“But certainly,” the Frenchman agreed with one of his quick smiles. “We go to Monsieur Sutter’s hunting-lodge. You know the way?”
A vaguely troubled look clouded the clear gray eyes regarding him as he announced our destination. “Sutter’s lodge?” the girl—by now I had determined that it was a girl—repeated as she cast a half-calculating, half-fearful glance at the lengthening lines of red and orange which streaked the western sky. “Oh, all right; I’ll take you there, but we’ll have to hurry. I don’t want to—come on, please.”
She led the way to a travel-stained Model T Ford touring-car, swung open the tonneau door and climbed nimbly to the driving-seat.
“All right?” she asked across her shoulder, and ere we had a chance to answer put the ancient vehicle in violent motion, charging down the unkempt country road as though she might be driving for a prize.
“Eh bien, my friend, this is a singularly unengaging bit of country,” de Grandin commented as our rattling chariot proceeded at breakneck speed along a road which became progressively worse. “At our present pace I estimate that we have come five miles, yet not one single habitation have we passed, not a ray of light or wreath of smoke have we seen, nor—” he broke off, grasping at his cap as the almost springless car catapulted itself across a particularly vicious hummock in the road.
“Desist, ma belle chauffeuse,” he cried. “We desire to sleep together in one piece tonight; but one more bump like that and—” he clutched at the car-side while the venerable flivver launched itself upon another aerial excursion.
“Mister,” our driver turned her serious, uncompromising face upon us while she drove her foot still harder down on the accelerator, “this is no place to take your time. We’ll all be lucky to sleep in bed tonight, I’m thinkin’, in one piece or several, if I don’t—”
“Look out, girl!” I shouted, for the car, released from her guiding hand while she answered de Grandin’s complaint, had lurched across the narrow roadway and was headed for a great, black-boled pine which grew beside the trail. With a wrench she brought the vehicle once more to the center of the road, putting on an extra burst of speed as she did so.
“If we ever get out of this,” I told de Grandin through chattering teeth, “I’ll never trust myself to one of these modern young fools’ driving, you may be—”
“If we emerge from this with nothing more than Mademoiselle’s driving to trouble us, I think we shall be more lucky than I think,” he cut in seriously.
“What d’ye mean?” I asked exasperated. “If—”
“If you will look behind us, perhaps you will be good enough to tell me what it is you see,” he interrupted, as he began unfastening the buckles of his gun-case.
“Why,” I answered as I glanced across the lurching car’s rear cushion, “it’s a man, de Grandin. A running man.”
“Eh, you are sure?” he answered, slipping a heavy cartridge into the rifle barrel of his gun. “A man who runs like that?”
The man was certainly running with remarkable speed. Tall, almost gigantic in height, and dressed in some sort of light-colored stuff which clung to his spare figure like a suit of tights, he covered the ground with long, effortless strides reminiscent of a hound upon the trail. There was something oddly furtive in his manner, too, for he did not keep to the center of the road, but dodged in a sort of zigzag, swerving now right, now left, keeping to the shadows as much as possible and running in such manner that only for the briefest intervals was he in direct line with us without some bush or tree-trunk intervening.
De Grandin nursed the forestock of his gun in the crook of his left elbow, his narrowed eyes intent upon the runner.
“When he comes within fifty yards I shall fire,” he told me softly. “Perhaps I should shoot now, but—”
“Good heavens, man; that’s murder!” I expostulated. “If—”
“Be still!” he told me in a low, sharp whisper. “I know what I am doing.”
The almost nighttime darkness of the dense pine woods through which we drove was thinning rapidly, and as we neared the open land the figure in our wake seemed to redouble its efforts. Now it no longer skulked along the edges of the road, but sprinted boldly down the center of the trail, arms flailing wildly, hands outstretched as though to grasp the rear of our car.
Amazingly the fellow ran. We were going at a pace exceeding forty miles an hour, but this long, thin woodsman seemed to be outdistancing us with ease. As we neared the margin of the wood and came into the dappled lights and shadows of the sunset, he put on a final burst of speed and rushed forward like a whirlwind, his feet scarce seeming to touch the ground.
