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The Old Gods AwakenThe Old Gods Awaken

by

Manley Wade Wellman

Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of

strangers.

-Victor Hugo

Things started that morning in the third week in June, when Mr. Creed Forshay

left out of his cabin and headed up the struggling trail on the steep side of

Wolter Mountain, to check on the flow of water from the spring that fed to the

pipes for his place.

It was a rare, bright day, Mr. Creed allowed to himself. Summer was a-climbing

over spring here in the mountains. Mr. Creed was a middling tall, chunky-made

fellow, with bushy gray hair and a square face chopped with strong lines. He was

dressed more or less usual, jeans pants stuck into high laced boots and a blue

hickory work shirt with a bag of roll-your-own tobacco in the pocket, and his

black old umbrella hat that had cost him maybe thirty dollars some years back.

He wasn't young any more, but a good sight short of being old. He was a good

farmer and a good hunter and all sorts of a good man.

He tromped across the hollow where his fish pond twinkled, a-looking up to

sloping, terraced fields of corn and vegetables and to an apple orchard and nice

stands of pine beyond. Forshays had owned that land all the way back to the

first settlement times, in or around the year the Revolutionary War was fought

to its end. And it might could be that Mr. Creed Forshay and his big son Luke

worked it as well as air Forshay known to history. Loving that land helped a

right much. Both Mr. Creed and Luke had been away in their times. Mr. Creed

served in the Navy when he was young, had been a machinist who came back able to

string his own rural electrification wires and lay his pipes to carry the spring

water. And Luke had gone to Shenstone College, a-working his way through

Shenstone College with good history and English grades and a-playing a patch of

football. But both were there at their own place that June, because they didn't

much care to be air other place else on this earth.

Above and ahead of Mr. Creed jumped up Wolter Mountain, all the great big high

humps and bunches of it, grown over with trees of air kind you could call for.

Under his boots, the trail went a-shammocking up the steep, woodsy face, tight

and narrow as a lap of cord. The mountain kept it narrow from side to side.

Going up, you moved close against the face to your right, and to your left there

dropped down what might could be the death of you if you set a foot out of

place.

But his cleated soles knew the way, from years of it. He tramped that way toward

where he was headed, taking his usual care at the narrow-rough places. He made

note of vines and trees, he relished the flowers. He saw purple wake-robin, blue

spiderwort, little rosy bits on the twisted-stem. Where leaf rot made it rich

under a clump of hickory, yellow trout lilies; under some pines, pouchy pink

moccasin flower and three-bird orchids, red and white with a white gape like the

mouths of baby birds. The pale blooms were gone off the serviceberry and the

dogwood, but he spied a tuft of late windflower, white with its tad of pink. The

branches of a gum showed shaggy with the close bunches of witches'-broom. Folks

said that grew where someone had been murdered. If witches'-broom grew air place

murder had happened round Wolter Mountain, there'd be a sight of it no matter

where you roamed.

A-clambering, Mr. Creed couldn't see all the way to the top of that winding,

snaking trail with the steep rocks and thick-growing plants to the one side and

a long, long jump down on the other. But he'd clambered it so often he could

tell air turn and jog of it, and he well knew what was up above. That was where

it came to a flat amongst taller heights and hikes, and there flowed the spring.

The trail, as his own feet had more or less driven it out, went between the

cliff and a patch of rocks to the spring. He came on up that-a-way, out from

between two pines, to where he could see the flat as always. Only today there

was something different.

A couple of men were there ahead of him. He knew them by sight.

They were brothers, Brummitt and Hooper Voth, and round about six weeks back

they'd taken the old Gibb place. That was the mountaintop piece of foresty flat

and slope that right here bordered the Forshay land.

You'd better know something about the Gibb place and the Gibb family. Those

Gibbs had found their way in, like the Forshays, in that first old time of

settlement From the first they'd been a right odd lot Even amongst

mountain-dwelling people, who've got a fair gift of minding their own business,

the Gibb crowd had held off from neighbors, generation after generation. The

last one of them all had been old Jonathan Gibb, who'd nair married, nair

farmed, who hadn't even grown him a garden. For money to live on, he'd raised

hogs on the acorns and chestnuts from his trees, and he'd blockaded fair to

middling good whiskey. He'd remarked, the few times he talked to somebody, that

if you tried to plow a furrow on his place, the rain and thunder and lightning

came down. Nor would he allow one tree on his place to be cut. Back when the

timber companies worked Wolter Mountain, he'd prowled round under his pine and

oak woods with a shotgun, to run off air soul a-coming there with an axe.

Lately he'd died, maybe from sickness or old age, nobody knew what. He nair left

chick nor child, brother nor cousin, to heir his property. But it had come up at

the county seat that he'd made a written deal that the land would go after he

died to the Voth brothers.

The Voths had turned out to be as standoffish as air Gibb in history. They

stayed to themselves. They went to Sky Notch, the closest town, only to shop

supplies and pick up mail. Mr. Creed had run into them there a couple of times,

and when he'd passed them the time of day, why, they'd just nodded to him

without a-passing it back. The line of the Jonathan Gibb property they'd taken

ran just at the foot of a grassy slope. On that slope had long ago been laid out

a sort of figure of stones. This side of the slope ran a flat patch, mostly

rocks, funny-looking rocks, to the side of Mr. Creed's trail.

Just now, when Mr. Creed got there that morning, the two Voth brothers were

a-busying themselves with a posthole digger and some locust stakes, a-putting in

a line of posts for a fence, right up against the edge of that very trail of Mr.

Creed's.

"Hidy," Mr. Creed hailed them, quiet and cool. "Do youins have any objection to

telling me why you're out here today, a-fencing off a chunk of my land?"

They wheeled on their feet to look at him. It was the closest he'd stood to them

so far. Brummitt Voth was tall and lean and looked maybe a little small bit

elegant, with a checked vest on over his black shirt and an expensive white hat

"Your land, sir?" he repeated to Mr. Creed, in his voice that had a sort of

salt-and-pepper touch of the English accent. "Your land?" he said. "According to

the records at the courthouse, it's our land."

"What records are them, and in what courthouse do you say they are?" Mr. Creed

inquired him, still quiet about it.

"I refer to the county courthouse, in the office of the register of deeds," said

Brummitt Voth. "The original grant, as kept there, describes the line between

the properties as running along the separating trail."

Mr. Creed stared from one Voth to the other. "That there description harks back

near about two hundred years," he told them, his voice getting deeper. "In them

old days, the trail run the far side of this here stony patch youins want to

take over."

He motioned with his broad hand to the patch he called his. It was maybe an acre

and a half, a flat piece in that little fold of Wolter Mountain, and it looked

about halfway paved with the funny-looking rocks. Some of those rocks had some

way the look of faces if you looked hard; deep eyes and stubby noses and big

wide mouths, the sort of face a monkey shows you.

"The official description of the grant definitely states the trail as the

boundary," put in Hooper Voth, the other brother. He was as heavy-built as Mr.

Creed, though not so hard-packed in the build. His face had a thin yellowy

mustache, and his tongue wetted his lower lip when he talked. "In any case," he

went on to say, "I can't imagine why you'd care. You don't farm this particular

ground It shouldn't be of any value to you."

He squinted his eye over that, and it was pale like his brother Brummitt's eye,

at one of the rocks that had a monkey look.

"Long ago, the trail run up yonder, above this here patch." Mr. Creed pointed to

show where. "I made this here new trail myself, trod it out with my own feet. I

get back and forth on it to my spring, what I get my water from." Up ahead, past

the Brummitts, the spring poured out of a high face of rock into a scooped-out

basin, to make a flow through wire netting into the plastic pipe.

"But the description of the land calls the trail the line of demarcation," said

Hooper Voth again, a-hooking a meaty thumb in his broad belt. There just might

could have been a gun in his pants pocket right below that point.

"No, sir," said Mr. Creed, his voice getting hot at last. "Youins got your

holdings figured dead wrong, gentlemen. Ill be obliged if you just take down

them posts, and do it right now while I'm here a-watching."

"The post stay where they are, Mr. Forshay," said Brummitt Voth, and he moved to

stand close to his brother. The two of them ranged like that, the tall one and

the meaty one, beside the tree stakes they'd already put in the ground. Mr.

Creed studied them up and down, thinking whether he might could be able to

handle both of them at once if they quarreled.

"I suggest that we be rational," said Brummitt Voth. "You may go to court if you

wish, Mr. Forshay. And when the judge consults the original grants of these

lands, you can hear him tell you that we have the rights by which we stand

here."

"Devil be damned!" came out Mr. Creed at them, loud and mad. "You two should

ought to take a good look at me before you try to shove me off my own ground

that's been in the Forshay family since two hundred years back about. I'm

a-telling you one more time, get off my place."

"We stay on our own place," said Brummitt Voth, and "Yes," said Hooper Voth, "we

stay here."

"Then stay here till I get back, you two devil-damned outlander thieves," Mr.

Creed hollered them. "I'm a-going now, and when you see me again I won't be

alone against the two of you. My son Luke knows the law, and he knows how to

deal with somebody a-trying to take the law into his own hands. You wait here

for us to go deeper into the matter."

When he'd said that, he swung round and headed off again, the way he'd come. As

he went, he could feel the prod of their tin-colored eyes in his back, like the

muzzles of pointing guns.

He slammed down that chancy trail, near about too fast for careful safety. He

was so pure down mad, he never took the time to feel scared that one of the

Voths might out with a gun and open up on him. Not that Mr. Creed was much of a

one to get scared easy. He'd seen too much of life, in different places, to feel

that a scared fellow prospers on this earth.

He got down to the lower ground and came a-hurrying along past his fish pond

toward his square-logged, shake-roofed cabin.

There on the door-log sat his long tall son Luke with his banjo, and I myself

was a-sitting there beside Luke. I had my silver-strung guitar. The two of us

were a-working out some breaks on a duet of "Laurel Lonesome."

"I vow, Papa, you look more or less ready to bite somebody in two," said Luke,

getting up. He was round about twenty-seven years old. His fair hair was long

and wavy, and he was strong in his bones and muscles, but built rangy where his

father was built stocky.

"This is my friend John, Papa," said Luke. "I met up with him last Saturday at

that singing in Sky Notch, and I invited him to come over and stay with us a

week."

II

The way I've just been a-telling, Mr. Creed was powerful mad at what had gone

with the Voths, but nair in his life did he forget his manners with somebody he

reckoned was worth a show of them. I'd stood up, too, and Mr. Creed shoved out

his hand to me. It was as big and broad as mine, and had a good grip to it when

we shook.

"I'm proud to know you, John, and right happy that Luke bid you come stay a

spell," he said. "I've heard tell of you from the Obray Ramseys in Madison, and

the Herrons up in the Rebel Creek neighborhood, and Preacher Frank Ricks. They

allow that, since Mr. Bascom Lamar Lunsford went to his rest, you're likely to

know more of the old-timey songs than air soul left on Earth."

"People are mostly kind about listening to me," I said.

He gave a glance to where I'd put down my silver-strung guitar. "Later on, when

maybe I've got rid of a thing I'm a-studying to do just now, you'll up and pick

and sing for us."

"I'll do that thing, sir," I promised him. "And Luke can help me out on the

banjo, he relishes to learn sweet music."

"But I want to ask what made you mad, Papa," Luke put in a word. "I can't figure

who in these parts would be witless enough to go foul of you."

"You got it right, son," said Mr. Creed to him. 'I've been made pure down mad by

them low-flung Voth brothers, up yonder at the old Gibb place on Welter."

With that, he filled us both in on what had taken place with him up the trail to

his spring, how the Voths had as good as vowed him they'd take that piece of

rocky ground up yonder. Hearing him, I gathered that the Voths might could turn

out mean.

"They didn't ask me, they told me," Mr. Creed finished up. "I'm honest to say,

if they'd acted the man with me and not the damn dog - if they'd asked me nice

could they have it, I just likely would have give it to them free, for

neighborly good will. But the chance of that happening is gone and past. Come

on, Luke, you and me's a-going back and make them haul up them stakes with their

backteeth. John, if you'd excuse us for maybe an hour of time -"

"Let's have John come along with us," said Luke, with a scowl like his daddy's.

"I know he acts like a more or less peaceable sort of fellow, Papa; but here and

there the talk is, when somebody started something, John finished it up for

him."

Mr. Creed gave me a studying look. "You're a stranger within our gates," he said

after a second, "but if you'll be with us in this, maybe help us out with the

knowledge I hear tell you have, I'll be pleased."

"So will I be pleased, sir," I said back to him.

Luke and I set our instruments inside the door. Mr. Creed went to his rack of

guns and chose out a good old deer rifle, German by the look. Luke slid a

snubby-nosed pistol into the pocket of his jeans pants. They offered me my

choice of guns, but I thanked them kindly and said I'd better do without. Then

all three of us headed for the trail up to the spring.

I've got to say right out, I more or less enjoyed that walk up the mountain.

Sure enough, it was a trail as lean as a whip and as steep as a bear slide, but

I was like the Forshays, brought up to run mountain ridges and shelves.

I did all right, though a couple of times I hung to vines or branches. "Looky

yonder," I said to Mr. Creed, maybe to get him into less of a black state of

mind. "Mushrooms-good eating."

"I wouldn't touch them toadstools," he said. "Air time I look at one, it's like

as if I see a toad a-sitting on it"

His mood was staying black.

Luke went up ahead, and he came to the top. He gave a little low whoop, and

waved to us. We caught up with him.

1 don't see those fence stakes," said Luke.

And there wasn't a single stake by the rocky patch. A-coming to the trailside to

look, I saw holes where they'd been.

"Shoo," sniffed Mr. Creed, "they must have thought better of taking the law into

their own hands. They pulled them stakes up when I said I'd go fetch Luke to

argue about it."

Luke went on farther, to where the spring was. I stood and gave a gaze up to the

stone-set figure on the slope beyond the patch the Voths had decided not to

fence in after all.

It was something to see. Big stones, boulders you might say, had been fetched

together to make the outline. I should reckon it would be forty feet up and down

the slope and twenty from side to side, a chunky body of bunched stones and a

head on top, and short legs and long arms a-hanging down. Those stones were

bigger than the monkey-faced ones in the patch the quarrel had been about.

Without having aught of a way to be sure, I made a guess that some stones in

that figure were tons heavy. And they must have been carried long ways from

yonder here and there, especially to get them in the right shapes, chunky ones

to lay close together for the body part, lean ones end to end for arms and legs.

"Just what's it meant to be, Mr. Creed?" I inquired him.

"Some sort of man shape, I reckon," he said.

"A right peculiar man shape," I had to say back "Look how it humps in the

shoulders, and the head seems like as if it snouts out. And those arms and legs

aren't rightly man arms and legs. It could stand up and put its hands to the

ground, like what they call an orangutan."

"Rangatang," he tried to repeat after me. "Nobody knows much about it, away off

from everywhere and older than the oldest. My first folks here allowed the

Indians told them it was here before the Indians remembered. Only, who'd be here

to shape it up before the Indians? They were the first people here, I done heard

science men say."

"I've been told a couple of tales about an older kind of folks than the

Indians," I said, looking at the rocks.

