, the theory he hinted at to you in the burned mill that night. Now this is what I see, Daniel. Westcott fell in with Peleg Carrier in Germany, learned from him about the witch-cult that had existed here, and came to find out more about it. He had a theory of his own, a theory in an inchoate state, and he fancied that witch practices might be subdued to the ends of that theory. When he was settled here he found that he could start nothing, for these people had ceased to practice the so-called Black Arts. What he needed was a key, a weapon to drive the farmers before him. He found that weapon in Captain Uriah Carrier’s black book. All he had to do was to startle the morose inhabitants of Marlborough and its outlying district with the testimony from this book, for the will toward witchcraft was already a part of their blood’s inheritance. I believe, Daniel, that he reinstituted witch meetings, formed a coven here, and made himself the ruling Black Man. That’s why he’s avoided; that’s why his farm is shunned territory. He commands the dark side of the nature of Marlborough. These people lead two lives, and one of them is the surface life that we see going on about us. The other is the secret life that centers about the place called Dagon. Westcott drives them through their fears and their secret weaknesses, weaknesses that they might fight against and successfully conquer if he were not here. When he goes the whole scaffolding of mummeries will break down, these people will become normal inhabitants, and all this stuff will seem like some wild dream. That’s what I think, Daniel.”

Dreeme nodded an assent.

“That’s it,” he agreed. “Now what can we do about it?”

Lathrop scowled heavily.

“_I_,” he emphasized, “can do nothing about it.”

“Something must be done about it,” urged Dreeme.

“Then you do it, Daniel,” said the old doctor. “And God be with you.”

He shook his head dolefully.

“I’m not a witch-hunter,” he explained mildly. “Neither am I Don Quixote or Bayard or Sherlock Holmes or ... or....”

He continued to roll his head from side to side slowly.

“No, Daniel,” he protested, “I’m the man who sits in a chair all day.”

He reverted to the phenomena that Dreeme had adumbrated during his story.

“The various things you’ve told me,” he said, “clear up, as I’ve pointed out before, some of my suspicions. Let us take up the wax figures first, those little puppets that Deborah Morton found behind Westcott’s books. That’s an old witchcraft trick. A doll is made and baptized with the name of some living person against whom the witch desires revenge or evil. Then needles are thrust into those places where the person is to be injured and charms are recited over the little figure. Westcott, I believe, imagined this mummery would sharpen and direct the invisible strength of his will. You say one of the dolls had a needle thrust into its leg. Well, Westcott got shot in the leg, didn’t he? I imagine that was his first charm, a charm against himself. And it worked. Never ask me how it worked, but it did. The other doll had needles through its eyes. Well, how about the wooden pegs driven into Wagner’s eye-sockets?”

Dreeme shuddered as he recalled the disfigured face grinning up at him from the bank of the Saccarac River.

“I don’t believe Westcott killed Wagner,” added Lathrop. “No, sir. I believe he wanted the hired man dead because he found out that the poor fellow was acting as a go-between for Martha Westcott and yourself. Now into whose brain did Westcott force the thought of and will for this murder? Find that out, Daniel, if you can.”

“I intend to,” said the young doctor, his mouth a thin line of determination.

“But don’t forget,” remarked Lathrop, “that there may be a little doll somewhere christened Daniel Dreeme with a needle through its heart.”

“I’ll take my chance,” said Dreeme.

“We come to the goat’s head,” proceeded Lathrop. “That puzzles me. I know its origin but not its purpose.”

Dreeme was visibly excited at this topic.

“Here we sit like two Sherlock Holmes,” chuckled the old narrator, “and we’re really two Doctor Watsons. Amateurs, Daniel, amateurs.”

Suddenly he sobered up.

“The goat’s head,” he explained, “was the seal of Thomas Morton of Merry Mount. It is still extant upon legal documents which he left behind him. I’ll venture to assert, Daniel, that your Deborah, who wears that seal, apparently, about her neck, is a descendant of the Morton clan. Old Thomas left enough illegitimate progeny, God knows, and there is no reason why some of these women may not have taken the rascal’s name. Why the goat’s head should have been clutched in Wagner’s hand or why it is branded on Martha Westcott’s shoulder is beyond my reasoning faculties. Those are things that you will have to find out.”

Slowly he opened the bulky black volume before him.

“Daniel,” he said, “listen to this. I am reading from Cotton Mather.”

He bowed over the page and read slowly:

“... this Rampant Hag, Martha Carrier, was the person, of whom the Confessions of the Witches, and of her own Children among the rest, agreed, That the Devil had promised her, she should be Queen of Hell.”

He looked up solemnly.

“That, I take it,” he remarked, “is the fountainhead of the Carrier family. You notice she had children. She was the Queen of Hell, Daniel, the Queen of Hell. That’s a brave title for a Puritan lady.”

He turned back to the book and searched through a few pages. Finding what he sought for, he cleared his throat and looked up.

