“I could guide the gentleman that way,” she droned; “but it is far, and there is no water on that side.”
“I want water first,” said Waldo, “or milk.”
“If you mean cow's milk, we have none. But we have goat's milk. There is to drink where I dwell,” she said, sing-songing the words. “It is not far. It is the other way.”
“Show me,” said he.
She began to walk, Waldo, his gun under his arm, beside her. She trod noiselessly and fast. Waldo could scarcely keep up with her. As they walked he often fell behind and noted how her swathing garments clung to a lithe, shapely back, neat waist, and firm hips. Each time he hurried and caught up with her, he scanned her with intermittent glances, puzzled that her waist, so well- marked at the spine, showed no particular definition in front; that the outline of her from neck to knees, perfectly shapeless under her wrappings, was without any waistline or suggestion of firmness or undulation. Likewise he remarked the amused flicker in her eyes and the compressed line of her red, her too-red lips.
“How long were you in the mission school?” he inquired. “Four years,” she replied.
“Are you a Christian?” he asked.
“The Free-folk do not submit to baptism,” she stated simply, but with rather more of the droning growl between her words.
He felt a queer shiver as he watched the scarcely moved lips through which the syllables edged their way.
“But you are not veiled,” he could not resist saying. “The Free-folk,” she rejoined, “are never veiled.”
“Then you are not a Mohammedan?” he ventured.
“The Free-folk are not Moslems.”
“Who are the Free-folk?” he blurted out incautiously. She shot one baleful glance at him. Waldo remembered that he had to do with an Asiatic. He recalled the three permitted questions.
“What is your name?” he inquired. “Amina,” she told him.
That is a name from the 'Arabian Nights',” he hazarded.
“From the foolish tales of the believers,” she sneered. “The Free-folk know nothing of such follies.” The unvarying shutness of her speaking lips, the drawly burr between the syllables, struck him all the more as her lips curled but did not open.
“You utter your words in a strange way,” he said. “Your language is not mine,” she replied.
“How is it that you learned my language at the mission school and are not a Christian?”
“They teach all at the mission school,” she said, “and the maidens of the Free-folk are like the other maidens they teach, though the Free-folk when grown are not as town-dwellers are. Therefore they taught me as any town-bred girl, not knowing me for what I am.”
“They taught you well,” he commented.
“I have the gift of tongues,” she uttered enigmatically, with an odd note of triumph burring the words through her unmoving lips.
Waldo felt a horrid shudder all over him, not only at her uncanny words, but also from mere faintness.
“Is it far to your home?” he breathed.
“It is there,” she said, pointing to the doorway of a large tomb just before them. The wholly open arch admitted them into a fairly spacious interior, cool with the abiding temperature of thick masonry. There was no rubbish on the floor. Waldo, relieved to escape the blistering glare outside, seated himself on a block of stone midway between the door and the inner partition wall, resting his gun butt on the floor. For the moment he was blinded by the change from the insistent brilliance of the desert morning to the blurred gray light of the interior.
When his sight cleared he looked about and remarked, opposite the door, the ragged hole which laid open the desecrated mausoleum. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness he was so startled that he stood up. It seemed to him that from its four corners the room swarmed with naked children. To his inexperienced conjecture they seemed about two years old, but they moved with the assurance of boys of eight or ten.
“Whose are these children?” he exclaimed. “Mine,” she said.
“All yours?” he protested.
“All mine,” she replied, a curious suppressed boisterousness in her demeanor. “But there are twenty of them,” he cried.
“You count badly in the dark,” she told him. “There are fewer.”
“There certainly are a dozen,” he maintained, spinning round as they danced and scampered about.
“The Free-people have large families,” she said.
“But they are all of one age,” Waldo exclaimed, his tongue dry against the roof of his mouth. She laughed, an unpleasant, mocking laugh, clapping her hands. She was between him and the doorway, and as most of the light came from it he could not see her lips.
“Is not that like a man! No woman would have made that mistake.” Waldo was confuted and sat down again. The children circulated around him, chattering, laughing, giggling, snickering, making noises indicative of glee.
“Please get me something cool to drink,” said Waldo, and his tongue was not only dry but big in his mouth.
“We shall have to drink shortly,” she said, “but it will be warm.” Waldo began to feel uneasy. The children pranced around him, jabbering strange, guttural noises, licking their lips, pointing at him, their eyes fixed on him, with now and then a glance at their mother.
“Where is the water?”
The woman stood silent, her arms hanging at her sides, and it seemed to Waldo she was shorter than she had been.
“Where is the water?” he repeated. “Patience, patience,” she growled, and came a step near to him. The sunlight struck upon her back and made a sort of halo about her hips. She seemed still shorter than before. There was a something furtive in her bearing, and the little ones sniggered evilly.
At that instant two rifle shots rang out almost as one. The woman fell face downward on the floor. The babies shrieked in a shrill chorus. Then she leapt up from all fours with an explosive suddenness, staggered in a hurled, lurching rush toward the hole in the wall, and, with a frightful yell, threw up her arms and whirled backward to the ground, doubled and contorted like a dying fish, stiffened, shuddered and was still. Waldo, his horrified eyes fixed on her face, even in his amazement noted that her lips did not open.
The children, squealing faint cries of dismay, scrambled through the hole in the inner wall, vanishing into the inky void beyond. The last had hardly gone when the consul appeared in the doorway, his smoking gun in his hand.
“Not a second too soon, my boy,” he ejaculated. “She was just going to spring.” He cocked his gun and prodded the body with the muzzle.
“Good and dead,” he commented. “What luck! Generally it takes three or four bullets to finish one. I've known one with two bullets through her lungs to kill a man.
“Did you murder this woman?” Waldo demanded fiercely.
“Murder?” the consul snorted. “Murder! Look at that.” He knelt down and pulled open the full, close lips, disclosing not human teeth, but small incisors, cusped grinders, wide-spaced; and long, keen, overlapping canines, like those of a greyhound: a fierce, deadly, carnivorous dentition, menacing and combative.
Waldo felt a qualm, yet the face and form still swayed his horrified sympathy for their humanness.
“Do you shoot women because they have long teeth?” Waldo insisted, revolted at the horrid death he had watched.
“You are hard to convince,” said the consul sternly. “Do you call that a woman?” He stripped the clothing from the carcass.
Waldo sickened all over. What he saw was not the front of a woman, but more like the underside of an old fox-terrier with puppies, or of a white sow, with her second litter; from collarbone to groin ten lolloping udders, two rows, mauled, stringy, and flaccid.
“What kind of a creature is it?” he asked faintly.
“A Ghoul, my boy,” the consul answered solemnly, almost in a whisper.
“I thought they did not exist,” Waldo babbled. “I thought they were mythical; I thought there were none.