Calmly, deliberately, de Grandin raised his gun and sighted down its gleaming blue-steel barrels.
“No!” I cried, striking the muzzle upward as he squeezed the trigger. “You can’t do that, de Grandin; it’s murder!”
My gesture was in time to spoil his aim, but not in time to stop the shot. With a roar the gun went off and I saw a tree-limb crack and hurtle downward as the heavy bullet sheared it off. And, as the shot reverberated through the autumn air, drowning the rattling of our rushing flivver, the figure in our wake dissolved. Astonishingly, inexplicably, but utterly, it vanished in the twinkling of an eye, gone completely—and as instantly—as a soap-bubble punctured with a pin.
The screeching grind of tortured brakes succeeded, and our car bumped to a stop within a dozen feet. “D-did you shoot?” our driver asked tremulously. Her fair and sunburned face had gone absolutely corpse-gray with terror, making the golden freckles stand out with greater prominence, and her lips were blue and cyanotic.
“Yes, Mademoiselle, I shot,” de Grandin answered in a low and even voice. “I shot, and had it not been for my kind and empty-headed friend, I should have scored a hit.” He paused; then, lower still, he added: “And now one understands why you were in a hurry, Mademoiselle.”
“Th-then, you saw—you saw—” she began through trembling lips, plucked feverishly at the steering-wheel with fear-numbed fingers for a moment, then, with a little, choking, gasping moan, slumped forward in her seat, unconscious.
“Parbleu, now one can sympathize with that Monsieur Crusoe,” the little Frenchman murmured as he looked upon the fainting girl. “Here we are, a dozen miles from anywhere, with most unpleasant neighbors all about, and none to show us to our destination.” Matter-of-factly he fell to chafing the girl’s wrists, slapping her cheeks softly from time to time, massaging her brow with deft, practised fingers.
“Ah, so, you are better now, n’est-ce-pas?” he asked as her eyelids fluttered upward. “You can show us where to go if my friend will drive the car?”
“Oh, I can drive all right, I think,” she answered shakily, “but I’d be glad if you would sit by me.”
Less speedily, but still traveling at a rate which seemed to me considerably in excess of that which our decrepit car could make with safety, we took up our journey, dipping into desolate, uninhabited valleys, mounting rocky elevations, finally skirting an extensive growth of evergreens and turning down a narrow, tree-lined lane until we reached the Sutter lodge, a squat, substantial log house with puncheon doors and a wide chimney of field stone. The sun had sunk below the western hills and long, purple-gray shadows were reaching across the little clearing round the cabin as we came to halt before the door.
“How much?” de Grandin asked as he clambered from the car and began unloading our gear.
“Oh, two dollars,” said the girl as she slid down from the driving-seat and bent to lift a cowskin bag. “The bus would have brought you over for a dollar, but they’d have let you down at the foot of the lane, and you’d have had to lug your duffle up here. Besides—”
“Perfectly, Mademoiselle,” he interrupted, “we are not disposed to dicker over price. Here is five dollars, and you need not trouble to make change; neither is it necessary that you help us with our gear; we are quite content to handle it ourselves, and—”
“Oh, but I wa
nt to help you,” she broke in, staggering toward the cabin with the heavy bag. “Then, if there’s anything I can do to make you comfortable—” She broke off, puffing with exertion, set the bag down on the door-sill and hastened to the car for another burden.
Our traps stored safely in the cabin, we turned once more to bid our guide adieu, but she shook her head. “It’s likely to be cold tonight,” she told us. “This fall weather’s right deceptive after dark. Better let me bring some wood in, and then you’ll be needing water for your coffee and washing in the morning. So—”
“No, Mademoiselle, you need not do it,” Jules de Grandin protested as she came in with an armful of cut wood. “We are able-bodied men, and if we find ourselves in need of wood or water we can—mordieu!”
