“It seems that they meet at Dagon at two o’clock, and that Dagon is somewhere in Nigger Swamp,” he said mechanically.
Walden Slater nodded his head in assent.
“That’s it,” he said. “Westcott sacrificed a chicken to see if the signs were propitious. Apparently he decided they were, although what a chicken’s crop has to do with it is beyond me.”
He stopped abruptly and turned his face toward the open window. Dreeme listened, too, and he could hear the distinct sound of footsteps going by the house. They apparently died away in the soft grass of the field that stretched from the dwelling to Briony Wood.
“They’re gathering,” remarked the farmer simply. He stood up and regained his lantern.
“We can’t know where they’ve hidden Deborah,” he said, “but we do know that they’ll bring her to the place called Dagon. She’s to be the sacrifice, Doctor.”
“They wouldn’t dare to kill her!” exploded Dreeme.
“There’s some things worse than death,” answered Walden Slater.
He moved toward the door and Dreeme followed him. Behind them the forgotten lamp perched on the edge of the table, and as the wind increased the curtain flapped ever nearer the yellow flame, a flame that sputtered but, being shielded from the worst of the gust by a protector, never went out. The two men passed through the sitting room and out through the broken door into the storm which had now settled down into a gusty drizzle.
“And, besides,” said Walden Slater slowly, “Wagner was killed, wasn’t he?”
“Do you know who killed him?” asked Dreeme. “Was it Jeffrey Westcott?”
“I know that the pegs driven into his eye-sockets were whittled by a mighty dull knife,” returned the farmer grimly.
They plodded on in silence after that, their heads bowed against the driving wind and rain. Occasionally they stumbled over hammocks of wet grass and once Walden Slater sprawled upon the ground, his lantern rolling from his hand and blinking out. With a grumbled curse he scrambled to his feet and picked up the extinguished lantern and examined it.
“It’s busted!” he said vehemently, flinging it from him with an angry gesture. They heard it clatter against a stone wall to the side of them. After that they struggled on in the darkness across the field, the black shadow of Briony Wood in its slight elevation looming nearer and nearer against the faint glow of the stormy sky.
“If you meet anybody,” said the farmer suddenly, “don’t you say a damn word. Keep your head down and trudge along.”
Dreeme muttered something in his throat. Mingled rain and perspiration was streaming down his face and his naked feet were cut by the sharp stones and twigs. He heard his heart beating violently in his bosom and wondered if the farmer was as tired as he. They had crossed the greater part of the field now and the ground was sloping upward before them, sloping upward to tall spectral trees that stood with intermingled branches and waited menacingly for their coming. It would be dark in those trees and there would probably be no pathway. But they would have to go on, for somewhere beyond the trees was the place called Dagon, and it was at Dagon that he would next meet Deborah. Sobbingly he climbed the slope at the heels of Walden Slater.
II
The trees reached out and took them in, circling about them in a massed formation. They were in the darkness of Briony Wood now, a darkness that was unrelieved by any light except the pale intermittent glow of the sky that filtered through the bowed branches of the trees. The unceasing storm rumbled in the leaves above them, and the incessant drip of water sounded about them as they lurched over broken branches, stones, unbared roots, and washed-out hollows. Far above the moist darkness through which they struggled Dreeme thought he could hear a faint humming, the sound of wind, perhaps, flowing along the tilted tops of the taller trees. His labored breath chimed with it. Walden Slater was lurching along doggedly beside him now, no longer ahead, but shoulder to shoulder with him except when the unevenness of the road they took caused them to stumble apart. It was good to feel his sturdy shoulder as it struck against him occasionally. It was like a tower filled with armed men who were always on guard. It was a fortress against evil and chance. The farmer was silent, conserving his strength for the difficult journey through the wood, and Dreeme, taking a lesson from him, refrained from speech, although questions were beginning to boil up in his restless mind. His intelligence was clarifying although he was still in a riot of fear over the situation in which Deborah must be. Images appeared and dissolved before his eyes. Deborah lying on the rainy ground bound and gagged. Deborah insensible in some secret retreat where George Burroughs, his sallow face aflame with malice, bowed over her and blasphemously intoned Biblical phrases that were twisted to serve the devil’s purpose. Deborah sitting wide-eyed in an hypnotic trance while Jeffrey Westcott stood before her, his cloven head bared to the rain and the wind. Deborah gazing into the heavy-lidded remorseless eyes of Martha Westcott while the taciturn farmers, muttering to one another, gathered about a great dripping stone in the heart of Nigger Swamp.
The humming in the air increased steadily above the two travelers now until it seemed as though a hundred and one faraway aeroplane engines were singing their way through the darkness and rain like a swarm of huge and unbelievable mosquitoes. Dreeme’s labored breath sucked in his throat as he pushed the entangling spiky vines aside and thrust his tired body forward. His bare feet were bruised and cut, but they seemed devoid of all