"That fits the thing the Indians said, what time they'd talk to a white

settler," said Mr. Creed, nodding his head. "Whatever built it, it must have

been something besides just the foxes and frogs round about here."

"I know an Indian over Sky Notch way," I said. "Reuben Manco. He might could

have something to say about it. Those are sure enough big old rocks."

"Some of them must be six or eight feet long, they'd weigh like a house, near

about," he said, spitting on the ground. "It wonders you how folks could get

them dragged round up here into the shape of that there thing. They didn't have

no machines back then - not even horses, I've heard say."

He looked brighter now.

"Anyway," he said, really happy, "them Voth brothers has got themselfs off my

land and their stakes with them. Didn't wait to argue no more."

"They might could have taken second thoughts and seen the right of it was on

your side," I made offer. "What if they turned out to be good neighbors after

all, no hard feelings?"

"That'd be fine," said Mr. Creed. "I don't love trouble no more than the next

fellow."

Luke hailed us from up at the spring. We walked that-a-way to see what it was up

to.

It was a right good spring, it looked like as if it had been there for long

years. It had washed through the gray rock to make a sort of little cave for

itself, coming down, I judged, from the heights of Wolter Mountain behind and

over it. There was a good basin for the water to gather into, big as a kitchen

sink. The Forshays had begun their line of plastic pipe there, mooring it right

to the rock with a couple of iron bolts wedged into cracks. A funnel fetched the

water in, and across that was wired an old screen sieve to keep out silt and

gravel. The water in the basin looked as crystal clear as ever I saw.

"Is it sweet water?" I inquired Luke.

"Don't drink of it right now," he warned me off. "Look here what was hanging on

it."

He held it out I saw a chain like what's used for a locket, and from it hung a

round piece of yellow metal - I wondered, could it be gold? - about as wide

across as an old-timey pocket watch. On it was cut a cross, with some kind of

chisel, rough but deep driven. Around that, inside the rim, had been chipped a

circle, so that the arms of the cross, up and down and left and right, touched

to it

"I vow, that couldn't be too bad a charm to put on us," allowed Mr. Creed,

bending to look. "It's got a cross to it, like a church house."

"But the cross is inside a circle," I pointed out to him. I've happened one time

to read in a book about old England, where it said crosses in circles were

heathen charms there before they ever had churches."

"Them Voths has a dialect kindly like Englishmen," said Mr. Creed. "I thought

that when them and me was a-talking just now."

I took a handkerchief from the pocket of my old pants and spread it out. Luke

put the thing into it and I wrapped it up and stowed it away. While I was

a-doing that, Luke craned his neck up the slope beyond the field where the rock

picture lay.

"Who's that up yonder?" he flung out.

A man stood there, just at the humpy shoulder of the stone figure. From where we

were at the spring, he was too far away for us to say if he was big or little,

old or young. He had a black look to him all over, like somebody coated in tar.

We looked at him, and I reckon he looked at us.

"What does he want?" Luke said.

"Whatever he wants, it's Voth property up on that rise," said Mr. Creed. "Since

they turned out nice enough to leave out of my land, I don't figure I'll go on

theirs."

"He's gone, anyway," I said.

And he was, just nice that, just like being blinked out of sight.

"Where'd he get to?" asked Luke. "I didn't see him leave."

"He did go sudden-like," said Mr. Creed. "Gentlemen, what you say we go home and

think about noon dinner? This here running over the mountain has got me hungry."

Down trail we headed again. I walked last, not knowing the way as surely as Mr.

Creed or Luke. Once I had a notion that somebody else was along behind, and

turned to see who. But if there'd been anybody there, he bobbed from sight like

a lamp going out. I started to mention this out loud, but I kept it till later.

Back to the cabin, and in we went. Luke waved us away from the sink.

"Don't take any water for a minute," he warned us. "I want to test it."

Mr. Creed grinned at him. "I take it you don't trust them Voths."

"Let's just be sure. Come into my room, John."

He had one back bedroom, his father had the other. In there against a wall, Luke

had built a bench. He had chemistry stuff - test tubes, some bottles of stuff, a

couple of burners and so on. I watched while he did his testing.

"Nobody's put in any poison so far," he said at last.

"No poison," I nodded. "Just this cross in the circle. Luke, did you think

somebody followed us down trail?"

"I thought that, but I couldn't make out anybody. I wonder if it was one of the

Voths. If it was, they saw that we came up there with guns. I hope we're through

having trouble with them."

"I hope that same thing," I said.

While Luke had tested the water, Mr. Creed had been a-cooking. He'd made some

corn dodgers in a skillet and coffee in a pot, and he sliced up some good cold

ham. Before Luke sat down at the table, he filled a couple of pails and three

jugs with water from the tap and stowed them under the old iron sink "That will

be enough for us until tomorrow morning," he said. "Ill give the water another

test as soon as I get up then."

"Good idee," nodded Mr. Creed as we all took our chairs.

Once again, it was like as if somebody else was there a-spying on us, maybe from

just at the open door. I turned, but I saw nothing. Then I ate, and enjoyed it,

the way I mostly enjoy to eat.

The talk went on while we ate. Mr. Creed told me things about the Voths; how

they were standoffish, no ways neighborly; how they kept up their old, old house

well, but never farmed, never even gardened. They seemed to have money enough to

live without working. Which made it all the more strange that they'd tried to

fence off that little rocky tag of the Forshay land, had even started to bluff

Mr. Creed out of it. Once or twice, folks had come close enough to their place

to hear singing amongst the trees, songs in no language air fellow in the Wolter

Mountain country knew of. And the two chimneys at the two ends of their stone

house now and then gave off odd-looking smoke, with green and pink and yellow

sparks in it.

"They've lived round here just long enough for folks to tell one another that

nobody knows what they're up to, or why they're up to it," Mr. Creed wound up

talking as he wound up eating. "Just now, I reckon that whatever it is, it ain't

nothing good for the right kind of folks hereabouts. John, I hope you can help

us decide about that. In your life, you've come against a right much of things

that might could help."

"I'll be right glad to do what I can," I said, laying down my fork. "Just now,"

and I got up, "I think I'll go up that trail and maybe learn something in a nice

way."

"Think you should?" growled Mr. Creed.

"Seems to me the best thing to do."

"I'll go along, John," offered Luke.

"No, just me," I said. "So far, probably they don't figure me as on your side."

I took my guitar under my arm. "This will make me look peaceable. Maybe they'll

talk for me to listen."

A-going out, again I had that being-looked-at feeling near at hand, but didn't

see a thing. It was like that all across the hollow, dodging off when I looked

round. But at the trail I felt nothing like that. I had a sense of aloneness as

I started the climb.

Being once up and down already, I didn't find the trip so nervish. I made good

time up to the top. It seemed to me there were plainer monkey-faces here and

there in Mr. Creed's rocks. Beyond was the slope with that big figure, and on

the crest stood the Voth brothers.

I flung up a hand friendly-fashion, and started across the monkey-faced rocks

and up the slope. They stood a-waiting. I took them to be men in their forties.

From what Mr. Creed had described, I knew Brummitt Voth by his gaunted body and

his fancy vest and hat, and Hooper Voth by his chunky build.

"Gentlemen," I hailed them, I thought I'd come visit."

"Visit?" said Brummitt Voth after me. All four of their tin-colored eyes looked

into me.

"My name's John," I made my introduction. I was a-stopping by the Forshays, and

I heard a couple of waif words about you all. Mr. Creed acted mad at first, now

he thinks things can turn out all right with him and you. I thought I might

could help, smoothing things betwixt neighbors."

"Are you a Forshay?" Brummitt Voth inquired.

"No, sir."

"Are you aught of kin?" asked Hooper Voth.

"None in this world," I said.

"Creed Forshay was a trifle emphatic about where we fenced our line," said

Brummitt Voth. "We took out the fence. That should satisfy him." He fell silent

a moment "For now," he added on.

Hooper Voth eyed my guitar. "Are you a wandering bard?"

"I know Byard Ray the fiddler," I told him.

"No, I meant a bard - a minstrel. My brother and I love to hear old music, if

it's old enough."

"I try to pick the oldest songs in the mountains." I smiled my friendliest.

"A-going here and there in these mountains, a-carrying my guitar with the silver

strings."

"Silver," Hooper Voth said. "Don't you carry more than that?"

"Sometimes a spare shirt and socks," I told him. "Mostly, just the guitar, and

trust to God for what I need else."

"Trust to God," said Brummitt Voth after me. "Is he in these mountains?"

"I hear tell he's everywhere, and these mountains are full of wonder. I

recollect names like Ugly Bird and One Other, and the Gardinel and the

Behinder."

"That's impressive," said Brummitt Voth, like as if he knew of those names.

"Now, Mr. -"

"I just go by John," I said. "All I hope is, I've got some of the goodness of

others who've had the name."

"I like the way he talks, Brummitt," said Hooper Voth, like as if I wasn't there

to be reckoned on. "He might turn out a friend."

"I'm glad you think so," I spoke up, and didn't add that this sounded different

from those who called the Voths standoffish.

They queried me things, standing there. I told some of what I'd seen and done in

the mountains. If they didn't believe, they showed no disbelief. Brummitt Voth

acted double interested when I told of seeing Devil Anse Hatfield risen from his

grave by a spell sent across time.

"John might be a stimulus to some of our efforts, Hooper," said Brummitt Voth in

his clipped way.

"I think the same, brother Brummitt," said Hooper Voth. "A practical help. If

he's a peacemaker for Creed Forshay, he can take back a message that we accept

the judgment on that small tract." He snickered, though I didn't see the joke.

"For the time being."

"You all pointed out to him, not much of a pay crop could grow there," I said.

"So you all shouldn't much value it your own selves."

They'd turned to go the other side of the ridge, betwixt dark pine and oak and

hickory in bunchy thickets, with vines grown among them. I went along. It wasn't

far on a mossy little trail to their place, the old house the Gibb family had

lived in so long.

That house was solid-made, of such rocks as come off a hillside, fitted by a

master fitter. You could hardly make out the plaster that held them. Without my

poking close, I judged that plaster had been mixed long ago, worked together of

clay and water and lime, such lime as is burned out of limestone. The stuff

would have come to be as hard as the rocks it bound.

The windows were of smaller stones. Their glass was in iron frames on hinges

bolted in. Behind the panes hung brown linen curtains. One curtain looked to

have something inside, a shadow on it, with a bunchy head set low and forward on

not much of a neck. The roof, as Mr. Creed had told it to me, was of flat pieces

of shale, laid like slates. At each end rose up a chimney. And in front grew a

big old oak, old maybe as the house, with its broad branches shading the roof.

"Whoever ran up that house knew what he was doing," I said.

"Old ways can be the best ways," said Brummitt Voth, taking off his hat The fair

hair had died away in the front, so that he looked to have a fine, wide,

thinking brow.

It's stone-floored and stone-walled inside," he said. "The only wood is in the

roof beams - seasoned so hard these two centuries, you couldn't drive a nail

into it"

I looked at something else. Against one end chimney leaned a big woven figure.

It was twined out of long shoots and dried-up vines, like basketwork, and it

stood maybe twelve feet tall and more than half that much wide and deep. Its

shape was rough human, with long, long arms that put me in mind of the stone

figure on the slope back yonder.

"You survey that image rather fixedly, John," said Hooper Voth.

Tm admiring it," I said. "Who made it?"

"We did," he said.

"You gentlemen are clever with your hands," I praised them.

"Come into our house, John," said Brummitt Voth, grinning his fine, white teeth.

"Well make you a cup of tea, though Americans don't generally relish tea."

"No," I agreed him. "We thought so little of it one time, we flung a whole

shipload of it into Boston Harbor up north."

Gentlemen, you should ought to have heard them laugh.

"John's an original wit," said Hooper Voth at last "Come in and sit down, John."

"Thank you kindly, but I'll go back down and tell the Forshays things are

settled betwixt them and you all," I said.

"Or on the way to a decisive settlement," Brummitt Voth said, almost like as if

he was putting me straight

Like a shot, I made up my mind to something. "I'll come back if you don't mind,"

I said, "and maybe fetch a friend who can appreciate all this."

"Bring him, if he's as agreeable as you," Brummitt Voth granted me.

It's a lady, and she has more education than I have. She's interested in old,

old things, she can talk to you about them."

"All right," said Hooper Voth. "Bring her."

Going, I felt them watch me. I walked among their dark, viney trees and down

their slope and took the trail below. When I got to the low ground of the

Forshay property, I felt something that hadn't been up on the mountain, that I'd

half forgotten about.

I mean the sense of being watched by something that wouldn't let me see it. I

took the feeling all the way to the cabin. Mr. Creed and Luke were interested to

hear all I brought to tell.

"Now, sir," I said to Mr. Creed, "you've made me welcome here, and I hope you'll

let me ask somebody else to come."

"Air friend of yours can stay with us, John," he said right off.

"Her name's Holly Christopher," I told him. "She's been educated in special

things at the University, she's known through the land for her study of

folklore. I've cut her trail now and then, and sometimes we've given each other

knowledge."

"Will she be all right here?" asked Luke. "We live in simple ways, and perhaps

some choosy old lady -"

"I don't reckon she's older than you, Luke," I said. "A-studying what she does,

she's not persnickety about where she stays. And by the way, she's a right

pretty woman."

"Does she know she's pretty?" inquired Mr. Creed.

"She'd be a fool not to know, and she's no fool. But she also knows that being

pretty isn't enough to run air show on earth by itself. I like her, and so will

you if you let her come."

Mr. Greed said, "Go ahead," and I got on their country telephone and put through

a call to a Chapel Hill number. After while, "Hello," came Holly's voice, a low

voice with music to it

"This is John, Holly. Up in the Wolter Mountain country."

"John, how good to hear you. What are you doing up there? Something to interest

me?"

"Maybe," I replied her, and went on to say some things about the Forshays and

the Voths, and the place on the mountain that had belonged to the family of

Jonathan Gibb.

"Gibb?" she said the name after me. "Gibb, did you say? Oh, that's marvelous,

John. Listen, today I just finished with a seminar here at the University. I'll

be in my car at sunrise tomorrow morning. How long is it up there?"

"No more than six hours, driving carefully. I'd say, come to Sky Notch and

you'll be met There's a filling station at Sky Notch - Duffy Parr runs it. I'll

look for you there round about noon."

She vowed she'd come, and we hung up.

After supper, Mr. Creed called again for music. I picked and sang a couple he

could recollect way back to when he was little, "Mathy Groves" and "The Death of

Queen Jane." Luke tuned his banjo and we played some things together. That

pleased Mr. Creed in special

I'm glad for my boy to relish good old things," he said. "I figure he's the

smartest Forshay by the name, and I've always wanted the best for him. I got him

a good college education - no, devil be damned, I nair got it for him. He worked

his own way through Shenstone College, but I stood back of him in that. Now he's

got learning, and he's got love of this land, and I'm proud for him."

Luke's handsome face grinned. He'd rather have his daddy speak well of him than

air other man on earth.

Finally we were ready to sleep. I had the loft room, going up there by a ladder,

and a candle because there was no electricity. Luke made me up some blankets on

an old army cot in the loft and said good night. I took off my clothes and blew

out the candle and stretched myself down to close my eyes.