“Now then,” he said, and began to read again.

“‘Richard Carrier affirmed to the jury that he saw Mr. George Burroughs at the witch meeting at the village and saw him administer the sacrament.’ And here’s another interesting bit. ‘He,’ ... that’s Burroughs, Daniel.... ‘He was Accused by Eight of the Confessing Witches, as being an Head Actor at some of their Hellish Rendezvouses, and one who had the promise of being a King in Satan’s kingdom, now going to be erected....’”

Lathrop closed the book with a snap and a puff of dust started up from it.

“And there,” he said, “is the stock from which your sallow preacher-friend, the Reverend George Burroughs, descends. I point these things out to you, Daniel, so that you may understand how clear the stock has come down from the Salem witch-days. There’s another place in this book, if I recollect aright, where the witches accused George Burroughs of bringing puppets with him and sticking thorns into those puppets. Burroughs, I suppose, was the Black Man, or one of the Black Men, who ruled the New England coven. There we are, Daniel. Now you know all that I know and I imagine you can see why I wanted to keep it from you. I thought the ancient fever would die out and that there would be no need of all this speculation. It seems not.”

He wheezed heavily and shook his head.

“What must I do, Humphrey?” asked Dreeme.

Lathrop opened his eyes very wide and pointed a pudgy finger at the young doctor.

“Do?” he said. “Why, be a wise man. Take your little Deborah Morton with you and get out of the valley and settle elsewhere and live your life without worrying about these things. This situation cannot last. Westcott is undoubtedly mad, and he will blow himself up in some devilish experiment, or some farmer will do for him. Why should you stay here rooting into things that, after all, are no concern of yours? If these fools want to play at being witches, let them. Much good may it do them! Your life is all before you, and it moves on another arc than the existence in this gray town of Marlborough.”

He sighed and glanced at the silver-streaked window where the runnels of rain slid unceasingly.

“I’m anchored here,” he said sadly. “I’m an old hulk rotting in a forgotten dry-dock. Time has forgotten me. All I can do is sit in this chair and watch absolutely nothing go by and cogitate upon it. It’s a bright prospect, Daniel, a bright prospect.”

“I shall go away,” remarked Dreeme slowly. “Just when, I don’t know, but soon ... soon.”

He, too, watched the rain beating against the window-panes and listened to the confused roar of the storm as it beat over Marlborough. It was pleasant to sit in a dry warm nook and observe the elements raging vainly outside. The valley was full of the grey smoke of the down-pour, and the greedy soil, that had parched beneath the hot sun; was drinking the cool water, bringing its measure of relief to the tiny thrusting roots that fumbled about in the darkness for nourishment. It had not rained since the night he had first gone to the Westcott farm, since he had stood in the dark doorway with Martha Westcott listening for the sound of wings in the air; and that had been but a brief storm, a swift and vanishing interruption of the parched season that had hovered over the valley. That had been but a few days ago, and yet how far away it seemed. Wonderingly he watched the rain beat against the window and listened to the whirring music that filled the cloudy air.

III

Walden Slater had drawn his rickety rocker back against the wall and he sat just outside the curtain of water that dripped from the eaves of the back piazza. He looked through the swinging silver hangings of rain soberly, his empty corncob pipe drooping disconsolately from his wide mouth. It was evident that he was deep in the concentration of difficult thought for his brows wrinkled and his head bowed still lower as he twiddled a small bit of wood in his hand and gazed blankly at the whirring rain. Dreeme stood in the back door and watched him. Behind the young doctor in the kitchen Deborah moved about, her small clear voice raised as she attempted unsuccessfully to converse with the reticent Mrs. Slater who paraded back and forth with dishes and answered her in grudging monosyllables. There was an excited quaver in Deborah’s voice that moved Dreeme, the note of a stifled excitement. They all had something on their minds. They were all concealing something from one another. The very atmosphere induced an ingrowing that was unhealthy and unnatural. Dreeme coughed loudly and shifted his position. Walden Slater did not stir. He still sat crouched in the rocker rolling the bit of wood between his stumpy fingers.

“I should think the rain would cheer you up,” remarked Dreeme.

Walden Slater turned his head slowly, inspected the young doctor with a blank eye, and then resumed his study of the rain.

“Won’t it be good for the crops?”

“Umph,” said Walden Slater. He twiddled his bit of wood and looked at the sky.

“I’m going to marry Deborah,” announced Dreeme.

Walden Slater turned deliberately around and stared at the young doctor. He looked first at his shoes, then his trousers, then his coat, and finally into the doctor’s face. His eyes were opaque mirrors. He cleared his throat. He said:

“Be you?”

His tone was mild and there was no surprise in his voice.

“I reckoned so,” he added after a moment.

“Any objections?” asked Dreeme.

Walden Slater watched the rain carefully.