Somewhere, faint and far-off seeming, but growing in intensity till it seemed to make our very eardrums ache, there rose the quavering, mournful howling of a dog, such a slowly rising and diminishing lament as hounds are wont to make at night when baying at the moon—or when bemoaning death in the family of their master. And, like an echo of the canine yowling, almost like an orchestrated part of some infernal symphony, there came from very near a little squeaking, skirking noise, like the squealing of a hollow rubber toy or the gibbering of an angry monkey. Not one small voice, but half a dozen, ten, a hundred of the chattering things seemed passing through the woodland at the clearing’s edge, marching in a sort of disorderly array, hurrying, tumbling, rushing toward some rendezvous, and gabbling as they went.
The firewood clattered to the cabin door, and once again the girl’s tanned face went pasty-gray.
“Mister,” she told de Grandin solemnly, “this is no place to leave your house o’ nights, for wood or water or anything else.”
The little Frenchman tweaked the needle-points of his mustache as he regarded her. Then: “One understands, Mademoiselle—in part, at least,” he answered. “We thank you for your kindness, but it is growing late; soon it will be dark. I do not think we need detain you longer.”
Slowly the girl walked toward the door, swung back the sturdy rough-hewn panels, and gazed into the night. The sun had sunk and deep-blue darkness spread across the hills and woods; here and there an early star winked down, but there was no hint of other light, for the moon was at the dark. A moment she stood thus upon the sill, then, seeming to take sudden resolution, slammed the door and turned to face us, jaw squared, but eyes suffused with hot tears of embarrassment.
“I can’t,” she announced; then, as de Grandin raised his brows interrogatively: “I’m afraid—scared to go out there. Will—will you let me spend the night here?”
“Here?” the Frenchman echoed.
“Yes, sir; here. I—I daren’t go out there among those gibbering things. I can’t. I can’t; I can’t!”
De Grandin laughed delightedly. “Morbleu, but prudery dies hard in you Americans, Mademoiselle,” he chuckled, “despite your boasted modernism and emancipation. No matter, you have asked our hospitality, and you shall have it. You did not really think that we would let you go among those—those whatever-they-may-bes, I hope? But no. Here you shall stay till daylight makes your going safe, and when you have eaten and rested you shall tell us all you know of this strange business of the monkey. Yes, of course.”
As he knelt to light the fire he threw me a delighted wink. “When that so kind Monsieur Sutter invited us to use his lodge for hunting we little suspected what game we were to hunt, n’est-ce-pas?” he asked.
COFFEE, FRIED BACON, PANCAKES and a tin of preserved peaches constituted dinner. De Grandin and I ate with the healthy appetite of tired men, but our guest was positively ravenous, passing her plate for replenishment again and again. At last, when we had filled the seemingly bottomless void within her and I had set my pipe aglow while she and Jules de Grandin lighted cigarettes, the little Frenchman prompted. “And now, Mademoiselle?”
“I’m glad you saw something in Putnam’s woods and heard those things squeaking in the dark outside tonight,” she answered. “It’ll make it easier for you to believe me.” She paused a moment, then:
“Did you notice the white house in the trees just before we came here?” she demanded.
We shook our heads, and she went on, without pausing for reply:
“That’s Colonel Putnam’s place, where it all started. My dad is postmaster and general storekeeper at Bartlesville, and Putnam’s mail used to be delivered through our office. I was graduated from high school last year, and went to help Dad in the store, sometimes giving him a lift with the letters, too. I remember, it was in the afternoon of the twenty-third of June a special delivery parcel came for Colonel Putnam, and Dad asked me if I’d like to drive him over to deliver it after supper. We could make the trip in an hour, and Dad and Colonel Putnam had been friends since boyhood; so he wanted to do him the favor of getting the package to him as soon as possible.
“Folks had started telling some queer tales about Colonel Putnam, even then, but Dad pooh-poohed ’em all. You see, the colonel was the richest man in the county, and lived pretty much to himself since he came back here from Germany. He’d gone to school in that country as a young man, and went back on trips every year or so until about twenty years ago, when he married a Bavarian lady and settled there. His wife, we heard, died two years after they were married, when their little girl was born; then, just before the War, the daughter was drowned in a boating accident and Colonel Putnam came back to his old ancestral home and shut himself in from everybody, an old, broken and embittered man. I’d never seen him, but Dad had been to call once, and said he seemed a little touched in the head. Anyway, I was glad of the chance to see the old fellow when Dad suggested we drive over with the parcel.