But I wished I didn't keep a-feeling that something was there in the loft with

me, maybe humped over at the foot of the cot or a-hanging to the rafters like a

big bat. I told myself that it was just only my fancy, but that made it worse.

No luck, gentlemen, being bothered with what's not there - better maybe for it

to be there so you can do something about it. I hated that kind of sneaky

company in the dark. All the things Mr. Creed had said about the Voths and the

Gibbs before them, and some of the things the Voths had said their own selves,

made them sound like folks with the very sort of power I'd hated and fought

against for all my years. Now and then, I'd been able to see such people with

such powers fall and be brought down to nothing, and their place knew them no

more. But also I knew right well that there was still another sight of evil,

strong and mighty, to face in this world.

A-thinking I'd do well to stay awake, I dropped off to sleep and didn't stir

hand or foot till I heard Luke and Mr. Creed a-clattering round below me to make

coffee and fry eggs for breakfast.

III

Just before noon, I got into the Forshay pickup truck with Luke and we took off

for Sky Notch, round about ten miles away, next to Dogged Mountain. We got there

to find Holly Christopher in her little red car, a-waiting for us at the filling

station. She jumped out and grabbed me by both my hands.

"John, John," she cried out at me, and gave me a kiss. It's good to see you,

it's always good to see you."

"Holly Christopher," I said, let me make Luke Forshay known to you."

Luke's blue eyes bugged out to stare at her, and air man worth the name might

could be forgiven for staring. Holly was a pure down fine-looking young woman, a

little taller than the common height, and slim and sweet in her figure in brown

slacks and brown jersey top. Round her neck hung a little sort of blue thing on

a thin leather cord. Her face was as fine-cut as if some master jeweler had done

it on one of those stones they call cameos. Her eyes were as dark as two pools

deep in the shade of the forest And she had soft-tanned cheeks and a mouth red

and ripe. Her hair showed the Indian blood she could claim. It was shiny black

and straight, cut short and sort of chubby to her head, with square bangs in

front. The hand she gave Luke was long and slim, with a ruby ring on it.

"I'm glad to know a friend of John's," she smiled.

"And I'm right glad to know you, Miss Christopher," said Luke, meaning it all

the way down to where he lived.

"If we're to be friends, you call me Holly."

"Miss Holly," he said, his handsome face all pinked up.

"Holly," she told him again.

"Holly, then," he said after her, and let go her hand like as if he hated to.

Then he turned to me, half-surprised to find out I was still there. "I'll drive

back with her and show her how we get to our place," he said. "You can bring the

pickup."

"I don't drive a car, Luke," I said, and he sort of squinched his face, the way

they all do when I admit that. "You let me ride with Holly and come along with

your own truck."

He nodded, though you could see he'd rather it was the other way round. I got in

Holly's car with her and told her which way to get out on the country road to

the Wolter Mountain neighborhood.

"And drive right carefully on these twisty turns," I gave her the advice.

"I will," she said. "Lots of people think they're expert speedsters the minute

they get a little red car, but I'm not one of them. John, your friend Luke is a

mighty fine-looking, mighty fine-mannered young man."

"The way I figure, he thinks as good as that about you," I said.

She asked me to build on what I'd said over the longdistance phone, and I told

her again about meeting the Voths and how, after starting out to squabble with

Mr. Creed Forshay, they'd pulled up the stakes for their fence and then acted

friendly and clever with me. She harked at all I said, like as if it was a

hundred dollars in her pocket to know about it.

"I'm so glad you asked for permission to bring me to meet them," she said. "But

well talk more about my motives when I can explain it to our hosts, the

Forshays. You haven't told me how you've been faring, and how things are with

that lovely Evadare girl of yours."

"Evadare's a-stopping off with my friends, the Ramseys," I said. "I'm out

a-picking up a little money owing me here and there, and we figure to get

married before this month runs ll the way out. I'd be at the Ramsey place to

join her by now if all this Voth business hadn't boiled up."

We turned in on the Forshay driveway and swung round the edge of the fish pond

toward the cabin and stopped by the stable.

"John," said Holly as she put on her brakes, "do you have a sort of sense that

something is watching us?"

"I've had that sense yesterday, and today too," I said. "I thought I'd mentioned

it to you."

Mr. Creed Forshay was by the door, a-smoking his corncob, and when I made the

introductions he admired Holly with his wise eyes. "I'm beholden to John for

a-fetching such a beauty-looking lady to my house," he said.

Luke came out of the truck and joined us. He and his daddy wondered Holly would

she like some noon dinner, but she fetched from her car a hamper that had things

she'd fixed before she left out of Chapel Hill. There were roast beef sandwiches

and some cole slaw in a plastic container, and a bottle of red wine she called

burgundy. It was a plenty for the whole four of us. We ate it together, out in

the yard. Then Mr. Creed allowed he'd make his own room ready for Holly.

"There's a sort of sleeping place out over the stable shed, above the stall

where once we used to keep a cow," he said. "I'll just spread my gear there."

"Not there, you won't," said Holly at once. "Call that place your guest house,

and let me stay there. Luke can show it to me."

Luke was ready and more than ready to do that, or air thing she would bid him.

He picked up her suitcase and tote bag and out they went. Mr. Creed watched them

go.

"I've got it in mind that there walks a right fine-looking couple," he said to

me.

"You and I won't quarrel about that," I said.

When the two of them got back to the house, they were chattering away like two

old friends who'd gone to Sunday school together. "It's a fine room up there,

fit for a royal princess," said Holly, radiant with her smile.

"Then possibly it's fit for you," said Mr. Creed. "Let's go in and sit down and

talk about things."

"The first thing," Holly said as Luke held the door for her, "is that charm John

says you brought down from your spring."

It was a-lying on the fireboard over the hearth, next to the clock. I gave it to

Holly and she unwrapped my handkerchief, then dangled the thing from the chain

and bent down to give it a study.

"My advice is to bury this object," she said. "Bury it deep, and let me

pronounce some words over it."

"I've heard tell of such things," Mr. Creed began, "but-"

"Let Holly run this business just now," Luke broke in, one of the few times I

ever heard him break in on a person a-talking.

"Yes, sir," I seconded him, for I recollected a-hearing tales of praying out a

bad spell. "Where's the spade?"

Luke fetched it and we walked through the yard, Holly a-carrying the charm on

its chain, just one finger hooked through. She led us to a cucumber tree and

pointed down to its roots. Luke drove the spade in, drove it in again, until

he'd gouged out a hole big enough to hold a bucket. She nodded without speaking

and knelt down to put the thing inside on the bottom, with the chain fallen on

top.

Then Luke filled the hole up again and stamped down the dirt with the heel of

his boot Mr. Creed fetched in a flat chunk of rock that put me in mind of the

shales on the Voth house, and fitted this over. Holly bowed her head and

whispered something like a prayer. When she looked up, her face had turned

bright again.

"That feeling we've noticed here," she said. "As if we were being watched. It's

gone now, isn't it?"

"I don't feel it no more," said Mr. Creed, and, "Nor I don't," said I.

We went back in the house and took chairs round the table.

"John knew enough to see that a cross on something like that wasn't a good

symbol," said Holly. "Just as he told you, the cross set in the circle turns up

in the magic of several ancient cultures. I judge that your spring wasn't

poisoned, but that charm was planted beside it for you to find and bring home.

With it here at your house, it became a focus for some way of keeping watch on

you, spying on you."

"I'd thought the Voths had got done with a-spying or things like that against

us," said Mr. Creed, frowning. "They done took up the fence they started, and

sent word by John that all was good feeling betwixt them and us."

"No, sir, they didn't send word quite like that," I recollected. "They added on

something about just for the time being."

"That's so," Luke offered his word. "My feeling is, we'd better not let down our

guard for a moment."

"Luke has the right of that," said Holly, and he beamed over her words. "I seem

to have come here for more than I bargained for."

"What might could you have been a-bargaining for, ma'am?" Mr. Creed wondered

her.

"John mentioned a family named Gibb that's lived here since Revolutionary

times," she said, "and a family named Gibb has been one of my research projects

since I read about it in my freshman year."

Mr. Creed told again the tale of the Gibb family on Wolter Mountain, down to

Jonathan Gibb who'd lived in Mr. Creed's time, though he hadn't been much known

to Mr. Creed or other neighbors. Holly jotted down some notes on a legal pad

she'd brought.

"Nobody knows where them Gibbs come here from," Mr. Creed finished up.

"Just possibly I have a clue to that myself," said Holly. "It goes back to

Scotland, in the time of William and Mary."

"The late eighteenth century," said Luke, and she cut her dark eyes at him and

nodded.

"Certain matters were reported about a man named John Gibb, a shipmaster," she

started out. "You can see his name in Patrick Walker's Biographia Presbyteriana,

and in Walter Scott's book of Witchcraft and Demonology. If John Gibb was a

shipmaster, he must have had some education and social standing, but his

neighbors felt mistrust for him. He claimed to have certain special powers and

he drew some people into a sort of cult. They brought out all their Bibles and

burned them."

"No wonder his neighbors didn't like that," said Luke. "I've been told that most

Scotsmen value their Bibles."

"His action was enough to get him thrown into jail," Holly went on, "and he had

trouble with the prisoners there. They wanted to pray, but he howled like a wild

animal until they had to hold him down and stuff a gag in his mouth. At last he

was transported to the American colonies. I'm not quite sure where, but that

often happened to convicts in those days."

"I've read about that, too," said Luke. "I reckon lots of us are descended from

people like that"

"Important thing is, we're here now," allowed Mr. Creed. The old folks would

say, no point to worry about who was the father of such a son. Because mostly

sons are better or either worse than their daddies."

'It strikes me that Gibb isn't too strange and scarce a name," I spoke up.

"Though mostly it's spoken and written Gibbs."

"Old Jonathan Gibb and others of his blood got mad if they got called Gibbs,"

recollected Mr. Creed. "But what else about this other Gibb, John Gibb? You

don't make him sound like the sort of John this John we got here is named for."

"John Gibb is said to have brought along whatever powers he had to the American

colonies," said Holly. "Other settlers said he offered sacrifices to the devil,

and the Indians were in awe of him. He died somewhere around 1720."

"And," said Luke, "you're of the opinion he left descent."

"According to some old letters I've seen, he did," nodded Holly. "Those

descendants weren't any more popular with their neighbors than John Gibb before

them. At last they moved out, and at just about the time of the Revolution they

seem to have come here to this state - to these very mountains." She looked all

round at us, those dark eyes snapping. "I would suggest that your Gibb people

here were the great-great-grandchildren, in some degree, of John Gibb. I wish I

could have met them."

"I'm sorry for your sake that old Jonathan Gibb is dead and gone, and a sure

thing to wind up in hell," said Mr. Creed.

"I'm sorry, too. It might have been profitable to talk to him."

"He wouldn't have talked to you, ma'am," Mr. Creed said.

I'll bet he would," Luke argued him. Td like to see the man, even an oddball

like Jonathan Gibb, who wouldn't talk to Holly Christopher."

"Luke, you overwhelm me," she dimpled at him. It was the first time I'd noticed

that Holly Christopher had dimples. "But," she said, "Jonathan Gibb left behind

him that house that John described to me. It sounds an unusual one."

'Ain't no other house like it hereabout," Mr. Creed told her.

"Tomorrow John will take me there to meet those new householders, the Voth

brothers," said Holly. "But, gentlemen, this is all shoptalk on my part, I see

John's guitar yonder, and isn't that a banjo in that case? My vote is for

music."

"My vote's with yours," said Mr. Creed. "And I reckon I'll just pour us all a

little thimbleful of how-come-ye-so."

He dug a fruit jar out from a cupboard and glasses. While Luke and I were

a-tuning up, he poured out tots all round.

"Now, Holly Lady, that there blockade whiskey isn't like government run," he

lectured at her. "I know the fellow who made it - him and me is cousins - and

it's as clean as the cleanest. Nothing's touched it but the wood of the keg and

the copper of the still and the glass of the jar. He keeps his equipment as

clean as the galley of a flagship."

Luke and I picked up our drinks.

"I say a word of wisdom in time," warned Luke. "Just taste it, Holly, sip by

sip. Don't put water in it, drink water for a chaser."

She tasted. "It's good," she said, and likely she meant it

"Good?" Mr. Creed repeated her. "Why, you could bite this right off at the neck

of the bottle."

We finished a-drinking one to another, and Holly asked me for one she'd heard me

sing once, and joined in to help sing it:

Poor Ellen Smith, as sweet as a dove,

Where did she ramble, and who did she love . . .

When we'd done, Mr. Creed clapped us as loud as guns going off. "This here Holly

girl sings like a bird in spring," he cried out. "I've been a-wanting to ask,

what's that you wear round your neck?"

She held it out on its leather string. We saw it plain now. It was of blue

stone, turquoise as I guessed, and it had been carved and polished into the

shape of an elephant as big as your thumb - trunk, ears, all about it.

"It's Indian," she said. "My grandmother was a Cheyenne. She got that from a

medicine man of some Arizona tribe, and she gave it to me."

"Looks oldish," said Mr. Creed, admiring it.

"Thousands of years old," Holly told him.

He cocked up his eyebrows. "How come the Indians to know about elephants

thousands of years ago?"

"They had them here, Papa," said Luke. "Only they were really mammoths and

mastodons. Their bones have been found, dating back ten or fifteen thousand

years, with the spear points of Folsom man among them."

"I ain't nair heard tell there was Indians that far back, neither," said Mr.

Creed. "A preacher showed me a book one time that said they was the ten lost

tribes of Israel or some such matter."

He looked at Holly, like as if she could explain, and she did her best.

"I don't believe it's ever been established how early man came to America," she

said. "There was a study of tools found in California, and L. S. B. Leakey -

he's one of the foremost authorities on prehistoric man - dated them at about

seventy-five thousand years ago."

I declare to never," said Mr. Creed, and Luke was a-taking it in too, and so was

I.

"Some dare to go back to times before that," Holly said next "A government

geological survey team turned up other tools in Mexico, and said they might be

two hundred fifty thousand years old - called it archaeologically unreasonable,

but said it anyway."

"You make me think that America isn't such a new world, after all," I said.

"But two hundred and fifty thousand years, Holly," said Luke. "A quarter of a

million years ago. That was before mankind."

"Well, before modern mankind, at least," Holly agreed him. "Before man as we

know him today, as we are mankind today. More like the time of early Neanderthal

man - the time, say, of whatever manlike giant left his jaw in that pit at

Heidelberg."

I took all this in, only half understanding. Holly and Luke were the college

folks there; what education I had was mostly on the spot here and there.

"It's wonderful talking over these things with you, Holly," said Luke, shaking

his head. "A great privilege."

"But let's bring things to the present," said Holly, sort of a-making a sparkle

at him. "And the future, too. John, you started to tell me about your Evadare

girl."

I'm always glad to talk about Evadare. I said that the world lighted up when I

saw her, and that we aimed to take some land near Haynie's Fork, where the

neighbors already said they'd help us build. I'd farmed when I was a young chap,

and I reckoned I could farm again. Evadare was the sweetest flower in all those

mountains, I told them I thought. It was a plain fact that Luke enjoyed to hear

me say such things, because once or twice he'd acted mournful about how Holly

and I were such choice friends.