“Do you ever whittle?” he inquired.

Dreeme laughed aloud.

“No,” he said. “I don’t even carry a knife.”

His mind flashed back to dour farmers seated morosely before the post office and general store whittling away at small pieces of wood, industriously carving nothing to pass away the endless time.

“No objections at all,” remarked Walden Slater mildly.

Both of them heard the humming of the Reverend George Burroughs as he came through the kitchen from the dining room, and Dreeme drew back with some distaste as the tall sallow figure pushed through the door to the back piazza.

“The Lord gives plenteously,” intoned the preacher as his black expressionless eyes roved from the faces of the two men to the gusts of rain that swept across the green foliage beyond the house.

“Lend me your knife,” requested Walden Slater, twiddling the bit of wood in his hand.

The Reverend George Burroughs extracted an old clasp-knife from his pocket and passed it over to the farmer. Walden Slater began to methodically whittle the bit of wood he held to a fine point. The tiny shavings fluttered to the floor.

“A fine rain makes a fine crop,” announced the preacher.

“A fine crop makes a fine profit,” added Dreeme, saying the first thing that popped into his mind.

“A fine knife makes a fine point,” declared Walden Slater. “This knife is dull.”

He handed it back without any thanks, and the preacher stowed it away in his pocket. Dreeme drifted back through the kitchen preparatory to returning to his study. The conversation was altogether too dull.

IV

Dreeme was jerked out of a sound sleep by a strong hand grasping his shoulder. He started up with an uncontrollable cry of amazement.

“Get into your clothes,” said a voice. “It’s time.”

He recognized Walden Slater’s voice. Without any questions he leaped out of bed and hurried into his trousers and shirt. A heavy rain pounded on the roof as he completed his brief toilet, and shook his head violently to recover his partially benumbed senses. Walden Slater moved before him as they hurried for the stair-case and ran down it to the entrance hall. Before dashing out through the door into the rain Dreeme flung his still soggy rain-coat about him. A moment later they stood in the road where the heavens seemed to open and let down an unimaginable flood upon them. Walden Slater snatched up a storm-proof lantern from the ground by the gate, and as he stooped his heavy coat gaped open and Dreeme caught a glimpse of the butt of the Smith and Wesson revolver thrust into his belt.

“What is it, Walden?” gasped the young doctor. “For God’s sake, find your tongue.”

“I can find my tongue when I want it,” replied the farmer. “You come with me.”

They splashed through the puddles up the gradual rise of the Leeminster Road, bowing their heads to the fierce blows of the frantic gusts of rain that sought to thrust them back. Dreeme was running in his bare feet.

“Walden!” he gasped. “Walden!”

“Deborah’s gone. Disappeared completely,” cried Walden Slater with unwonted vigor. “So’s Burroughs. Does that tell you anything? Dreeme, I’ve thought this whole thing out. You come with me.”

He ran all the faster, and Dreeme followed him while a mounting rage seethed within him.

“I know what I know,” the farmer called back over his shoulder.

Dreeme seemed to be borne along by the furies within him. He accelerated his pace and soon was abreast of the farmer. For a time they ran doggedly, the breath whistling in their lungs. Under their feet drummed the boards of the bridge that spanned the Saccarac River. A moment later they were on even ground. Deborah gone! How or why she had gone Dreeme did not know, but Walden Slater knew, and that was enough. It would be time enough later to ask questions. Yet Dreeme, leaning his head closer to the farmer, did ask something.

“Where are we going?” His voice rose in a shout. “To the Westcott farm?”

“Dagon, damn it, Dagon!” shouted back the farmer. “We’re going to the place called Dagon!”

They ran all the faster through the relentless rain.

Chapter Nine

I

As Dreeme, racing close at the heels of Walden Slater, circled the Westcott farm-house, he glanced up curiously at the windows. There was no light. The building gloomed in its cluster of trees just as it had that first night when he had stumbled after the boy Miles along the uneven path and entered through the back door. It was like a house of the dead, a dwelling-place from which the rose-colored actualities of living had long ago vanished. Around it, the tall dark trees kept their somber watch, standing like ghostly sentinels. The spark of Walden Slater’s lantern sent strange beasts of shadows scurrying into the underbrush that lined the hummocky path. At the back door the farmer set down his light and hammered upon the wood with the butt of his revolver. The sound seemed to echo inside the house. It was like the echo that comes from a musty tomb when the iron grille that guards its dead from the living world is shaken. If there was anything in back of the wood against which Walden Slater was hammering so vigorously, that shape or being or spectre was standing mute.