“There was something queer about the Putnam house—something I didn’t like, without actually knowing what it was. You know, just as you might be repelled by the odor of tuberoses, even though you didn’t realize their connection with funerals and death? The place seemed falling apart; the drive was overgrown with weeds, the lawns all gone to seed, and a general air of desolation everywhere.
“There didn’t seem to be any servants, and Colonel Putnam let us in himself. He was tall and spare, almost cadaverous, with white hair and beard, and wore a long, black, double-breasted frock coat and a stiff white-linen collar tied with a black stock. At first he hardly seemed to know Dad, but when he saw the parcel we brought, his eyes lighted up with what seemed to me a kind of fury.
“‘Come in, Hawkins,’ he invited; ‘you and your daughter are just in time to see a thing which no one living ever saw before.’
“He led us down a long and poorly lighted hall, furnished in old-fashioned walnut and haircloth, to a larger apartment overlooking his weed-grown back yard.
“‘Hawkins,’ he told my father, ‘you’re in time to witness a demonstration of the uncontrovertible truth of the Pythagorean doctrine—the doctrine of metempsychosis.’
“‘Good Lord, Henry, you don’t mean to say you believe such non—’ Dad began, but Colonel Putnam looked at him so fiercely that I thought he’d spring on him.
“‘Silence, impious fool!’ he shouted. ‘Be silent and witness the exemplification of the Truth!’ Then he calmed down a little, though he still continued walking up and down the room twitching his eyebrows, shrugging his shoulders and snapping his fingers every now and then.
“‘Just before I came back to this country,’ he went on, ‘I met a master of the occult, a Herr Doktor von Meyer, who is not only the seventh son of a seventh son, but a member of the forty-ninth generation in direct descent from the Master Magician, Simon of Tyre. He possesses the ability to remember incidents in his former incarnations as you and I recall last night’s dreams in the morning, Hawkins. Not only that: he has the power of reading other people’s pasts. I sat with him in his atelier in Leipzig and saw my whole existence, from the time I was an insensate amoeba crawling in the primordial slime to the minute of my birth in this life, pass before me like the epis
odes of a motion picture.’
“‘Did he tell you anything of this life; relate any incident of your youth known only to yourself, for instance, Henry?’ Father asked him.
“‘Be careful, scoffer, the Powers know how to deal with unbelievers such as you!’ Colonel Putnam answered, flushing with rage, then calmed down again and resumed pacing the floor.
“‘Back in the days when civilization was in the first flush of its youth,’ he told us, ‘I was a priest of Osiris in a temple by the Nile. And she, my darling, my dearest daughter, orphaned then as later, was a priestess in the temple of the Mother Goddess, Isis, across the river from my sanctuary.
“‘But even in that elder day the fate which followed us was merciless. Then as later, water was the medium which was to rob me of my darling, for one night when her service to the Divine Mother was ended and temple slaves were rowing her across the river to my house, an accident overturned her boat, and she, the apple of my doting eyes, was thrown from her couch and drowned in the waters of Nilus. Drowned, drowned in the Egyptian river even as her latest earthly body was drowned in the Rhine.’
“Colonel Putnam stopped before my father, and his eyes were fairly blazing as he shook his finger in Dad’s face and whispered:
“‘But von Meyer told me how to overcome my loss, Hawkins. By his supernatural powers he was able to project his memory backward through the ages to the rock-tomb where they had laid the body of my darling, the very flesh in which she walked the streets of hundred-gated Thebes when the world was young. I sought it out, together with the bodies of those who served her in that elder life, and brought them here to my desolated house. Behold—’
“With a sort of dancing step he crossed the room and swept aside a heavy curtain. There, in the angle of the wall, with vases of fresh-cut flowers before them, stood three Egyptian mummy-cases.
The Best of Jules de Grandin Page 51