Time went on with the talk. We had us another sip or so of the good blockade.

Finally Holly allowed that she'd cook us our supper.

I'll vote my yes on that," said Mr. Creed. "Woman's cooking is better than by a

man. I've already took a frying chicken out of the deep freeze."

Holly fixed herself a clean dish towel to be an apron, and she took a knife and

jointed the chicken up. Then she put vegetable shortening and some country

butter together in the skillet to melt. Meanwhile, Mr. Creed stirred up dough

and cut it up for biscuits and set it in the oven. Luke opened a jar of

home-canned kraut to heat, but he near about spilled it on his boot, a-looking

at Holly where she fried that chicken the right brown. Luke had it bad, and no I

reckon about it. What did old Shakespeare say one time? It's in a play I saw at

Flournoy College. '"Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?"' And it seemed

to me like as if Holly kept a-cutting her dark-shining eyes back at Luke.

It turned out to be an early supper, and a good one. We ate up air piece of the

chicken, and the gravy went good on the biscuits. Holly said she should ought to

have baked a pie or something, and Mr. Creed begged her not to kill us with too

much kindness. We kept on with more talk about how long men had been in America,

and how the old Indians had said the figure on the Cibb slope had been there

before the first of their tribe had come.

"I keep on with thoughts about that figure, with its long arms and hunched

shoulders," said Luke, buttering his last biscuit. "And to that I add what Holly

said about traces of human, or almost human, people on this continent two

hundred fifty thousand years ago. Neanderthal man was a stocky, stooped fellow

who could play the star part in your bad dreams. Could he and his kin have come

over from Asia, across that land bridge that used to be at the Bering Straitr

Mr. Creed acted proud that his son could know enough to talk of such things.

"There's them tales about the Big-foot, up on the northwestern Canadian border,"

he said. "That big, hairy ape-thing they keep a-saying is in those woods. I've

always figured it was about ninety per cent made up, but that leaves ten per

cent that you can wonder if it's true."

Holly made a sort of shaky shrug with her shoulders. Luke, at least, thought she

looked wonderful a-doing it.

"When I came here, I may have found even more than I bargained for," she said.

"You could do a doctor's dissertation on these things, Luke. Have you thought of

going into graduate work?"

He told her he'd thought mostly of football when he was at Shenstone, and gave

her a play-by-play report on how he'd touchdowned one time as a tight end. She

knew enough football to understand him and talk back at him. Mr. Creed took time

to say something on one side to me.

"My boy Luke acts like as if he's got the squaw fever," he said so they couldn't

hark at him. "This Holly girl seems all right, though."

"If I had a son Luke's age," I said, "I couldn't call for a better girl for him

to have. If so be he could get her."

"There's always that," Mr. Creed said.

It had come on to dark, and all four of us did the dishes and stacked them on

the shelves. I reckon we all had a reason for feeling good in special; I mean,

no thought that we were being looked at, listened to, by something hidden out of

sight. Luke and I got back to the guitar and banjo, and Holly sang a couple of

songs with us. Her voice was sweeter than honey in the honeycomb. Finally, she

said she'd relish some sleep. Luke got a lantern and saw her out to the stable,

then came back.

"I swear, John," he said, "that's a right nice girl you fetched here to visit

us. You know, when you mentioned her at first, I wondered if you had something

a-going with her."

"Not Holly and me," I was glad for his sake to tell him. "You heard us a-talking

about Evadare, and you know I'm a gone gump about her. Some later time, I want

to fetch her for a visit here."

"You do that," Mr. Creed invited. "We'll make her welcome."

I climbed the ladder to the loft and put my candle on the old table. Sure

enough, no black shadows bunched in corners, no wonder if something was there,

a-holding its breath so you wouldn't know it was a-looking and a-harking at you.

I told myself that when we buried the circle cross charm, we'd cut the line to

that spy. And I wondered if the Voths knew what we'd done.

I slept, as sound as a black bear in the wintertime, and woke up at dawn to go

out with Luke to the fish pond. We dropped lines and the trout in there swarmed

and fought to get on our hooks. Back we fetched four big ones for breakfast,

gutting and scaling them fast and rolling them in corn meal to fry. Holly was

there to help. All four of us sat down to eat. Holly praised those fish like as

if they were the best-tasting in the world, and for my part I figure they near

about were.

Holly chased Luke and me out so that she could do the breakfast dishes. We

walked to the cucumber tree where the charm had been buried. "Looky there," said

Luke sharply, and he pointed.

Something had dug there in the night, maybe a-trying to gouge the thing out. We

saw the rock had been shoved aside, and earth flung this way and that, but the

hole wasn't opened all die way down. I knelt to take a close look.

"What sort of thing would dig here?" I asked.

Luke stooped beside me. "I see a print in the soft earth," he said. "It must

have rested a paw there while it scooped with the other. Only - that's not the

mark of a paw. It was made by a man's hand."

I studied it myself. A hand was what it was; I saw the thumb and the spread-out

fingers. But, gentlemen, it was an almighty big hand, bigger than mine or

Luke's. And it had another strange thing about it

"You sharpen your eyes and you'll see it had claws," I said to Luke. "On the

thumb and the fingers. Longer than air nail a man can have, and wider and

stronger to dig in.

That was the fact, too. We went back to the house, where Holly and Mr. Creed

were a-laughing over something while they stowed the dishes away. We brought

them out and showed them what had gone on beside the cucumber tree while we

slept.

"Why didn't it finish digging that thing up?" Mr. Creed wanted to know. "It must

have got down almost to it"

"Perhaps the words I said were enough to prevent it," said Holly, in a voice

that almost whispered.

Luke pointed out the claw marks on the finger marks. "Holly," he said, "that

puts me in mind of what you told us last night, of how once there may have been

things in America that weren't animals, but weren't men either, as

yet." Holly walked toward the house. I caught up with her.

"Now what?" I asked.

"Now we'd better go visit those brothers, the Voths," she replied me. "Go and

see if I'm to be made as welcome as they told you I'd be."

IV

Mr. Creed looked like as if he was worried. "Youins dead sure you'll be all

right up yonder?" he wondered us.

"Let's just hope so," I said, "Anyhow, those Voths sounded and acted polite when

they bid me come back and fetch Holly along."

Luke frowned and hiked his big shoulders. "I wish I was coming along, but I can

see why I mustn't," he grumbled. "Here, John, take this."

He held out a pistol, a thirty-eight S&W, but I shook my head.

"Don't reckon I will," I said, and took up my guitar. "This is better for the

trip. It's more peaceful to look at."

"John," said Mr. Creed, "it takes half an hour or so to go up there, and another

half hour to come back down. Well say, another hour and a half for you to pay

your visit to them Voths. Two and a half hours in all. If youins stay away much

past that, I'll be on the phone to the sheriff to come help us look for you."

Luke nodded his head to that, but Holly shook hers. It stirred her black hair

round her face.

"What sheriff would believe the things we're trying to find out here, Mr.

Creed?" she asked, and smiled, though it didn't truly have the sound of a joke.

"Come on, John."

They stood at the door and watched us head away.

Holly and I walked along the edge of the fish pond. There was a big fluttery

bunch of fish to swim toward us, the way chickens come to a fence to be fed. I

made out some bream, some bass, three or four fine trout

"I wish we had some bread or something to throw to them," said Holly. "How

friendly they are."

"If you drop a hook in, you'll get a bite right quick," I said. "Maybe not the

biggest fish, but the best fighter. They'd fight one another to take the hook."

"There's some sort of parable to that thought," she said, not air way

cheerfully. "How life gives you something you think is good and wholesome, and

then uses it to yank you out of your world." "Yes, ma'am," I agreed her.

Holly climbed the trail up the mountain right well. She hadn't done all her

folklore studies in libraries and classrooms. She admired the trees and flowers

and toadstools, the way I'd done and still did. "At least I know what direction

we're going," she said. "Look on that walnut trunk where the moss grows is the

north side."

"Look all the way round and you'll see moss on all sides of it," I said.

"There's no way to tell direction except by stars and by sun, and you've got to

look at them different ways with the different seasons." "However did you learn

so much, John?" "I learn things a little at a time," I replied her. Tm still

a-trying to learn, air minute. I look to learn something new today, and live to

use it."

Both of us kept a-trying to feel if we were being watched, though we'd agreed

not to talk too much about such things. The feeling wasn't there till we got to

where that rocky patch was at the top. "I see those ape faces on the stones,"

said Holly. They were sure enough plain to see. Plainer than before. I

recollected stuff I'd heard, things I'd read in books about what had gone on

before history. How that monkeys hadn't been wild in this part of the earth, not

air that science knew of. No Indian air saw a monkey till white men fetched them

from the old country for shows. And the rocks we stood over looked to have had

that monkey face since the first days of this world.

Holly gazed up past the monkey faces to the slope. That big thing of rocks up

there looked to be halfway bucking the knees of its short legs, halfway lifting

its long, long arms at us.

"John," she said, "you could go all through America and not see anything like

that. I've never exactly seen the like, even abroad; but it reminds me of

certain things in England."

"What certain things you mean, Holly?" I inquired her.

"Figures on hills, cut into the turf down to where the chalk shows through in

white lines," she said. "Such as the Long Man on Windover Hill in Sussex. And

one like it, at Cerne Abbas in Dorset. And what they call Gog-magog, near

Cambridge."

"Gogmagog," I repeated her. "There's something about Gog and Magog in the Book

of Revelation."

"Gog and Magog became one name," she said. "It was in England before ever the

Book of Revelation was written."

"Come on," I said. "We go up this-a-way to get to where the Voths live."

They weren't a-waiting for us, or if they were we didn't see them. But I

recollected the way and found it, though it wasn't just exactly what I'd

followed before.

The trees crowding from both sides somehow didn't look like the same trees.

Those trees watched us, whether the Voths watched us or not. I recollect one

that flung out its branches like the arms on something deep down under sea,

waiting to grab and eat up something else. Another had vines all over it, drawn

close like the wings of a roosting buzzard. And once, in the bark of a big, big

pine, I made out what looked like a door put in there. I wasn't a-going to

mention that to Holly, but that same second she saw it too. "A door there," she

said, close to my ear. "But no catch. No knob. No latchstring out, to mean

welcome. Nobody can get in, but what's inside can come out."

If it comes out, maybe it leaves the door open to get back in," I said. "The

open door policy, you might could say." "Let's go ahead," she said, and she went

ahead, faster than she'd been a-going so far.

We got to where we made out the house where the Voths lived, in amongst the

trees, not so much hidden amongst them as hiding there.

"Here we are," I said, and lifted up my voice. "Hello! Hello, the house!"

"Hello yourself," came a voice back From around one of the dark-stony corners

walked Brummitt Voth.

He had off his hat, to show how his head was balded in front "Welcome, John," he

said. "I take it that this is the lady you said you'd bring to call on us."

His brother Hooper showed at the front door, under the wide, dark branches of

the oak. I spared a look for the drawn curtain in the window beside the door.

That shadow was in the curtain, where it had been before.

"Miss Holly Christopher," I said, "let me make you acquainted with Mr. Brummitt

Voth and Mr. Hooper Voth. They allowed they'd be glad for you to visit them,

talk to them, hark at things they know."

Their pale eyes were a-looktng at Holly, half ready to eat her up. However

different from folks the Voths were, they were like all men when they looked at

Holly.

"We are honored Miss Christopher," said Brummitt Voth, a-putting up a hand to

his brow like as if to take off the hat that wasn't there. And he said something

past his shoulder to his brother, in a language I'd nair heard before.

I maybe frowned, because that's not what a man might call good manners. Brummitt

Voth saw, and made a smile at me.

"Hooper and I sometimes talk in that jargon, John," he said. "I remarked that I

was glad that Miss Christopher had found her way here."

"Misle gran ches tarer," Holly came out with the same talk. "A traveler knows

the way, gentlemen."

Their mouths dropped open about a foot with surprise, and Brummitt Voth hit his

both hands together. "You speak the Shelta Thari!" he cried. "This is wonderful

past counting, Miss Christopher."

"Shelta Thari, the tinker's language," she said. "I've read Ignatius Donnelly's

book, and I've spoken with tinkers in England. I wonder if John Bunyan didn't

know Shelta Thari."

"Maybe he knew it, and then forgot it," said Hooper Voth, and tried another

string of the strange words at her.

"You're a-leaving me out in the cold, folks," I said. "I don't talk air language

but just a little countrified English."

"On our brief acquaintance, I've heard you speak very much to the point, John,"

said Brummitt Voth, a-smirking. "But let's stick to a tongue we all can

understand. We're glad you came, and we wonder what profit we can give you."

"Just conversation, Mr. Voth," said Holly. "This house of yours," and she gave

it her look, "it's so wonderfully built I'm sure you feel happy in it"

I looked, too. I had a sense that something moved up in those oak tree branches,

amongst their darkest shadow. I couldn't see it, but I had a notion it was about

a man's size and not quite a man's shape. I couldn't make it out the way I might

have if it would move into the light.

The Voth brothers were glad about Holly a-being there, and no I-reckon about it

They smiled at her, moved close to her; if they'd had a litde bitty bit more

nerve they'd have put hands on her. I was double glad that Luke Forshay wasn't

with us, because likely he'd have hit one of those brothers, or even both, and

then what? But I wasn't on top of Wolter Mountain to wonder such things. Not

right then and there.

There at the end of the house, they helped Holly look over that big shape

wickerworked out of branches and vines.

"That's artistically done," she praised it It reminds me of woven figures I've

seen in England."

"England?" they both repeated her. "Oh, yes, you've been to England."

"Twice. In a hall there they had those big, baskety old giants on display. One

of them was Corineus, the chief of the British giants that Brutus fought and

overcame."

"Corineus was on Brutus's side," said Brummitt Voth. "Not on the side of

Albion."

"Excuse me, I was mistaken there. The other giant in that hall was Gogmagog, the

British giant. He had a staff with a globe full of spikes, fastened to it with a

chain. The deadliest flail I ever saw."

I had walked past them toward the rear of the house. For the first time I saw a

stone shed back there, all open on the side toward me. A forge was there, anvil

and hearth and bellows. On the anvil lay something that shone pale. Out in front

was an old, old plow, turned upside down. Its share was rusty and its handles

worn with use in the field.

Holly came to look, too. "And you do metalwork as well as basketwork," she said.

"You gentlemen are so gifted, so informed."

It's a blessing to work with the hands," said Brummitt Voth, like somebody

a-saying a text in church. "We're trying to make a new share for that plow we

bought secondhand in Sky Notch."

Holly went into the shed. They went with her. I stood outside to watch.

"But this is silver work," she said.

"Exactly," said Brummitt Voth, rubbing the share with his hand. "We want to use

silver, not iron, if we plow ourselves a little plot to grow vegetables."

"Why not use the iron plow?" she asked, sweetly as a song.

The brothers were both quiet a moment Then Brummitt Voth nodded at Hooper Voth,

like as if to tell him to do the talking.

"This may sound strange to you, Miss Christopher," said Hooper Voth, cracking a

silly-looking grin. "It may sound even superstitious, fatuous. But when we took

this land, the family that had owned it made certain stipulations. One of these

was, the earth here is not to be dug or stirred with any iron tool."