“Of course not,” muttered the farmer. With a fierce kick of his heavy boot he crashed the door open and it smashed against the wall on broken hinges. The intruder entered slowly, holding the lantern before him in one hand and grasping his cocked revolver in the other. Dreeme followed at his heels. The small beam of light darted about the room reflecting the stuffed chairs, the wax flowers under glass, the photographic enlargements on the wall. Dreeme’s mind automatically swept back to that time when he had followed Martha Westcott through this room trembling from the magnetism of her strange personality. Walden Slater circled the sitting room slowly, lifting his lantern to view the pictures and examining the tables and the chairs. He seemed to be looking for something, some hint that might indicate the direction that he desired. “Uriah,” he muttered, pausing before one picture, a particularly large and atrocious piece of workmanship that hung above the wax flowers. Dreeme caught a glimpse of a glittering eye highly touched by the painter’s art.

“What are we searching for?” he inquired. “Shouldn’t we get on?”

Walden Slater said nothing but strode toward the door that led to the library. He kicked it open unceremoniously and entered and Dreeme followed close at his heels. It was just as the young doctor remembered it.

“Light the lamp,” said the farmer. Dreeme fumbled at the chimney and wick, and an instant later the pale yellow glow illuminated the room. The crowded book-stacks leaned forward, and the ancient volumes seemed to watch the intruders speechlessly. The young doctor walked impatiently about the table where he had once seen Jeffrey Westcott seated. He felt that they were wasting time, that Deborah was confined somewhere in some secret place from which she should be rescued as speedily as possible. He wanted to say this to the farmer, to get him started on the way to the place called Dagon, and yet he refrained from speech, for Walden Slater was obviously looking for something. He, too, circled the room, inspecting the backs of the books with a swift and keen eye. Dreeme paused near one case and read a few faded titles. “Certainty of Worlds of Spirits” by Richard Baxter. “De la Démonomanie des Sorciers” par Jean Bodin. “Sadducismus Triumphatus” by Joseph Glanvil. “Daemonolatria” by Nicholas Remigius. “Discourse of the Subtill Practises of Devilles” by George Giffard. He turned abruptly to the farmer.

“What are we looking for?” he asked.

“The goat’s head,” replied the farmer. He had ruffled through the papers on Westcott’s table.

“Do you know what that means?” exclaimed Dreeme.

Walden Slater nodded.

“Be patient,” he said. “It’s the signal for the Esbat.”

He continued to rummage about the room.

Suddenly he snorted in triumph, and started for the door. Dreeme followed close at his heels. The farmer, still holding his lantern, turned a corner and they began to climb a narrow flight of stairs. Behind them in the deserted library the oil-lamp perched precariously on the corner of the table and quivered at each gust of rainy air that swept through the window.

They wandered through two bedrooms, the feeble flare of the lantern illuminating neatly-made beds, and came to a closed door that apparently opened into a room on the rear of the house. Walden Slater, employing his usual tactics, kicked it open and they entered into a small chamber that was entirely unfurnished except for a raised stone slab on three perpendicular pillars of granite in the corner. The farmer made his way immediately toward this strange bit of furniture and held his lantern over it, inspecting the corrugated surface of the stone. Dreeme, standing beside him, saw dark stains on the slab and a small keen-bladed knife that appeared more like a lancet than anything else. The knife glittered in the ray of the lantern and the young doctor was overwhelmed by a sudden fear. He stared wide-eyed at the farmer, and Walden Slater’s long upper lip quivered in the dim light. Dreeme struggled between an absorbed excitement in their discoveries and his intense concern for Deborah’s safety. She was somewhere not far from them, her mind a riot of fear, waiting frantically for him. He was sure of that. But what had happened to her in the meantime, during those hours (and he was not sure how many they had been, for the taciturn farmer had vouchsafed no specific information on this point) she had passed since Burroughs enticed or kidnapped her from the Slater house, he could not even guess. If any harm had come to her (and his heart nearly ceased beating at the thought) he would not leave the valley until he had killed Jeffrey Westcott and George Burroughs. A cold determination seemed to freeze the emotions in him as he came to this decision. His thin lips tightened and his eyes became like blue steel.

“I shall go mad in a minute,” he said calmly to the farmer.

Walden Slater opened his mouth to speak and then, with a grunt that expressed both surprise and relief, he pointed to the corner in back of the stone slab. The dejected carcass of a chicken lay there in its dishevelled feathers, its crop slit open and its blood dabbled upon the floor.

“He’s been divining,” he said. Then he looked closely at the young doctor.

“You perk up, Doctor Dreeme,” he added. “I know what I’m doing. There’s no harm done to anybody ... yet.”

He bent over and fumbled about the limp carcass of the chicken and then straightened his body with a grunt of satisfaction. In his hand he held a small blood-smeared square of paper. Silently he turned and strode down stairs, Dreeme close at his heels. He did not speak until they had regained the comparative light of the library and then he sank into Jeffrey Westcott’s chair by the table. The curtain from the window fluttered inward, narrowly missing the chimney of the sputtering lamp. Dreeme stood before the farmer, his eyes staring and his hands trembling.

