These preparations Lanark reviewed mentally, while he heard Enid’s bare feet splashing timidly in the water. It came to him, a bit too late, that the arms he bore might not avail against supernatural enemies. Yet Jager had seemed confident. … Enid was speaking, apparently repeating the ritual that was supposed to summon the unnamed god-demon of Persil Mandifer:
“A maid, alone and pure, I stand, not upon water nor on land; I hold a mirror in my hand, in which to see what Fate may send. …” She broke off and screamed.
Lanark whipped around. The girl stood, misty-pale in the wash of moonlight, all crouched and curved together like a bow.
“It was coming!” she quavered. “I saw it in the mirror—over yonder, among those trees—”
Lanark glared across the little strip of water and the moonlit grass beyond. Ten paces away, between two trunks, something shone in the shadows—shone darkly, like tar, though the filtered moon-rays did not touch it. He saw nothing of the shape, save that it moved and lived—and watched.
He drew his revolver and fired, twice. There was a crash of twigs, as though something had flinched backward at the reports.
Lanark splashed through the water and, despite his limp, charged at the place where the presence lurked.
XII
Jager
It had been some minutes before eleven o’clock when Jager reined in his old black horse at a distance of two miles from Fearful Rock.
Most of those now alive who knew Jager personally are apt to describe him as he was when they were young and he was old—a burly graybeard, a notable preacher and exhorter, particularly at funerals. He preferred the New Testament to the Old, though he was apt to misquote his texts from either; and he loved children, and once preached a telling sermon against the proposition of infant damnation. His tombstone, at Fort Smith, Arkansas, bears as epitaph a verse from the third chapter of the first book of Samuel: Here am I, for thou didst call me
.
Jager when young is harder to study and to visualize. However, the diary of a long-dead farmer’s wife of Pennsylvania records that the “Jager boy” was dull but serious at school, and that his appetite for mince pie amounted to a passion. In Topeka, Kansas, lives a retired railroad conductor whose father, on the pre-Rebellion frontier, once heard Jager defy Southern hoodlums to shoot him for voting Free-state in a territorial election. Ex-Major Kane Lanark mentioned Jager frequently and with admiration in the remarkable pen-and-ink memoir on which the present narrative is based.
How he approached Fearful Rock, and what he encountered there, he himself often described verbally to such of his friends as pretended that they believed him.
The moonlight showed him a stunted tree, with one gnarled root looping up out of the earth, and to that root he tethered his animal. Then, like Lanark, he threw off his coat, strapping it to the cantle of his saddle, and unfastened his “hickory” blue shirt at the throat. From a saddlebag he drew a trusty-looking revolver, its barrel sawed off. Turning its butt toward the moon, he spun the cylinder to make sure that it was loaded. Then he thrust it into his belt without benefit of holster, and started on foot toward the rock and its remains of a house.
Approaching, he sought by instinct the cover of trees and bush-clumps, moving smoothly and noiselessly; Jager had been noted during his service in the Army of the Frontier for his ability to scout at night, an ability which he credited to the fact that he had been born in the darkest hours. He made almost as good progress as though he had been moving in broad daylight. At eleven o’clock sharp, as he guessed—like many men who never carry watches, he had become good at judging the time—he was within two hundred yards of the rock itself, and cover had run out. There he paused, chin-deep in a clump of early weeds.
Lanark and the girl, as he surmised, must be well into the gulley by this time. He, Jager, smiled as he remembered with what alacrity Lanark had accepted the assignment of bodyguard to Enid Mandifer. Those two young people acted as if they were on the brink of falling in love, and no mistake. …
His eyes were making out details of the scene ahead. Was even the full moon so bright as all this? He could not see very clearly the ruined foundations, for they sat in a depression of the earth. Yet there seemed to be a clinging blue light at about that point, a feeble but undeniable blue. Mentally he compared it to deep, still water, then to the poorest of skimmed milk. Jager remembered the flames that once had burned there, blue as amethyst.
But the blue light was not solid, and it had no heat. Within it, dimmed as though by mist, stood and moved—figures. They were human, at least they were upright; and they stood in a row, like soldiers, all but two. That pair was dark-seeming, and one was grossly thick, the other thin as an exclamation point. The line moved, bent, formed a weaving circle which spread as its units opened their order. Jager had never seen such a maneuver in four years of army service.
Now the circle was moving, rolling around; the figures were tramping counterclockwise—“withershins” was the old-fashioned word for that kind of motion, as Jager remembered from his boyhood in Pennsylvania. The two darker figures, the ones that had stood separate, were nowhere to