"How interesting," said Holly, and her dark eyes shone. "Did they say why not?"

It seems to be an old, old belief in this part of the country," he said to her.

"If you use iron in this earth, it will bring a storm of rain and thunder and

lightning. Wash you away."

"Again this reminds me of old England," she said. "It's like a belief there used

to be, is still mentioned in Scotland and Wales. I mean the Sith Bhruatih."

Both of those brothers hiked up their ears when she spoke that name, the way

they'd done when she talked the talk they called Shelta Thari.

"Sith Bhruaith," Brummitt Voth said after her. "You know about that. So do we."

"Oh, in English, the Goodman's Croft," said Holly. "I've heard tell about places

called that in these mountains," I felt like putting in. "A piece of land let go

to trees and brush and so on, for the spirits. They say you call Satan the

Goodman, so as not to rile him. But I've had it in mind that maybe old, old gods

were thought to be good in their day."

"What philosophical acumen, John," said Hooper Voth, a-giving me a grin. "You

have a good sense of things, I daresay. But, since both of you are so

flatteringly interested, let me go on to explain. Before the first white settler

came here to build this solid old stone house, this tract was sacred to the gods

of the Indians. They, too, never farmed it - and I've heard that the old Indians

were good farmers. Their wishes seem to have been courteously respected by the

family that settled here."

"What family was that?" Holly inquired him, like as if she didn't know already.

"Gibb was the name," said Brummitt Voth. "We never really knew them and, as I

believe, the last Gibb has died. But we accepted their stipulation about the

land. We try to be honest men."

The three walked out of the blacksmith shed together. "Come into our house,"

Brummitt Voth invited us. "We consider the pair of you welcome here, the more so

because you're helping to compose things with our neighbors, the Forshays. We

have some things that may prove interesting."

I was interested to go inside, anyway. We went into a big room, all the way from

front to back of the house. Overhead showed those wooden rafter beams, black as

iron with the age on them. The floor was laid of flat stones, like a pavement,

and on it stretched out a couple of bearskin rugs, maybe left there by Jonathan

Gibb. The furniture was heavy-made of oak, the chairs had leather cushions. I

judged they'd come from far away and likely had cost something once. There were

shelves against the walls, also made of flat stones. I saw books on them, dark

books with a sneaky look to them somehow. Midway of the room was a fireplace,

but no fire in it, nor yet a look of a fire there any time lately. I felt a sort

of creep inside me, but Holly smiled her pretty smile. She walked to the hearth

and studied something on the fireboard. It was a curve of bright blade that

shone yellow in the light from that window where the shadow showed on the

curtain, but looking from inside like as if the shadow was cast from outdoors.

"A golden sickle," she said.

"Not exactly golden, Miss Christopher," said Brummitt Voth, a-standing just

about as near to her as he dared. "Gold plate over bronze. It's an antique,

maybe two thousand years old."

She half put out her hand to it, but drew it back "Interesting," she said.

"Evocative."

"Evocative of what?" Hooper Voth asked.

"More than anything, of an opera with that sort of sickle in it," Holly said.

"Norma, by Bellini. They presented it last winter in New Orleans. Do you

gentlemen know Norma?"

"We've heard Norma, yes," said Hooper Voth. "What does Norma mean to you, Miss

Christopher, I mean in particular?"

"The music, the beautiful music," she said at once. "That duet with Norma and

Adalgisa, 'Mira Norma.'" Her tuneful voice sang a few lines in Italian. I

touched my guitar's silver strings to pick up the melody. She sang it over, in

English this time:

Hear me, Norma, before thee kneeling -

Then she broke off. "I don't have the voice for it," she said.

"You've a voice to sing with the gods of music," vowed Brummitt Voth. "I agree

with you, it's a splendid opera, though perhaps not exactly true to historical

fact."

"It has a happy ending, more or less," put in his brother, and that sounded

strange to me, for I'd heard tell a grand opera isn't grand unless it's unhappy

at the finish.

"Will you and John stay for luncheon?" asked Brummitt Voth.

"I'd love to, but I don't eat at noon," said Holly. "I have to watch my figure,

you know."

The both of them were a-watching her figure, and I didn't reckon either one of

them saw aught wrong with it Brummitt Voth took a step nearer. He had a hand up,

like as if to take hold of her. But then he backed that step's length away

again.

"What are you wearing around your neck?" he croaked.

"This?" She took it in her fingers and held it out "Just a curious old Indian

pendant."

"An elephant," said Hooper Voth, not happy about it. "A strange thing for

Indians to make. Elephants and Indians hardly go together, do they?"

"I never thought of that," Holly said, though of course I knew different. "But

whatever it is, it's nothing wonderful compared to this fine old house of solid

stone, and all the things you're doing. Your own work, I should guess, is a

great reward to you."

"We're happy with what we find to do," said Hooper Voth. "Our work and our

studies - they're rewarding, as you say. Twenty times beyond our hopes."

Brummitt Voth shot him a look, like as if there was something wrong about saying

that We all went out again.

They made their good-byes to Holly, while I stood under the branches of the oak

tree and tried not to look up into them at what moved itself round in them. I

dared only one quick peek. I had a sense of something my size or thereabout,

dark-colored; but whether it had fur like an animal or scales like a snake, I

didn't make out. I did think it could take grip with its feet as well as its

hands. I wished it didn't hang right over me.

"Please come again," Brummitt Voth was a-telling Holly. "It's a great pleasure

to talk with someone so well informed."

"Well see to your coming again," Hooper Voth gave his second to that "We won't

take no for an answer."

"Good-bye, gentlemen," I said, stirring some bit of music out of my guitar. "You

all come see us."

"Just possibly we shall," said one or other of them.

We walked off on the woodsy path. It was like a-being somewhere amongst folks

that strained their ears to hear what you might say.

"John," said Holly, "you said you'd join Evadare after this visit to the

Forshays."

I knew what she meant; no talk of what we'd been into, not with air bush and air

rock more or less crowded close, with whatever passed with them for ears all

cocked up to hear us.

I talked some about our wedding plans and the house we'd build at Haynie's Fork.

Holly mentioned how she'd seen some pretty cloth Evadare had woven on her loom,

and would Evadare do some like that and maybe sell to people? I said, no doubt

she would. Then I tried to banter her a trifle about how Luke Forshay liked to

be round with her, but she turned the subject to something else.

We came to the slope with the figure on it, and went down across the rocky

patch. The ape-faces showed plainer still than they'd been, so plain I took care

not to set my foot on any. Beyond that, we started down the steep trail. Even

there, it was a feel of watchers and listeners.

"Name the flowers we see growing here, John," said Holly, to make sure we didn't

talk of what we hadn't better talk of, not there and then.

That was right smart of her, I knew. So, step by step down along that narrow,

snaking way, I showed her the flowers, and she carried on about how pretty they

were. You'd have reckoned that's what we'd come out to see, the flowers.

A tawny tuft of cotton grass where sun struck down; spiderwort; wake-robin; a

late, pale Indian cucumber blossom; and some turkey beard round a pine, part of

it chewed off by a deer or something.

There was a rattle and scuttle amongst some weeds right where we stopped to look

at the turkey beard. "Is that a squirrel?" Holly inquired me, and I said, "I

reckon," though it was too big a noise for a squirrel - too big for either a

groundhog, when it came to that. I wondered if I wished to know just exactly

what it was.

Toward the bottom of the trail down, colic root and bunchflowers, and Holly

allowed they were right pretty, too.

Neither one of us mentioned one time even, the sense of something a-going along

with us, close to us, its weight on us, the way the air weighs just before one

pure hell of a blow of wind and rain.

This time the sense stayed with us when we got to the Forshay place, along past

the fish pond where now the fish hung at the bottom of the water. And all the

way to the cabin, with Mr. Creed and Luke a-coming out of the door, glad to see

us back.

V

"Thank the good Lord youins both got back safe," Mr. Creed hollered us, his face

all shiny with a big smile. "We been a-holding our breath for you."

Luke was just before a word of his own, but Holly put her gold-tanned forefinger

to her mouth; and that mouth was a lighter red than usual, I saw. She wanted

silence all round. Straight to her car she went and opened the door and then the

glove compartment, and took out a folded paper. Then she fairly ran to the house

and inside. She spread the paper out on the table. It was written in words of

black ink. She beckoned for us all to come ring round with her. We did so, not

speaking a word.

"Say your Christian name," she said, pointing at Mr. Creed.

He blinked, but, "Creed," he said.

She pointed again. "Luke," said Luke, and her finger came round to me.

"John."

"Holly," she spoke her own name. "Now, listen as I read."

Standing at her shoulder, I looked at the paper while she said the words of it,

solemn as a prayer:

"All ye things and spirits of evil, I forbid you this house and home; I forbid

you, in the three holy names, our blood and flesh, our bodies and souls; I

forbid you all the nail holes in this house and home, until you have traveled

over every hillock, waded through every water, till you have counted all the

leaflets of the trees and counted all the starlets in the sky, until that

beloved day arrives when heaven comes upon this earth."

At the bottom of the writing I saw three crosses in a row:

t      t      t

Still holding up her hand for quiet, Holly read it through again, and one time

more, making three. At last she smiled at us all, one after another.

And that heavy sense was gone from out the air on all sides of us.

"I think that's going to work," she said, with the smile. "Now, in this house,

we can't be overheard or attacked. We can talk about what's been done, and what

perhaps we can do ourselves."

We all sat down. I, anyway, felt tired, but a trifle easier.

"What's that there thing you read out?" Mr. Creed inquired her.

"It's a form of spell credited to Albertus Magnus," Holly told him. I was

present once in a home in the Pennsylvania Dutch country, where it was read the

way I just read it, to drive out some witchcraft I asked for a copy and they

wrote it out for me and told me to keep it with me all the time. And I've kept

it"

"Albertus Magnus," said Mr. Creed. I've got it in mind, he wrote a bad book of

magic one time, didn't he?"

"What they call the Grand Albert" I said. I've been up against that in my time."

"It's hard to decide on all the legends about Albertus Magnus," said Holly.

"I've had a try at coming to what facts are known. He was born in a town on the

Danube in 1205, and he was considered one of the foremost scientific

philosophers of his day."

"He must have been a great one to be called Albertus Magnus," Luke said.

"Oh," she said, smiling, "that's just the Latin form of his Germanic name,

Albrecht de Groot. But he was a priest, he was a bishop of the Church, and Saint

Thomas Aquinas was his pupil. And what he left behind as a formula of exorcism

seems to have cleared the air in this house, wouldn't you say?"

"I feel better," I said for myself. "I even feel a little small bit hungry."

"Hungry," Mr. Creed repeated me. "Let's eat up a little something or other."

It wasn't any great shakes, I suppose. We made sandwiches of peanut butter, and

Holly asked that we have some blockade whiskey. It was plain that she felt the

need of something to hike her up.

While we ate, she talked, and made me talk. I told in particular about that

glimpsing of some sort of thing a-moving in the shadows of the oak branches in

front of the Voth house.

"That's what I felt, or maybe saw, and if John saw it too, it was there," said

Holly. "This isn't an unusual story, gentlemen. There are tree spirits, bush

spirits, in the legends of all sorts of peoples in every part of the world."

"But what about the one the Voths have in their oak tree?" Mr. Creed wondered

us. "That there's more or less a new thing."

"Or an old thing," said Holly. "I was thinking again of Reginald Scot's book,

and the list he made of frightening spirits - Kit-with-the-candlestick and the

spoorn and so on, and the Man in the Oak." She looked round at us, serious as at

a funeral "There's been the Man in the Oak in all sorts of places. And that's

not all we have to worry us, up there on Wolter Mountain."

"What's the main real trouble?" Luke asked her.

"I talked with them, and I think I know the answer to that." She weighed air

word as she spoke. "We're up against Druids and Druidism."

"Druidism," I said after her. "How bad is that?"

I've heard tell, off and on, about Druids," said Mr. Creed. "It was in the

county seat paper, Halloween time one year. They was supposed to be some kind of

beardy old-time priests, ain't that a fact?"

"Only part of the fact," replied Holly. "There was more to a Druid than a sort

of Santa Claus in a long robe with a bunch of mistletoe in his hand."

"They worshiped nature," spoke up Luke.

"Yes," said Holly, "but the old magazine advertisement spoke the truth about

nature in the raw being seldom mild. A lot of half-romantic foolishness has been

said and written about Druids. They've been described as noble savages. But they

weren't savages - not when they had metalwork and grew crops and built stone

temples. And they weren't particularly noble either, not with bloody human

sacrifices to their gods of nature."

"No," Luke agreed her.

Part of the noble - savage attitude comes from the fact that the Druids left no

writings we know of. The Celts in Gaul and Britain understood writing - we have

inscriptions on stone, in Greek or Roman letters, before Caesar's conquests. But

the Druids don't seem to have committed rituals or records to writing. They

always passed these on orally, from old priests to young ones."

"That esoteric?" said Luke.

"Or that secretive," she said. "It was usually a Roman commentator who wrote

anything down. We're in obscurity about the real names of their gods. They had a

god named Los, and a goddess Vala, we think. And of course, their real chief

deity was Baal."

"Baal," echoed Mr. Creed. "That's in the Bible. The Philistines had Baal."

"And the Carthaginians and the Gauls," went on Holly. "The worship of Baal

reached all over the world from Persia to Ireland. It's still heard in place

names - Balquhidder in Scotland, or Byron's haunted Bridge of Balgownie. And

Baltimore."

"Baltimore?" said Mr. Creed. "Over here?" "Baltimore in Maryland is named for

the town in Ireland. I've heard that the name comes from Bal-tigh-more, the

grove of the great god Baal."

She stopped to let us drink in that muck Then she went on ahead.

"That Man in the Oak, in front of that strange stone house," she whispered. "How

good a look did you get at it, John?"

"About enough to wonder myself about it," I had to confess. "It looked as big as

a man or a bear; and its shape might could have been something like man-shape. I

can't rightly say if it had fur or feathers or scales, but it was one of the

three. And it must have had what you might call fingers on its toes, it could

take a grip with its feet."

"Like what the Ashantis in Africa call Sasabonsam," said Holly. "He lives in a

silk cotton tree there, and catches unwary men with his feet as they pass

below." "Might that be suggested by great apes?" asked Luke.

"Gorillas?"

"Who knows?" said Holly. "The thing in that oak was no gorilla, it was something

worse. Gentlemen, the oak was the Druid's sacred tree, for good and evil. They

said it beckoned the lightning and thunder. It has age and size and strength

beyond other trees. And they made bloody sacrifices to their oak-spirit." She

trembled in her throat. 'Ill come to those sacrifices in a minute. It's horrible

to think about what reminded me of them."

She got out paper and spread it on the table and took a pen.

"We'd better put down notes about this," she said. "See what we have to face."

She dashed off several lines about what we'd said so far.

"Didn't the Druids build Stonehenge in England?" Luke asked her.

"No, that was about four thousand years ago," she told him. "There weren't even

Celts in England then, much less Druids. Though there's a lot of do-it-yourself

legendry about how old the Druids are. Henry Rowlands wrote his Monna Antiqua

Restaurata in 1723 or thereabouts - I sound like someone taking doctor's orals -

and he says that Noah's sons were Druids and began a religion that Rowlands

called 'pure and untainted.' Somebody else claims Corner, the son of Japheth, as

the founder of Druidism."