“I reckon I’ll have to explain a few things,” he remarked slowly, “or you’ll be fainting on me, Doctor.”

“I’m not going to faint, Walden,” replied the young doctor, “but I am mad to get on. I know Deborah’s in grave danger and I should be with her.”

Walden Slater nodded gravely.

“Westcott is playing his last card to dominate the valley,” he said. “He’s called an Esbat, a meeting, and he intends a sacrifice. I knew it was coming ever since I saw that goat-head in Wagner’s fist. The goat-head is used as an announcement for a coming event. Wagner was on his way to somebody with the sign when he was smashed in the head and killed. That’s when I started thinking. There hasn’t been an Esbat in this valley since old Captain Uriah Carrier died, and my dad told me all about him.”

He cleared his throat after this unexpectedly long speech. Then he renewed his distasteful task of narration.

“We don’t want none of this stuff, Doctor,” he declared. “The farmers want to forget what their grand-dads were. Westcott won’t let us forget. He’s got Uriah’s black book and we’re all in it. He’s got some of us fooled by stirring up feelings in us that we thought had died out of us. It has died out of me. I don’t take any stock in this stuff though my dad was befuddled by old Uriah and went to his Esbat.”

He cleared his throat again and held up the bit of paper. In the lamp-glow Dreeme saw the tiny goat’s head carefully drawn in blue ink and when Walden Slater slowly turned the paper he saw “Dagon--two--nigger” written in small letters. He recalled now that he had never turned over the bit of paper he had given to the coroner. He recalled, too, the antagonism of the farmers who had stood so short a distance from him when he had extracted the paper from Wagner’s stiff hand.

“It seems that they meet at Dagon at two o’clock, and that Dagon is somewhere in Nigger Swamp,” he said mechanically.

Walden Slater nodded his head in assent.

“That’s it,” he said. “Westcott sacrificed a chicken to see if the signs were propitious. Apparently he decided they were, although what a chicken’s crop has to do with it is beyond me.”

He stopped abruptly and turned his face toward the open window. Dreeme listened, too, and he could hear the distinct sound of footsteps going by the house. They apparently died away in the soft grass of the field that stretched from the dwelling to Briony Wood.

“They’re gathering,” remarked the farmer simply. He stood up and regained his lantern.

“We can’t know where they’ve hidden Deborah,” he said, “but we do know that they’ll bring her to the place called Dagon. She’s to be the sacrifice, Doctor.”

“They wouldn’t dare to kill her!” exploded Dreeme.

“There’s some things worse than death,” answered Walden Slater.

He moved toward the door and Dreeme followed him. Behind them the forgotten lamp perched on the edge of the table, and as the wind increased the curtain flapped ever nearer the yellow flame, a flame that sputtered but, being shielded from the worst of the gust by a protector, never went out. The two men passed through the sitting room and out through the broken door into the storm which had now settled down into a gusty drizzle.

“And, besides,” said Walden Slater slowly, “Wagner was killed, wasn’t he?”

“Do you know who killed him?” asked Dreeme. “Was it Jeffrey Westcott?”

“I know that the pegs driven into his eye-sockets were whittled by a mighty dull knife,” returned the farmer grimly.

They plodded on in silence after that, their heads bowed against the driving wind and rain. Occasionally they stumbled over hammocks of wet grass and once Walden Slater sprawled upon the ground, his lantern rolling from his hand and blinking out. With a grumbled curse he scrambled to his feet and picked up the extinguished lantern and examined it.

“It’s busted!” he said vehemently, flinging it from him with an angry gesture. They heard it clatter against a stone wall to the side of them. After that they struggled on in the darkness across the field, the black shadow of Briony Wood in its slight elevation looming nearer and nearer against the faint glow of the stormy sky.

“If you meet anybody,” said the farmer suddenly, “don’t you say a damn word. Keep your head down and trudge along.”

Dreeme muttered something in his throat. Mingled rain and perspiration was streaming down his face and his naked feet were cut by the sharp stones and twigs. He heard his heart beating violently in his bosom and wondered if the farmer was as tired as he. They had crossed the greater part of the field now and the ground was sloping upward before them, sloping upward to tall spectral trees that stood with inter-mingled branches and waited menacingly for their coming. It would be dark in those trees and there would probably be no pathway. But they would have to go on, for somewhere beyond the trees was the place called Dagon, and it was at Dagon that he would next meet Deborah. Sobbingly he climbed the slope at the heels of Walden Slater.

