The Place Called Dagon

in her presence. The man in him would tremble before the woman in her. She could not touch his brain, though, for that was an insuperable bulwark between them. It was his stout shield of defence and beat upon it as she might with the sharp sword of her loveliness she could not hack her way through. She was like the beautiful and heartless wife of the Afreet in the Arabian Nights, the one who possessed the vast number of rings, each one a souvenir of a time when she had betrayed her sleeping lord. Well, he would not be a victim. No ring of his should join that glittering and invisible chain that he suspected Martha Westcott wore about her white throat. He was safeguarded from her by a welling desire that rose in his heart, by a desire that he knew would keep him in Marlborough until the time came when he might go away not alone. A shadow of dim light, the shy reflection of crystal, stood near him now and his eyes brightened as his thoughts shifted.

He had helped her anyway. He had stood between her and the callousness of her reticent relations, between her and the despairing selfishness of her helpless aunt. She had wanted to bury her on a lonely farm, to engulf her in the very mystery that tormented all his faculties. He wondered if she was sleeping now in the house next door, lying with one thin pathetic white arm stretched across the bright patches of the crazyquilt and dreaming, perhaps, of him. Dreeme smiled at the yellow lamp-flame. He was growing sentimental. Her confident helplessness, her blue-eyed surrender to circumstances, her ultimate faith in the goodness of humanity, her unquestioning dependence on him, all these things touched him acutely. He felt his eyes grow moist at the thought of her. She, at least, was real. He had said that to himself before and he would say it again and again for it gave him a strange strength. She counted and made the whole thing worth while. He could depend on her as she depended on him. He would constitute himself her champion, the fighter who would stand between her and⁠ ⁠… Dagon. The name sprang spontaneously into his mind. “Dagon,” he said aloud, listening to the sound of the word in the little study. “Dagon.” It meant something. It was a place.

His mind turned back. “I will tell you a great many things tomorrow night.” Did she mean anything, after all, by that statement? Or was it merely a snare, a bait to inveigle him back to a rendezvous that he found in itself distasteful? Would she, for instance, tell him about Dagon, describe it to him, indicate where it was, explain what it meant? If pushed to a last extremity of desire she might. He flushed at the thought of so befooling her. Still.⁠ ⁠… He was fighting with whatever weapons he could grasp. If only.⁠ ⁠… The clock noisily announced nine-thirty. Of course, she would not be there. She would never dare to come after what had happened the night before. Go⁠ ⁠… stay⁠ ⁠… go⁠ ⁠… stay. The clock was ticking it now. Still undecided he rose up and reached for his hat. It would do no harm to take a walk anyway, to stroll in the cool of the evening as the Reverend George Burroughs would say. Dagon⁠ ⁠… Dagon. He closed the door softly behind him and stood in the moonlight.

IV

The burned mill stood in the bright moonlight, its charred door yawning on the road. It looked like the sun-dried skull of a buffalo resting forlornly on the dry sand of a parched plain. Yet about it were the trees shot through with a milky light and beyond it was the silver blade of the Saccarac River. Dreeme walked slowly through the door wondering if she would be waiting there for him. Inside he paused with a brief start of surprise and anger as his eyes located the figure in the broken embrasure. The moonlight flowed in crystal over a cloven head bowed forward in a listening attitude. This shaven cranium seemed phosphorescent in the rich glow.

“Good evening, doctor,” said Jeffrey Westcott. There was the hint of a grim levity in his voice. He stood up, his powerful arms swinging apelike at his sides, waiting for the young doctor to approach closer. Dreeme eyed him speculatively and without fear. Of course. He might have known if he had thought clearly enough about it.

“I’m afraid that this is an abrupt surprise for you,” remarked the farmer. His tone was studiously polite, the tone of a man about to have business dealings with a stranger. The snarl that had permeated it the first night when Dreeme had removed the bullet from his plump calf was missing. The young doctor approached him slowly and sat down in the embrasure. Well, if he was in for a scene.⁠ ⁠… Westcott turned, the moonlight rippling across his flat face. His eyes and teeth glittered in the flood of light.

“It is a surprise,” said Dreeme calmly. “I expected to meet your wife here.”

He might as well have it over with at once.

“She is detained,” answered Westcott softly.

“You must not misunderstand me,” proceeded Dreeme, a trifle stiffly. “Your wife and I.⁠ ⁠…”

Westcott spread a broad hand deprecatingly.

“I know my wife,” he said in a very low voice.

There was silence then while Dreeme shifted his eyes from the farmer to the scummed waters of the millpond. They were like an old opaque mirror in the moon. Did he know his wife, though? Did anybody know his wife. Astarte Syriaca. The wife of the Afreet. What was she?

“No, no, doctor,” resumed Westcott as though he were reading Dreeme’s thoughts. “My wife’s little vagaries do not disturb me. She discommodes me at infrequent times but I have a remedy for it.”

Dreeme glanced at Westcott’s long powerful arms.

“I suppose you beat her,” he remarked shortly.

The farmer flung back his head and laughed,