"If it's the oak-tree religion, that's all through the world. The Indians had

it, and I recollect hearing the Romans did."

"The Romans hated the Druids for their human sacrifices," said Holly. "Julius

Caesar felt that was horrible, though his own Roman people hadn't given up human

sacrifice until about a century before. And Pliny scolds the Druids. The Romans

wiped them out in old Britain, because they felt it must be done."

"Suetonius Paulinus massacred them on Mona - the Isle of Man," said Luke. "They

were there with priestesses in black robes, waving torches and howling curses,

when the Romans came across to fight them."

Holly blinked at him. Her smile came back to admire him. "How did you know about

that, Luke?"

"Why," he said, a-smiling back, "it's in Tacitus. We studied Tacitus in our

ancient history classes at college."

For a moment there was that bright feeling betwixt him and Holly. It almost

drove out the trouble-haunting in the room. But the moment went away, and she

turned back to what we had to figure out there.

"I knew the Voth brothers were into Druidism, almost at once," she said. "They

talked to each other in the Shelta Thari, and when I spoke it too they seemed to

be delighted. That's a language spoken sometimes amongst wandering tinkers, but

it's been traced to the priestly caste of the Druids among the ancient Celts. It

was part of Druid secrecy, to make their religion powerful, to rule over even

the chiefs and longs of Gaul and Britain. And there at their house was direct

evidence, to confirm the spoken evidence."

"What evidence, child?" asked Mr. Creed.

"They had a giant figure of wickerwork," she said. "Many times the size of a

human being. That's one of the most important and the most ghastly items in the

Druidic rites. Such a wickerwork figure was used as a cage. They'd put their

victims into it and burn them alive for a sacrifice to their tree gods and

nature gods. No wonder even those tough Roman legionaries turned sick."

"Turned sick," said Luke after her, "and afraid. They were afraid of the magic

on that British isle. Remember the story of the Argonauts. They sailed their

Argo ship through inland seas - the Black and Caspian - and dragged it on

rolling logs to a river, maybe the Volga. When they got into a northern ocean,

their talking oak branch warned them not to land on an island they came to, its

magic was too strong, too deadly. That was Britain, or so Charles Angsley

thought when he wrote his book of Greek hero tales."

Again Holly's eyes shone at him. Air thing he said, from the books he'd read to

the thoughts he'd had, made her like him more.

"Their talking oak branch, in Greek folklore," she said. "Fraser's Golden Bough

thinks the oak tree was worshiped everywhere, the way John said a moment ago.

The Druids focused that belief, in old Britain."

"And here too," said Mr. Creed. "You and John make it sound like as if them

Voths have got them their own sacred oak tree. The way you talk about it, it's a

right big old tree."

"It's big, for a fact," I said. "You could cut it up into enough lumber to build

you as big a house as this one. And you'd have planks left over to make a

chicken coop."

"What was that term you used, Holly?" Luke inquired her. "The one for that sort

of land where nothing was to be planted?"

"Sith Bhruaith, and that's more ancient Celtic," she told him. "The Goodman's

Croft, but it isn't any good man it's set aside for."

"Like calling elves and trolls the Good People," said Luke, "because nobody

dared call them bad. We have them here in these mountains, I think we're

beginning to prove."

"Yes," said Holly, and she quoted:

Up the airy mountain,

Down the rushy glen,

We daren't go a-hunting

For fear of little men-

"Devil be damned to that!" snorted out Mr. Creed. 'I ain't air been scared of

little men nor yet either big ones.

What's them Voths think they're up to with me, first a-trying to scare me, then

a-sending me all that sweet talk about neighborly doings? I got a mind to go up

that there airy mountain you talk of, and do me some hunting."

His eyes were on his rack of guns, like as if he was a-getting ready to grab one

of them and take off.

"Mr. Creed," said Holly, "I'm not at all sure that powder and lead would work

against them."

"If lead won't work, silver will," said Mr. Creed. "I just so happen to have

bullet molds, and I could run me some silver bullets. It wouldn't be the first

time in these here parts a silver bullet found out a devilish witch-man."

Likely he was a-thinking of a case I knew, how Jack Bowdry had shot Kib Wordin

with a silver bullet, and came clear in his murder trial when not one witness

would speak up to swear Jack's life away. Mr. Creed was mad enough to shoot the

same way his own self.

"I'll get word to them," he vowed, "tell them to come on down and fight me

barehanded, both of them Voths at once. They've been a-using round Wolter

Mountain long enough. Too damn long."

"Mr. Creed, they'd never dare fight you stand up, fair fight or two against

one," I said. "Hark at Holly, and well make out how's the best way to beat them

at their own game."

"No," said Luke suddenly, "not their own game. If you're fighting a wrestler,

box him. And if he's a boxer, wrestle him."

"Maybe we should ought to have some of them Roman fellows youins been a-talking

about," said Mr. Creed, quieted down a little bit "You say they wiped out them

Druids."

"And had their hands full doing it," said Luke. "From what little I gathered

studying history, the Romans used plenty of their own magic charms to help

themselves along. Probably they went in heavily for it, before invading the Isle

of Man that time. I'm all for a little magic of our own."

His eyes were on Holly as he said it, but she shook her head.

"Just because you heard me read that prayer from Albertus Magnus, don't set me

down as a magical expert," she said. "That's more in John's line."

"I'm not a magic-man either," I said. "I've seen things done, and been into

them, but it was all American. These Voth brothers are from far off in that

other land, and they've got things I don't know how to monkey with. Thank you

kindly for the nomination, but I'd better not accept. I keep a-thinking of

somebody else, if we can get him to help us."

"Who's that, John?" asked Luke.

"He's an old Indian chief and medicine man, lives only a few miles from here," I

said. "Reuben Manco."

"That there old close-mouth?" said Mr. Creed. "I've been a-seeing him off and on

for years, at Sky Notch. I've even traded him cabbage plants for tomato plants.

But he sure enough does as little talking as he can manage. Round about three

words a week. How come you to think he'd help, or could help if he would?"

"I met Reuben Manco at the state capital, in a bookstore where he was buying

some Latin and Greek things," I said. "He loosened up with me a little tad.

Other Indians allow he knows things from the old times that no other Indian

knows. And I was at his place once, a-fetching him a message from a college

professor. He was all right with me then."

"I don't even know where his place is," said Luke.

"If John knows, let's go bring him to talk these things over," Holly said.

"All right," said Mr. Creed. "If he'll come, he's welcome. He's Cherokee, I got

it in mind."

"I'll do my best for the Cheyennes," said Holly.

"He's a Cherokee, all right," I said. "One of what they call the Civilized

Tribes. They're a proud breed of Indian."

"So are the Cheyennes," she said.

Luke got up when she and I got up. "Can't I come too?" he asked, like a kid

a-honing to be at a taffy break.

I felt for him, but I shook my head. "I'm not certain sure that Reuben Manco

will even talk to me, Luke," I said. "Holly will be near about all the strangers

for him to meet at first" I beckoned to her. "Come on, let's go over and try

him."

Outside, it was different from inside. It was heavyish out there, like as if

mist hung round us, though the sun shone. And it seemed to me I could hear a

hum, the way you hear water a-falling down a rock, just round the bend of a

trail out of sight. I couldn't be certain sure if it was a hum inside my head or

outside. I said nothing to Holly, she said nothing to me. We got in her car and

drove out of there.

The heaviness and the hum died off when we were out on the road, but still we

said nothing. Not till I told her, "Just ahead, there to the right, you'll see

two white rocks set. That's to mark Chief Reuben Manco's driveway in."

And she brought us there and turned off and drove up. A snaky, rocky driveway it

was.

You couldn't see Reuben Manco's house from the road. The driveway curved up and

then in through close-growing trees, a good climb of it, until you came to where

the house was. It was built round, of poles driven into the dirt straight up and

close together. Smaller poles were sort of braided in and out crossways, and

outside all of that it was plastered in with clay and lime mixed, hard as cement

and painted reddish brown. The roof was of flat walnut shakes, built to come to

a point at the very top. The plank door hung on leather hinges. Rows of young

beans and cabbages grew in front. Behind was parked his rattletrap old car.

Close in front of the door sat Reuben Manco himself, on a squarish chunk of

rock, a-playing his old fiddle and a-playing it mighty well.

VI

He cut his deep-set eyes up at us when we got out of the car, but said nothing,

didn't show he'd air seen me in his life. Reuben Manco wasn't much for being

forward with visitors. He was small and wiry-made, and nobody knew for sure how

old. Betwixt two hanging braids of lead-gray hair, his brown face was as hard

and ready as the blade of a hatchet. He wore a tan shirt and tan pants, and

beaded moccasins he'd likely made himself.

The bow stopped a-moving on the strings of the fiddle. Reuben Manco looked at us

with those deep eyes as dark and bright as Holly's, and full of wisdom he mostly

kept to himself.

"Good evening, Chief," I spoke up. It's been a long piece of time since we've

seen one another. You remember me - John."

"John," he recognized me, in a voice deep as a deep cave, the sort of voice

Indians like to use when there's a stranger there. His eyes were on Holly.

I've brought you a visitor," I said. "Let me make you known to Holly

Christopher. She's a folklore lady and a true scholar, and one of the best

friends I've got. I thought it would be good for you two to meet and be friends,

too."

Reuben Manco put his fiddle down on his lap. "Scholar lady," his deep old voice

repeated me. "Umh." He kept a-looking at Holly. "You been to school?"

"Out west, at Wichita State in Kansas," she said. "Then graduate work at the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But I want to learn from other

things than books."

"Other things," he boomed in his chest, solemn as a preacher in a church house.

"What other things?"

"Things of nature," she said, and well I knew that she was trying her best with

him. "Things about people - real people. Plants and animals. As much as I can

see and hear and learn."

"Why you come here?" he asked her.

"Because John says you're strong in the wisdom of your people. That you know the

truth of what was here before any white settlers came."

"That long ago?" he grunted. "Fool talk. I'm not that old."

"She's all right, Chief," I tried to speak for her, but he nair harked at me. He

began to play the fiddle again, a whisper of old-time music. I sang with his

tune:

Jinny went a-courting, Jinny went a-courting,

Jinny went a-courting with a smile;

You'd ought to been there when Jinny went a-courting,

You could hear her singing for half a mile . . .

He broke his music off and put his fiddle back on his lap again. "Why you come?"

he asked her again. "Maybe come to laugh at old fool Indian."

It was like a charge in court.

"Chief, I'm Indian myself," she tried hard with him. "My grandmother was a

Cheyenne, a Tsi-tsi-chah."

"Good tribe," he sort of growled. 'Tm Cherokee. Different tribe."

"But I came to hear you speak, see what you do," she almost begged to him.

"Don't do anything," said Reuben Manco. "Just sit on this rock."

"Chief," she said, halfway like as if she was a-going to cry, "John would never

have brought me here if he hadn't trusted me. I'm sorry if I've disturbed you.

Maybe you wish we'd just go away, but-"

He laughed then, a small, short laugh. He grinned his fine old teeth, white as

milk.

"All right, Miss Christopher," he said, not so deep now, nor either so growly.

"Suppose we just drop this comic-book dialogue and hold ourselves a modest

little seminar on comparative cultures. Call the way I acted an example of early

American homespun humor. If you're Holly Christopher, I know your name from the

Journal of American Folklore, your interesting article about certain parallel

tales to the Tennessee Bell Witch."

She stared. "Oh, thank you," she breathed out "You read the Journal?

"Regularly," smiled Reuben Manco. "Now and then I contribute to it myself."

"Do you?" whispered Holly, and all of a quick sudden she sat down on the ground

beside his rock, and tucked her feet under her. Right well she knew how graceful

she looked that-a-way. He smiled, stroking the fiddle in his lap.

"It's a pleasure to welcome a true scholar of the Cheyenne blood," he said. "Not

that I begrudge John's coming. Probably he has a strain of Indian heritage in

him, at that Most Americans do if their family has been around for seven or

eight generations."

I squatted on my heels with my back to a tree and harked while Holly and Reuben

Manco told one another about where they'd been to college and what professors

they knew and what books they'd read. He'd graduated from Dartmouth up north,

long years back, but he'd kept in touch with folks there, and Holly knew some of

them.

All Holly had to say about the Voths, he heard and nodded as if he checked

things over, likewise with what she told of the Gibb family. He took it in with

a brown face chuck full of wisdom and maybe just a tad of worry.

"Druids," he repeated after her. "As you say, there's a whole cargo of notions

about the Druids, mostly not worth consideration. But I've studied the few valid

accounts of them from time to time, and so, I can see, have you."

"Not as much as I should have, I'm afraid," said Holly. "When you consider what

we're up against here."

"We're up against more than just Druidism," said Reuben Manco, and, that's

right, he said we, not you. "I agree that parts of their belief and practice can

be evil. Dangerously evil. But twice as evil here," he said suddenly. "Where it

might well mix into, crossbreed as you might say, with something else that's

both similar and different."

"You all are five or six jumps ahead of me, Chief," I made bold to speak up. "I

purely hate to butt in, a-seeing I don't have the schooling you and Holly got-"

"All right now, John, don't fish in shallow waters," he laughed at me. "You've

told me in the past that your formal education is sketchy, but here and there,

in various places, you've taken in considerable knowledge and training."

"I agree," said Holly. "John's a man of ripe sense and high native wit."

"Maybe not quite as native as with us Indians," said Reuben Manco, "but we need

him in this problem." He turned his tone weighty again. "I'd suggest that some

of the things John has seen and faced and handled - things that most people

wouldn't believe, because nothing of the sort ever happened to them - have given

him a unique strength in coping with evil. And, my young friends, evil is here

in the neighborhood with us in carload lots, and it needs coping with in a high

degree."

He questioned me, and I told about the big oak tree in front of the Voth house

and what I'd glimpsed, or thought I'd glimpsed, up high in the shadow of its

branches. And Holly mentioned what she'd read in that book, about the Man in the

Oak.

"I don't doubt that he's there," said Reuben Manco. "I'm no more certain than

you are what Reginald Scot meant by that term, but I wonder if I can't give you

the name of this man in this oak." He crumbled a leaf of tobacco into the bowl

of an old stone pipe. "How do you think that Gibb would suit?"

"Gibb?" said Holly after him. "Jonathan Gibb?

"Not the Gibb who died here lately," said Reuben Manco, striking a match.

"Another Gibb, first of the name who settled there. The story has come down with

my people. He was able to take that particular tract without any protest from

the Cherokee who lived nearby, because they themselves didn't even hunt there.

It was bad medicine, if you'll permit me to use the Indian term." He puffed

smoke. "No Cherokee had gone there in lifetimes."

"What was the trouble?" I inquired him.

"The Other-People who'd been there before and kept their gods there before the

Indians," he said, smoking. "That stone figure you saw on the slope - once, long

ago, our wise men thought it ought to be pulled apart and dragged down away.