II

The trees reached out and took them in, circling about them in a massed formation. They were in the darkness of Briony Wood now, a darkness that was unrelieved by any light except the pale intermittent glow of the sky that filtered through the bowed branches of the trees. The unceasing storm rumbled in the leaves above them, and the incessant drip of water sounded about them as they lurched over broken branches, stones, unbared roots, and washed-out hollows. Far above the moist darkness through which they struggled Dreeme thought he could hear a faint humming, the sound of wind, perhaps, flowing along the tilted tops of the taller trees. His labored breath chimed with it. Walden Slater was lurching along doggedly beside him now, no longer ahead, but shoulder to shoulder with him except when the unevenness of the road they took caused them to stumble apart. It was good to feel his sturdy shoulder as it struck against him occasionally. It was like a tower filled with armed men who were always on guard. It was a fortress against evil and chance. The farmer was silent, conserving his strength for the difficult journey through the wood, and Dreeme, taking a lesson from him, refrained from speech, although questions were beginning to boil up in his restless mind. His intelligence was clarifying although he was still in a riot of fear over the situation in which Deborah must be. Images appeared and dissolved before his eyes. Deborah lying on the rainy ground bound and gagged. Deborah insensible in some secret retreat where George Burroughs, his sallow face aflame with malice, bowed over her and blasphemously intoned Biblical phrases that were twisted to serve the devil’s purpose. Deborah sitting wide-eyed in an hypnotic trance while Jeffrey Westcott stood before her, his cloven head bared to the rain and the wind. Deborah gazing into the heavy-lidded remorseless eyes of Martha Westcott while the taciturn farmers, muttering to one another, gathered about a great dripping stone in the heart of Nigger Swamp.

The humming in the air increased steadily above the two travelers now until it seemed as though a hundred and one far-away aeroplane engines were singing their way through the darkness and rain like a swarm of huge and unbelievable mosquitoes. Dreeme’s labored breath sucked in his throat as he pushed the entangling spiky vines aside and thrust his tired body forward. His bare feet were bruised and cut, but they seemed devoid of all sensation, blotches of white meat that lifted and fell with a maddening regularity. He was not sure that the humming he heard was more than the blood pounding in his ear-drums and throbbing in his temples. Yet it seemed to be more than that, to be, in fact, an ominous and steadily-increasing warning of the approach of mysterious and frightful things. It would not have surprised him to see a host of devils and witches suddenly sweep through the tree-tops screaming and laughing to one another. He could imagine them calling to one another gross phrases, turning their red-rimmed eyes downward at him, pointing with long-nailed hands and bursting into gales of infernal laughter. Then he realized that his imagination was slipping from his control and he strove to concentrate on Deborah, to save himself from his own madness through the memory of her. He pitched forward over oozy hummocks. The fierce thorns of clutching vines ripped along his legs and arms. Malicious branches lashed murderously at his face. Water sucked and gurgled about his naked feet. But he pressed forward half-blindly, hardly conscious of the direction in which he was proceeding, knowing only that Walden Slater’s shoulder struck against his from time to time, and that a desperate and imperative necessity was urging them into the depths of the marshy wood. Some small beast scurried beneath his feet, and he screamed at the nervous tension of the moment. He heard laboring branches crack and groan above his head and the hollow sound where a dislodged stone rolled down an incline and landed in a huge puddle. The humming had developed into a roar about him. It was so dark that he could not see Walden Slater. He could not even hear the heavy thud of the farmer’s boots. Suddenly he became conscious that a devastating delirium of fear was engulfing him and rendering him incapable of any action, “This is horrible!” he sobbed in his throat. He stopped dead in his tracks, straightened his body, and gazed upward until the faint glow of the stormy sky pierced his dulled eye-sight. It came slowly, a gradual light, a milky hue against which the silhouettes of the black branches cut sharply. Gazing steadfastly he strove to quiet the tempest that shook his mind. He thought for a moment that he could see small winking lights scurrying across the surface of that milky sky, but, forcing himself to gaze fixedly, he decided that these lights were no more than optical illusions or the small sparks that rise in tired and over-strained eyes. His heart was beating like a loud trip-hammer and he pressed one hand against it tightly. Standing so for several seconds he experienced a slowing of his nervous faculties, a sensation of again being master of himself and not the victim of an unreasonable fear that was, perhaps, self-implanted by a too imaginative mind. It was with actual surprise that he felt Walden Slater’s sturdy arm about his shoulder urging him forward. Clear-headed now he resumed the laborious toil of the journey.

This is New England, he thought. This is the tired land of forgotten pioneer enterprises. This is the land of machinery and shoe factories and canned goods and ice-skates. It is everything that is material and dispiriting and “up-to-date” and unlovely. It is the land of lean farms and thin mouths, too. It is a land of humming commercial cities, of great businesses, of the New Day. But it is more than this, as well. How if all this glittering commercial civilization is no more than a huge shell, an incrustation of years, beneath which lurk the old pagan madnesses that were corollaries of the Puritan repression? How if the ancient Dionysiac urge did not perish but remained like an ominous monster in a deep cavern biding its time and waiting its day? Suppose that the May Pole of Merry Mount and the Witches’ Sabaoths of Salem were to be reborn with disastrous consequences because of their long suppression? Might not the humming wind be saying, “The day is coming! The Black Man is coming! The May Pole of Merry Mount is to be reared again on the site of the factory! The witches and warlocks are to rule! The cities are to be laid waste for this huge shell of civilization is no more than a pasteboard affair and it is only the ancient furies and instincts that count in the long run!” Dreeme permitted his imagination to go to whatever lengths it pleased as he plunged through the forest with Walden Slater. He was fully aware of the fancifulness and impossibility of his thoughts, but they seemed to act as a release-valve for the feelings that boiled within him.

