“What’s up?” he growled menacingly, and his sound hand moved swiftly to a holster at his side. Then his eyes found me, and with an oath he drew his revolver.
“Easy, Constable! Easy does it,” soothed Judge Pursuivant, his own great hand clutching O’Bryant’s wrist. “You’ve forgotten that I showed how Mr. Wills must be innocent.”
“I’ve forgotten what we’re here for at all,” snapped O’Bryant, gazing around the clearing. “Hey, have I been drunk or something? I said that I’d never—”
“I’ll explain,” offered Zoberg. “The judge met me in town, and we came together to see you. Remember? You said you would like to avenge your brother’s death, and came with us. Then, when you balked at the very edge of this Devil’s Croft, I took the liberty of hypnotizing you.”
“Huh? How did you do that?” growled the officer.
“With a look, a word, a motion of the hand,” said Zoberg, his eyes twinkling. “Then you ceased all objections and came in with us.”
Pursuivant clapped O’Bryant on the unwounded shoulder. “Sit down,” he invited, motioning toward the roots of the tree.
The five of us gathered around the fire, like picknickers instead of allies against a supernormal monster. There, at Susan’s insistence, I told of what had happened since Judge Pursuivant had left us. All listened with rapt attention, the constable grunting occasionally, the judge clicking his tongue, and Doctor Zoberg in absolute silence.
It was Zoberg who made the first comment after I had finished. “This explains many things,” he said.
“It don’t explain a doggone thing,” grumbled O’Bryant.
Zoberg smiled at him, then turned to Judge Pursuivant. “Your ectoplasmic theory of lycanthropy—such as you have explained it to me—is most interesting and, I think, valid. May I advance it a trifle?”
“In what way?” asked the judge.
“Ectoplasm, as you see it, forms the werewolf by building upon the medium’s body. But is not ectoplasm more apt, according to the observations of many people, to draw completely away and form a separate and complete thing of itself? The thing may be beastly, as you suggest. Algernon Blackwood, the English writer of psychic stories, almost hits upon it in one of his ‘John Silence’ tales. He described an astral personality taking form and threatening harm while its physical body slept.”
“I know the story you mean,” agreed Judge Pursuivant. “The Camp of the Dog, I think it’s called.”
“Very well, then. Perhaps, while Miss Susan’s body lay in a trance, securely handcuffed between Wills and myself—”
“Oh!” wailed Susan. “Then it was I, after all.”
“It couldn’t have been you,” I told her at once.
“But it was! And, while I was at the judge’s home with you, part of me met the constable’s brother in this wood.” She stared wildly around her.
“It might as well have been part of me,” I argued, and O’Bryant glared at me as if in sudden support of that likelihood. But Susan shook her head.
“No, for which of us responded to the call of that thing out there?”
For the hundredth time she gazed fearfully through the fire at the bushes behind which the commanding whine had risen.
“I have within me,” she said dully, “a nature that will break out, look and act like a beast-demon, will kill even my beloved father—”
“Please,” interjected Judge Pursuivant earnestly, “you must not take responsibility upon yourself for what happened. If the ectoplasm engendered by you made up the form of the killer, the spirit may have come from without.”
“How could it?” she asked wretchedly.
“How could Marthe Beraud exude ectoplasm that formed a bearded, masculine body?” Pursuivant looked across to Zoberg. “Doctor, you surely know the famous ‘Bien Boa’ séance, and how the materialized entity spoke Arabic when the medium, a Frenchwoman, knew little or nothing of that language?”
Zoberg sat with bearded chin on lean hand. His joined brows bristled the more as he corrugated his forehead in thought. “We are each a thousand personalities,” he said, sententiously if not comfortingly. “How can we rule them all, or rule even one of them?”
O’Bryant said sourly that all this talk was too high flown for him to understand or to enjoy. He dared hope, however, that the case could never be tied up to Miss Susan Gird, whom he had known and liked since her babyhood.
“It can never do that,” Zoberg said definitely. “No court or jury would convict her on the evidence we are offering against her.”
I ventured an opinion: “While you are attempting to show that Susan is a werewolf, you are forgetting that something else was prowling around our fire, just out of sight.”
“Ach, just out of sight!” echoed Zoberg. “That means you aren’t sure what it was.”
“Or even that there was anything,” added Susan, so suddenly and strongly that I, at least, jumped.
“There was something, all right,” I insisted. “I heard it.”
“You thought you heard a sound behind the tree,” Susan reminded me. “You looked, and there was nothing.”
Everyone gazed at me, rather like staid adults at a naughty child. I said, ungraciously, that my imagination was no better than theirs, and that I was no easier to frighten. Judge Pursuivant suggested that we make a search of the surrounding woods, for possible clues.
“A good idea,” approved Constable O’Bryant. “The ground’s damp. We might find some sort of footprints.”
“Then you stay here with Miss Susan,” the judge said to him. “We others will circle around.”
The gaunt constable shook his head. “Not much, mister. I’m in on whatever searching is done. I’ve got something to settle with whatever killed my kid brother.”
“But there are only three lanterns,” pointed out Judge Pursuivant. “We have to carry them—light’s our best weapon.”
Zoberg then spoke up, rather diffidently, to say that he would be glad to stay with Susan. This was agreed upon, and the other three of us prepared for the search.
I took the lantern from Zoberg’s hand, nodded to the others, and walked away among the trees.
XIV
“I Was—I Am—A Wolf.”
Deliberately I had turned my face toward the