More than twenty strong braves hitched hide ropes to one of the stones and

dragged and dragged - could barely move it a few feet So goes the legend. Then

there was a terrible wind, blowing down pine trees and rattling boulders like

gravel The braves felt less brave, and dragged the stone back. It took only half

of them to hoist it uphill, when all of them had had trouble moving it downhill

Once it was in place again, the storm died down. That's why it was left alone by

the Cherokee. Maybe that's why it's been left alone by white men."

"You make me shiver," said Holly, a-suiting the action to the word. "What has

this to do with the Man in the Oak?"

'It has a connection," said Reuben Manco. "I was talking about the first Gibb to

build there. He died in a strange way, I'm not sure how. But for some reason -

had he committed suicide, I wonder? - he was buried in his own front yard, with

a stake cut from an oak sapling driven through his heart."

"That's the way to hold down a vampire," Holly said.

"Whatever the reason for it," went on Reuben Manco, "that oak stake lived and

grew and put out leaves and branches. It grew and grew. It got to be that big

oak tree you saw there, two centuries old by now. And, when I listened to what

John said about something scrambling in the shade of its leaves, I wondered if

the stake really held down what it was supposed to hold. I wonder if it isn't

the founder of the Gibb family, hanging in those branches like some kind of ape

or bat, for whatever reason he may have to hang there."

We sat for a moment, chewing that much over. Reuben Manco studied Holly. "That

charm you wear, like an elephant," he said. "What is it?"

"A Cheyenne medicine man gave it to me, but it came from some other tribe in the

southwest. They knew about elephants."

"So did the old, old Cherokees. Gilushti, the Strong Hairy One - the ancient

mammoth. It meant wisdom and power and charm against evil"

"Chief," I said, "how do you figure them a-trying to fence in Mr. Creed

Forshay's rocky patch and then a-pulling up stakes when he made war medicine

about it?"

"I hazard that they suspected he'd make the dispute public," said Reuben Manco.

"I suggest that, the less public their possible wish for that rocky patch, the

better for them."

"Why do they want it?" Holly asked. "Mr. Creed himself says, it's nothing to try

to grow a crop on."

"Maybe the crop's already there," Reuben Manco said, puffing smoke. "Maybe

already planted, long ago, and about to come to fruit, in a sort of unpleasant,

crossbred way."

"In other words," said Holly, "they've brought one race of devils here to join

forces with another."

"Well put," nodded Reuben Manco, drawing on his pipe. "You phrase things well.

Because when you defeat a god, conquer him, he has to become a devil."

"Has to, Chief?" I said after him. "How do you figure?"

"By history, John, and a few guesses on prehistory. When a people was conquered,

put under the yoke and heel of the conqueror, that people's gods were crushed

and humbled. Nor matter if they'd been prayed to and thanked for the sun and the

rain, for good times and for life after death."

I understood that.

"Those gods were flung out of their temples to make place for the gods of the

victors," he went ahead. "Their images were smashed up and smeared with filth,

they were laughed at and flouted and called false gods."

"False gods," said Holly after him.

"Nothing sounds falser than a false god," I said.

"Exactly," said Reuben Manco. "They were never called gods again, except with

false along with it It was like that at the Roman conquest of Britain, the

Moslem conquest of Persia and Syria and North Africa and Spain, the Spanish

conquest of Mexico. False god became one word, like Damyankee with

unreconstructed old Confederates. When Milton marshalled the hosts of Satan in

hell, he called the roll of false gods." He smiled at Holly and smiled at me,

with lips as hard as the sole of my shoe. "Very well, young friends, can you

truly blame a broken, beaten god for becoming an outlaw, with an outlaw's

motives and behaviors? For making a virtue of necessity and trying to fight

back?"

"I see what you mean, Chief," I said, "but likewise I see what the thing means

to me. Blame or not, we've got these things to fight, whether they're devils or

gods. My saying is, throw punches at whatever the target might could be."

"Bravo!" cried Holly, and Reuben Manco smiled broader at her.

"It's always good to talk to John," he said. "He and I have the same thought

about the problem, but he knows how to put things into words."

"I'm still trying to follow all this reasoning, Chief," said Holly.

"I follow it, some little bitty bit," I said. "What you're a-getting at is this,

the way two things can join up into something bigger and get to be worse than

either one of them. What's a-going on here is an old, old place of bad magic

from those folks before the Indians, and then the Voth brothers fetched in their

Druid things. So it's a mixtry betwixt the two."

Reuben Manco slitted his eyes at me. "Miss Christopher," he said, "I'll repeat

myself here. John has foundout things in the life he's led that he might never

have learned or dreamed of either at your university or mine. It's possible that

he's been better off, being in charge of his own education."

"I'll endorse that viewpoint," she agreed. "What he says clarifies what you

say."

"What he clarifies is an example of what has happened in other areas," said

Reuben Manco. "Something coming from an old country to a new one can turn

baleful there. Look at English sparrows, imported here as a sentimental gesture,

and turning into a plague. Look at the problem the kudzu vine became when it was

brought over from Japan."

"Or in Australia," Holly added on. "A settler brought a pair of rabbits with

him. They and their progeny almost laid the whole continent waste."

"So, I suggest, with ancient old-world Druidism being joined to beliefs we used

to have here. Religions do that, too. There was the Smoholla belief by Indians

using their old legends along with Christianity, and it wound up in war. The

same thing - bloodshed over religion - on what's called the Ghost Dance War."

"The massacre at Wounded Knee," said Holly, unhappy to say the name. "Horrible."

"That's the word for what happened, yes," Reuben Manco agreed her, "but who

knows what would have happened if that massacre hadn't stopped it? Maybe

Wovoka's prophecy would have come true; the white man and his works might have

been swept away and the buffalo herds might have been born again."

"What you're a-getting at," I guessed, "is that the old-country Druid spirits

are a-nudging those forgotten gods on Wolter, a-waking them up."

"Yes," nodding Reuben Manco, bending to put his fiddle in its case. "Waking them

up. And that, if you'll allow me to employ a bit of slang, will be Katy bar the

door."

"Bar the door," I repeated after him. "It might could be hard to do, barring the

door against such old gods."

Reuben Manco stood up off the rock. He stood up, not big, but straight and not

old-looking the least bit We two stood up with him.

"All this is rational discussion," he said, "but discussion, as John wants to

say, isn't action. What are we going to do about all this?"

"That means you'll help us," said Holly gladly.

"If I can."

"Then come with us to Mr. Creed Forshay's and keep on a-talking." I made the bid

to him. "Mr. Creed said for us to fetch you."

"I know Creed Forshay slightly," said Reuben Manco.

"And don't forget your fiddle," said Holly. "I love to hear you play."

He went into his cabin and came out again, carrying two glass fruit jars of

something. 'If I'm to visit there, I'll contribute my share to supper tonight"

He gave them to me to hold, and stopped for his fiddle case. I saw another thing

he was a-bringing. Stuck in his belt behind was a hatchet, I reckon you'd call

it a tomahawk. All of us got into Holly's car and we drove back to the Forshay

place.

The sun was maybe an hour so above the mountain ridges when we got there. Mr.

Creed shook hands with Reuben Manco, and to me they looked right wise and strong

together. Luke was so glad to see Holly back, he stretched a grin near about all

the way round his head. And I saw Holly smile back at him, the kind of smile a

good man likes to get from a good woman.

"Proud to have you here, Chief," said Mr. Creed. "And right glad you'll help

with what's got to be headed off from here."

"A job perhaps overdue, Mr. Forshay," said Reuben Manco.

In the house, he gave us a look at the two glass jars he'd brought. "That's

stewed venison," he said. "I put it up last winter when I killed a white-tailed

buck. You see it's jellied; I boiled the meat with the bones for that And I

seasoned it as it cooked, to make it tangy."

"What seasoning, Chief?" Holly wanted to know.

"Bay leaf mostly," he said. "And some tart pickle spices."

"And vinegar?"

"No," he grinned, "just some good blockade. It turns out more or less like a

sort of wild-game sauerbraten in aspic. I consider it better cold than hot."

"Well have some wild sallet greens with it," said Mr. Creed, near about to smack

his lips. "Luke and I picked them here and yonder, while we waited for youins."

"I'll cook those," Holly spoke up, "very lightly, with a little green onion in

them."

Luke beamed at her while she fixed the greens. We sat down to eat together. The

jellied deer meat Reuben Manco had fetched along was mighty good, mighty good.

Holly wanted to know the recipe, and Reuben Manco told it to her for her to

write down. "You never can tell when I might come upon some good venison," she

said. "I want to be ready for anything."

"Ready for anything," Reuben Manco repeated her. "All of us had better be ready

for anything." He looked at me. "I feel better with you here, John."

"Thank you," I said. "I do my best most times, but I'm wondered if I know enough

for this business. I still feel like as if I missed out on not going to a

college somewhere."

"We all miss out on something, no matter what we do," said Mr. Creed. "I sit

round harking at the things Luke learned himself at college, but I'm more proud

than jealous over it."

"Just having a college degree doesn't give anybody a true intellectual

superiority," said Holly, "though sometimes it takes intellectual superiority

away." She looked sidelong at Luke. "I don't mean you," she said.

"I know, Holly," said Luke.

Mr. Creed allowed that, like Holly and me, he was wondered why the Voths had

those strong feelings about the rocky patch they'd tried to fence off. Reuben

Manco said he'd been giving the thing some thought of his own.

"I've been trying to remember everything I can about it," he said to us. "I have

only old, old legends to go on, things that have been passed on from one

generation to another. Mind you, I didn't see this thing I'm going to tell

about. Neither did any of the Indians who were in this Wolter Mountain country

when the first of the white settlers came." He fixed Holly with his black eyes.

"It may have been thousands of years ago," he said, "and it was told by the old

Cherokees to the young ones, all through those centuries, those thousands of

years."

"And we're a-waiting to hear it today, Chief," said Mr. Creed.

"They say there was war, far back in those times," said Reuben Manco, his voice

going deep, like as if he was a-making a speech. "The Indians fought the ancient

Other-People who were here first. They say that the Indians were better with

bows and spears and hatchets, but that the Other-People were better with magic

spells. The magic of the Other-People confused Indians making an attack or lying

in wait by a trail. Most of all, that magic was strongest at the foot of the

worship-place of the Other-People, the very place where today you see that

figure laid out in heavy stones, with that plot of ground full of rocks at its

feet."

"I nair heard aught of this," confessed Mr. Creed. "How could you hear it?"

Reuben Manco's deep voice asked him. "Not even all the Indians know about it

today. But it's my business to know it - I'm a medicine man. I must keep the old

stories, the old wisdoms." And he bit into a piece of corn bread and drank some

coffee.

"Well, about the rocky patch," I said, "I've been there three times these last

two days. The first time, I noticed what looked faces, or like maybe the shadows

of faces, on the rocks. The second time, they came out plainer. The third time,

plainer still, pure down a-looking at me. It wasn't just because I'd seen them

the other two times, because they were plain to Holly."

"Very plain," Holly agreed me. "I could believe they lived once."

"Your old Druids, pagan Celts, believed that in England and in old Gaul," said

Reuben Manco. "When they made stone images, those images were thought to live.

To be thinking, living creatures that drank the blood spilled for them."

I felt chilly about that. I reckon we all did. "Only," went on Reuben Manco,

"what I told you was long before the Druids in England. It concerns the

Other-People who ruled here before my people."

"Chief," said Holly, "if this goes into speculations about visitors from across

space, I have to say that I don't believe in such things, not yet I'm waiting to

be convinced." "Like the things in Genesis," said Mr. Creed. "Abraham

entertaining them angels unawares, and the other angel that wrestled all night

with Jacob and then blessed him. Gave him that long life and all them sons of

his that each of them was father of a tribe of the Jews."

"You've read the book of Genesis, Mr. Creed," said Reuben Manco. "Studied it."

"I study all the Bible," said Mr. Creed. I've done read it through time and

again. I can quote you chunks of it from memory."

"I hark back one more tune to something Holly talked about," said Luke. "How

men, or something like men, might have been in America as much as a quarter of a

million years ago. Might have been ancient before Chief Manco's first fathers

came over Bering Strait from Asia."

"Such things might could fetch out the tales that keep a-bobbing up here and

yonder amongst these hollows and ridges," I said. "Like things about

death-devils and such."

"The Raven Mockers," said Reuben Manco. "The bringers of death."

"Is that a Cherokee belief?" asked Holly. "I don't know it."

"It's the rumor of the spirits, or wild strange beings, that gather to make

somebody die," said Reuben Manco. "The Raven Mockers - I don't know exactly why

they're called that - close in on a man. Close his eyes and quench his breath,

as Alan Seeger says in his poem. Maybe they kill him, maybe he gets away

somehow. They fly or flutter, the old men told me when I was young. They have

arms to use like wings, or wings to use like arms. Nobody really sees them to

have and tell about them. But when death is near, you can hear the, flap of

their arm-wings."

I told myself not be believe I heard a flapping sound outside, like a shirt in a

high wind.

"Well, I've finished eating a good dinner," said Reuben Manco, like somebody

a-finding something else to talk about.

He got up and went to open his fiddle case. Beside the case lay the hatchet he'd

fetched in his belt He saw me looking.

"That's nicely made," I said to him. "It was hammered out by hand, not stamped

out by factory machinery. Who did it?" "I did," he said, fiddle in hand. "It's a

medicine hatchet."

I noticed a feather tied to the end of the handle.

"Before we get into what we have to do," he said, "I suggest we have some music.

You white Americans say the devil is afraid of music."

"That's what I hear tell once in a while," said Mr. Creed. "Maybe music can set

the devil back from our door. One old saying goes that if you're not in the

devil's power more than seven times a day, you're a-doing all right."

"That was said by Alexandre Dumas," Luke told us, a-giving a Frenchy sound to

the name.

"I think some people are in the devil's power just once a day," said Reuben

Manco, bending his ear to listen to how he tuned his fiddle. "Just once a day,

all day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. What shall we play,

gentlemen?"

Luke and I had brought out our instruments and we got the tunings right all

round. We did a verse or so of the Blockader song:

I been a blockader for thirty long years,

I spent all my money for whiskey and beer,

I'll go to the valley and set up my still

And I'll run you a gallon for a two-dollar bill. . .

"Good blockade comes another sight higher than that these days," said Mr. Creed,

a-humming it "But shouldn't we ought to have some sacred hymn if we're a-going

up against the devil?"

We did "Mary she heard a knock in the night" Holly knew that one and sang

sweetly with the tune:

Mary she heard a knock in the night

And she turned her key of gold

To open her cabin door, and then

She seen three great big beardy men

A-standing out in the cold.

O Lady Mary, the first man said,

O let us come in at your door,

For to see that baby upon your breast

We've traveled our way from the east to the west

A thousand miles and more . . .

Mr. Creed joined in with Holly. He had a deep, tuney bass voice. '"I sure enough

do love that song," he said.

Reuben Manco set down his fiddle at last and got up and went to look out the

door. "Full moonlight," he said, "and it so happens that this is Midsummer Eve."

"A special festival of the Druids," Holly said softly.

Luke frowned. "This is the twenty-third day of June," he said. "I thought

Midsummer Day was the twenty-first"

"No," said Reuben Manco, "that's the summer solstice, the longest day of the

year. The twenty-fourth is the first day when there's a noticeable change in the

length of the sun's stay in the sky, somewhat the way Christmas comes just after

the winter solstice. And if our friends the Voths are at all correct in their

Druidical rituals, they'll be doubly glad to have a full moon tonight." He came

back from the door. "They just might be out in this bright night, getting their

nerve up to pay a neighborly visit."