Walden Slater suddenly clutched his wrist in a huge gripping hand. He drew the young doctor to one side, and as he did so Dreeme became aware of the tiny bobbing jewel of light before them, a spark of yellow that disappeared behind trees only to reappear again. The farmer did not slack his pace but kept on rapidly, but Dreeme noted that there was a tenseness in his walk. The light bobbed before them and they gained on it. It grew in dimensions and before they had traveled many rods Dreeme, by straining his eyes, perceived that it was a lantern carried by a dark figure. He grew aware at the same time that other figures were slipping noiselessly through the trees before them. He even heard the subdued mutter of a voice somewhere to the right of him. Still holding the young doctor by the wrist, Walden Slater made a detour to the left and they circled the bobbing lantern. Keeping their eyes turned toward the lantern they drew abreast of it, passed it, and then Walden Slater uttered an exclamation as he bumped into a sluggishly moving figure in the shadow of a huge over-arching tree. “At Dagon,” said a low voice. An inspiration came to Dreeme. In a calm subdued tone he answered, “For the Master.” The figure fell away into the darkness of the trees and as they forged ahead Dreeme could feel Walden Slater’s fingers tighten on his wrist in an approving manner. The ground was growing more marshy and their feet sank into the soft soil as they pressed forward. The young doctor suspected that they were reaching that portion of Briony Wood that degenerated into Nigger Swamp and that their objective was not so far before them now. Walden Slater appeared to sense the same thing for his pace quickened automatically. They moved rapidly now, their feet making a distinct sucking sound as they lifted them from the muddy earth. The incline turned downward and as its slope increased the two men found themselves wading through good-sized pools of water and tall scratchy reeds that tore against their legs. Their feet sank deeper in slushy mire and occasionally the sleepy croak of a frog sounded in the darkness beyond them.

Although the journey was harder now, a painful lifting of one foot after the other, Dreeme’s weariness seemed to fall from him. He was like an eager hunter hot on the scent with the quarry almost in view. Any moment, he thought to himself, I may turn a corner and see a ring of dim lanterns about a huge stone and know that I am at the end of my journey and that I have seen what no other stranger in this valley has ever seen. The thought exhilarated him. So, too, did the memory that he had passed other mysterious figures in Briony Wood, for it meant that he was not late, that Deborah would be unharmed when he reached Dagon. How she was to be taken away from the group of fanatics who gathered in the swamp he did not know, but he trusted partially to the skill of the silent Walden Slater and partially to the inspiration of the moment. There would be a way, for he would make one. He was pleased to think that there was no fear in his heart now, that his brain had cleared, and that his nerves were steady. He had lost his madness in Briony Wood, and that was good. There was nothing but a clear flame of determination in him.

Walden Slater’s mouth was close to his ear.

“We’re not quite in the swamp yet,” he said. “There’s a road. We’ve got to find it.”

He turned and started to walk rapidly at right angles to their previous direction and Dreeme followed him.

There seemed to be nothing but swampy land, and in certain sunken places the slimy water rose to their knees. The drizzling rain continued to spit about them.

“We should have followed the lantern,” said Dreeme in a low voice.

“We’ll find the road all right,” replied Slater.

They trudged for some minutes through the water and mud and then Walden Slater emitted a low ejaculation of satisfaction. At the same moment Dreeme stumbled upward from the sucking mud to a firm elevation. Turning again in the direction which they had previously followed the two men followed this elevation which appeared to extend in a long narrow ribbon into the darkness before them. It was the road all right, and it ended at Dagon. Some distance ahead of them they could see the bobbing lantern, and looking back Dreeme observed another lantern coming down from the higher ground upon which stood Briony Wood. There were farmers before him and behind them, and the only way in which they might hope to avoid them would mean taking off into the swamp on either side of the narrow road. Walden Slater, as though in answer to an unasked question from Dreeme, said:

“The muck is up to your waist on either side. Don’t step off the road.”

The trees had thinned out, although a few grotesquely-twisted forms loomed up about them. The eery glow in the sky swept across the long desolate expanse, but it was not bright enough for the young doctor to make out anything with any degree of accuracy. All that he could see were great motionless shapeless shadows, bulks that squatted on the marshy ground like prehistoric beasts. In the daytime they would probably dwindle into nothing more menacing than bushes. But now there was something sinister about them. They sat on huge haunches and watched the two men travel along the narrow lifted road that ran through the flooded land. Dreeme could almost imagine great sleepy eyelids beneath which peered motionless eyes. He was neither frightened nor moved by his thoughts. Instead of excitement the slow blood of determination ran through his cold veins. He lifted his hand and brushed the wet matted hair from his forehead and rubbed his straining eyes. He could feel how set his face was, how the lines had deepened in his cheeks, how tight his jaw was set. He could not make out Walden Slater’s face in the deceiving rainy light, but he imagined that it was set like his own, reflecting a determination that would be ruthless and unescapable when the time for action came.

III

This was Nigger Swamp at last. The dark road ran like a pencil line across the level expanse that waved in the rainy wind its monotonous host of thin reeds. These reeds clacked together with a tiny rippling sound that was half-drowned in the sturdier bluster of the lessening gale. Rain still fell in a dispiriting manner, cold, large-dropped, maddening in its relentless evenness. Dreeme felt the rain no longer, for, soaked to the skin and numbed to the bone, the surface of his body had lost all sensation. Even his feet were senseless now. He followed the lurching beat of Walden Slater’s boots like a man in a trance. Yet his faculties were alert. Though he experienced no physical sensation he realized that his brain was clearing and capable of swift action. It was like a live intelligence in a dead body. It was this live intelligence that noted, even before the phlegmatic Walden Slater, that the bobbing lantern ahead of them had stopped. The young doctor touched the farmer on the arm.

“Look!” he whispered. “The man ahead has stopped.”

Both of them paused in their tracks and observed the stationary light with some unrest. Dreeme glanced behind him and saw that the light which was following them was steadily approaching nearer. He remembered Walden Slater’s warning: “The muck is up to your waist on either side.”

“What shall we do?” he whispered to Walden Slater, indicating the approaching stranger in their rear. The farmer said nothing but opened his coat a bit and loosened the revolver in his belt. He glanced first at the stationary light before them and then at the approaching light behind them. After that, he spat reflectively into the swamp at his side.

“We don’t want to kick up a fuss till we locate Deborah,” he said mildly.

Even as he spoke the stationary lantern before them began to return on its tracks, to approach them from the front even as the other lantern approached them from the rear. They were caught between two fires now.

“Perhaps we can hide our faces,” whispered Dreeme. “Perhaps we can pass them as we passed those other fellows back in Briony Wood.”

“Perhaps,” said Walden Slater noncommittally.

“Shall we stand out in the swamp?” asked Dreeme suddenly.

Walden Slater shook his head.

“You’d never pull yourself out of it again,” he said.

The light before them returned ten or twelve yards on its own track, and then suddenly disappeared to the right, vanishing completely from sight. Walden Slater grunted.

“They missed the cross path,” he said. “It’s a lucky thing for us.”

He started forward, accelerating his pace as much as the hummocky road would permit, and Dreeme, suddenly relieved from the tenseness that had held him like a coiled steel spring, followed with agility. It was remarkable how refreshed he felt after that brief halt. He even forgot the lantern that was following at his heels, perhaps fifty yards behind him in the rainy gloom, a dancing midge in the deceptive air. The road dipped a bit as they proceeded forward, and soon Dreeme observed low bushes lining it, bushes that rose in height as they stumbled along over the increasing unevenness. They were entering another expanse of wooded territory, this time, without a doubt, the center of the swamp. Trees shot up out of the mist about them and the road assumed the aspect of a funnel that dwindled to nothingness before them. Walden Slater walked very slowly now inspecting the bushes at the right of the road. Soon the misty light vanished behind the climbing shrubbery and trees and the farmer cursed softly to himself.

“Whereabouts did that lantern turn in?” he inquired of the night in general. Dreeme did not attempt an answer, but went down and felt the dark ground, fumbling about for possible footprints.

“You can’t find anything that way,” said the farmer ungraciously. He blundered along close to the bushes, sometimes stepping through only to catch himself just in time from toppling into the sunken mire from which the soggy growths sprang. It was intensely dark now and they could perceive nothing before them. Dreeme, lifting up his hand a foot from his face, could not make it out. They were in an alley of small trees and bushes that met above them.

“The lantern came back from here,” muttered Walden Slater. “I’ll swear to that.”

He turned on his heel and retraced his steps.

“Look!” whispered Dreeme.

The lantern that had been following them was now less than thirty yards before them. It approached slowly, its feeble spark illuminating a small circle of milky haze. Who held it or how many were in the party could not be made out. Walden Slater stopped by the side of the path and Dreeme paused beside him. The lantern approached deliberately at such a speed as to indicate that the person carrying it was walking very slowly. The stranger, or strangers, were evidently studying the right side of the road even as Walden Slater and Dreeme had studied it, searching for an ingress into the swamp, for a concealed road that would take them off at an angle from this main path.

“If they miss the road they won’t miss us,” murmured Dreeme.