"That's a fact, and I've got a notion about it," said Mr. Creed, getting up,

too. "Holly would do well to come and sleep in the house tonight."

"She can have my room," said Luke, right away quick. "I'll hustle my stuff out,

and if Chief Manco is going to stay here, he and I can make up pallets on this

floor."

"Come on, Holly," said Mr. Creed, taking a lantern off a hook. "I'll go out

yonder with you and stand by while you get whatever you want to bring in here."

He and she went out together. Reuben Manco stood at the door, a-watching them

and a-watching the blaze of the moon. He hummed another verse of what we'd

played about Lady Mary and the Three Wise Men.

Luke walked close to where I sat. "John," he said, a-leaning close so I could

hear his whisper, "I let Papa go and fetch in Holly's stuff, because I've got to

talk to somebody, about Holly and me."

"Why not talk to Holly?" I inquired him.

"Well, I'm beefing up my courage to do that. John, I never saw or heard of a

girl like that. I've had dates here and there with various girls, but I never

felt anything serious. But Holly - God in heaven, John, if she'd only look my

way."

"I've seen her look your way," I said to him. I think she looks your way a right

much of the time. And she's remarked to me about how good a fellow you shape up

to be."

"Has she?" he half squeaked, he was so glad to hear that word. "You think she

feels like that toward me?"

I had to smile. "All I'm a-telling you is how it seems to me, a-watching from

the sidelines. My unasked advice is, take up the subject with her."

Right then, we heard a wild, wild scream outside, a woman's scream, the voice of

Holly, loud and scared halfway to death.

VII

Which of us jumped up first, I can't now rightly say for certain. What I do know

is that, while the scream still flickered in the air, all three of us jammed and

wiggled to get out the front door together. Outside, I was the fastest on my

feet a-running for the stable, with Luke Forshay and Reuben Manco together, just

a hop behind me.

In the bright moonglow in front of the stable door, Mr. Creed lay on the ground,

quiet as a rock. Beside him was flung the lantern, busted and gone out. I

dropped down on one knee alongside of him.

"Holly!" yelled out Luke. He ran on past me into the stable. "Holly!"

Reuben Manco stopped beside where I knelt "Leave him alone, John, unless you

know how to handle a concussion case." He squatted on his moccasin heels and

felt all over Mr. Creed's head with the tips of his fingers. He acted like a man

who knows what he's up to.

Luke came out of the stable again, on a sail of a run. He carried Holly's

suitcase and dropped it next to us.

"This was in there, at the foot of the ladder," he yammered. "She's gone, she's

been carried away-" He headed off amongst the trees. "Holly!" we could hear him

call

Reuben Manco still worked his hands over Mr. Creed's head. "There's no fracture,

as well as I can judge," he said to me. "Thank whatever gods there may be for

that. And no open scalp wound. He must have been hit with something soft and

heavy, perhaps a sandbag."

"Holly!" we could hear Luke again, farther off among the night trees.

Reuben Manco put his hand flat on Mr. Creed's chest "He's breathing heavily," he

reported. "Ah," he said, for Mr. Creed made out to stir.

"Devil be damned," said Mr. Creed, barely a whisper of it

"Now he seems to be coming out of it," allowed Reuben Manco.

"Seven," Mr. Creed mumbled, loud enough this time to be heard well. "Seven, they

told me."

He tried to sit up. I saw that his hands were clenched.

"Let's get him to the house, John," said Reuben Manco, cool as a mountain

spring. "Be careful with him, though. If he can move a little, that should help

him come out of it. But don't let him make too much of an effort at first."

We hoisted Mr. Creed up on his feet betwixt us. Each of us got an arm of his and

dragged it over our necks. As we started for the house, he grunted and started

to move his feet to walk. "Hold him up," said Reuben Manco, and we half dragged,

half toted him along, step after step. In the front room we lowered him into his

armchair.

He sagged with his head down, like somebody a-having a snooze over the

newspaper. He kept his big, corded hands fisted tight shut. "Seven," he said,

one more time. "Seven in the way."

I held him up in the chair while Reuben Manco got ice from the refrigerator and

put it into a towel and jammed it against the back of Mr. Creed's neck. With a

wet cloth in the other hand, he carefully mopped and wiped Mr. Creed's face. Mr.

Creed blinked and snorted, and again he tried to get up on his feet

"Let me have a drink," he grumbled. "There's some yonder in-"

"No whiskey just yet," said Reuben Manco, like somebody who had a right to give

the orders. "Is there any coffee in the pot on the stove, John?"

I looked into the pot. "Yes, there's some, but it's near about cold."

"Pour him a cup of it and get the rest hot."

I fetched the cup and Reuben Manco took it and held it for Mr. Creed to drink

from, while I went back to get the fire started. Mr. Creed blew out his breath.

At last his fists came open. Something fell out of one of them, on the floor. I

picked it up and knew what it was. The elephant thing that Holly had worn round

her throat.

Reuben Manco kept on a-working the ice pack behind Mr. Creed's neck. "You're

coherent, Mr. Forshay," he said. "That's a very good sign. Talk to us if you

can, it will help clear your head for you."

"They jumped me up from behind," Mr. Creed made out to say. "They grabbed that

Holly girl, and I grabbed her back from them, and when I tried to fight them,

one of them hit me over the head and knocked me flat as a pancake. I heard what

they was a-saying." His voice rose, harsh and fierce. "Seven, they said, seven

in the way!"

"Seven what?" I inquired him.

"Seven in the way," he repeated himself.

"A warning, I'd judge," said Reuben Manco, busy with the ice and the cloth.

"There was five or six of them against me," said Mr. Creed.

"Did you know them?" Reuben Manco asked.

"Couldn't see them for no good. They looked black, is all I can swear myself to.

And floppy."

"Did they have robes on?" Reuben Manco asked him. "Hoods? Masks?"

"Maybe so, I can't tell you."

"Give him more coffee if it's hot, John," Reuben Manco told me. "All right, Mr.

Creed, you're sitting up better, you're becoming articulate. No complications,

we can hope, from that blow on your head; but stay quiet."

"It hurts like hell, and I can still see sparks," said Mr. Creed. "Hey, where's

Luke at?"

"He's gone after Holly," I said. "He went while we were a-looking after you."

"They'll get Luke, too!" he blared out and shuffled his feet to get up, but

Reuben Manco shoved him back into the chair.

"You'll stay right where you are until you're better," Reuben Manco gave him the

order. "We'll go find Luke in a moment. But first, answer me some questions." He

looked hard into Mr. Creed's eyes. "Do you see me clearly?"

Mr. Creed glowered up at him. "Sure enough I do, right clear."

"What was your father's full name?"

"Anson Trevis Forshay. What's he got to do with all this?"

"We can say that there's no brain damage," allowed Reuben Manco, happy to say

it. "You'll be back to normal pretty soon. But I tell you to stay quiet, I don't

want you blanking out on us." He turned around to me. "I said to bring him some

more coffee."

I poured it out and Reuben Manco held it for Mr. Creed to drink of it. Then Mr.

Creed allowed he felt better, only his head ached like a bad tooth and he was

plumb wrought up about Luke. "Could they might be a-killing him?' he said.

"No, hardly anything like that," said Reuben Manco, in so sure a voice that it

made me feel sure, too. "Whoever or whatever came out here tonight with just a

sandbag didn't mean to kill, or probably you'd be dead yourself. They may

capture Luke, but if they did well get him back. What are you up to there,

John?"

I'd taken time to look at that elephant charm. I tied the broken string back

together and slung it round my neck.

"Go on, keep talking," Reuben Manco said to Mr. Creed. "How did you happen to

have that amulet in your hand?"

"It was when Holly screamed out," said Mr. Creed. "I was out at the door, I seen

things a-coming, just black things I couldn't make out clear, the way I told

you. I grabbed a hold on her to pull her round and put myself in front of her,

and I reckon the thing come a-loose then. Next second, I got clubbed and knocked

out. Now she's out yonder somewheres, and Luke too, and what is it that's got

them?" His voice rose up on that.

"I'll go find out about it," I said, swiveling round with my face to the door.

"And I'll come along with you," vowed Reuben Manco. "Well start the moment Mr.

Creed here promises hell stay quiet until we get back"

"All right, all right, I promise," Mr. Creed near about snarled at him. "But get

them back safe, you hear? Better take you some guns."

"Guns aren't all that much good most nights, especially with what I suspect we

may be running into," said Reuben Manco. "I've got this," and he patted his belt

to make sure of his tomahawk. "John, I see you've got a good knife in that

sheath. Yes, and that powerful charm on your neck."

"When in the name of everything that's hellacious are youins a-going to start

after them?" barked out Mr. Creed.

"Well go right now." Reuben Manco moved past me to the door and looked back with

his hand on the knob. "You sit right where you are, however hard it is to do

that. Concentrate on feeling better. And trust us. Well fetch back both those

young people to you. That's the word of a chief."

"Thanks for a-saying it that-a-way," said Mr. Creed, softer in his voice.

"Chief," he added on.

"Come on, John."

Reuben Manco and I went out together. It was the kind of night where the full

moon poured itself down, seemed for a moment to be near about as bright as the

sun. The open patches were pale with the light. But under the trees lay shadows

like puddles of black water. The moon couldn't soften them like the sun. For the

sun lives; and the face of the moon is only the ghost face of Earth's dead

child, a-looking down, maybe a-trying to say it would come back home if it

could.

Reuben Manco went to where some stakes and poles leaned up against a big pile of

sawed logs. He picked up one, put it down, and chose him another. That one

looked to be from a locust tree, near about seven feet long and sharpened to a

point at one end, maybe to drive into the ground for a stake. He weighed the

balance of it in his hand. I started off for the path by the fish pond.

"We don't go that way, John." He came up alongside me with the pole in his hand.

"No sense in trying the regular trail up. Didn't Mr. Creed Forshay say something

about seven in the way?"

"What other way is there?"

"Come along with me." He turned and headed off under some oak branches. "Back

this way is a climb I remember from when I was just a boy, prowling here without

asking the leave of Mr. Forshay's father before him." He used his pole to feel

for good footing. "Come along with me," he said again.

I did that thing. I've learned to move at night, even now and then during the

war times when you had to do it without noise or a-stumbling if you wanted to

live through the walk you took. Reuben Manco took us to where a little stream

whooshed along to go to the fish pond. It was only a long step across it, though

when I made the step I wondered if something I saw down in the water might could

be a snake out for a moonlight swim. On the yonder side, we went up a slope

amongst trees, along the rows of the good garden the Forshays kept. Beyond that

was the big earthenware tile set up over a stone-and-cement basin to filter the

water that came down from the spring on Wolter Mountain and flowed to the house.

Reuben Manco pointed off with his stick.

"This way," he told me, "but I doubt if there's any sort of path, so stay close

behind me and step where I step."

There were thick-growing laurels there, and I couldn't exactly hear into them,

but I had the feeling that something was on the move there, under the cover of

the laurels, right along beside us. I didn't say aught about it, though. I just

kept on my way after Reuben Manco.

It was right dark for a while there, for Wolter Mountain loomed up over us.

Reuben Manco kept on ahead, almost like as if he could see. I wondered myself if

he'd been born at midnight, the way old folks say a child born that-a-way can

find his way in the dark. We went on for maybe twenty minutes, as I judged.

Beyond then, I saw light, where the mountain must be chopped open for the moon

to come through.

"I remember this place," said Reuben Manco, heading for where that good light

soaked in.

And I followed. And meanwhile, the thing I felt without rightly a-hearing it,

seemed to come a-moving in the laurels to keep us company.

We worked our way through heavy scrub for quite some distance, it might could be

half a mile. Then we came out into a cleared space amongst the trees, and I

could look up a rough, rugged, knobby old wall of rock, I didn't know how high.

At the top of it, the round moon hung and looked down, maybe a-wondering what in

the name of gracious we were up to.

"When we get up there," said Reuben Manco, like as if we were there already, "it

won't be so steep on top, the two or three miles well have left to travel to

where you say the Voth cabin is."

"We're a-going to climb up yonder in the night?" I wondered him.

"We have the light of a full moon," he replied me. 'It may be promoting a

Druidical sacrifice when it gets to the top of the sky, but not before then.

Just now, it will show us our way up."

The pale moonlight seemed to agree him. It poured itself on that set of high,

steep rocks that went up not quite as straight as the side of a house. I stood

in a mess of some sort of weeds that crackled under my shoes. I looked up the

mountain, but then again I heard something, and looked that-a-way to see.

The noise came from a hobby of laurel scrub all grown close and tangled enough

to be like the weaving of a basket. It was a noise that rattled and grumbled at

the same time, like something that pushed through and breathed hard as it

pushed. Something alive. I swung myself the rest of the way round to have a

clear look, and then what I saw made me just stand still amongst crackly weeds,

stand like as if I'd taken root with them.

A big, lumpy darkness wallowed itself out from under the laurel leaves. It

stopped halfway into the open, with the moon on the front of it, so that I could

plainly make it out

A pig, a boar pig. And no ordinary runaway from some farmer's hog lot You nair

got to see a boar pig like this one, not much often in the time of your Me. Nor

either would you care to.

At that first look, it was a white-tusked boar pig, near about a size to pull a

wagon. Later on, I was able to judge it might could weigh four hundred pounds,

enough to butcher out for a whole precinct barbecue. But just then at that

moment, it only looked big, big, and mean, mean.

Its head was the biggest, meanest part to it, I thought as I stood still and

looked. A huge, meaty old head that sloped back onto shoulders that were big,

too, but looking less than that head. It had chunky, slaty-shaggy jowls, and

shoe-sized ears hiked up to hark at things, and eyes like two chunks of feldspar

a-glinting, and a wet, slick nose that wobbled up and down. It had tusks, pale

white as fresh milk in a moonbeam that struck them, tusks the size of meat hooks

in a butcher shop, a-sprouting out of its jaw to right and left and curled up to

points sharp enough for hunting knives. The glinty eyes blinked and gopped,

a-trying to make out for sure what it saw in the bright night The whole thing

was dark and swelled out as bristly as a bear, but with a frosted, speckly shine

to the bristles. Gentlemen, that boar pig looked dangerous.

I stood right there where I was, still as a stone, a-doing my best not to

crackle those weeds at my feet A tad of breeze blew toward me from that boar

pig, so I knew it couldn't rightly whiff my scent. I hoped it might could miss

the sight of me if I didn't make a move. But it saw me all right. I heard it

bubble its breath out, like as if it had smacked its big slobby mouth. And then,

out it came at me, with a sort of scrambling run.

I could swear that I saw its hoofs strike fire out of a rock, like as if they'd

been shod with iron. My quick thought was, let it get almost to me and at the

last moment jump out to the side. Maybe it would just charge past. That wouldn't

be much of a chance to get away, but right then I could think of naught else to

do.

Out of that laurel thicket it slammed its big, shaggy self and toward me. That

was when Reuben Manco made his own charge, from the left side of it as it came.

He shoved at it with the sharpened point of his locust pole. He leaned into that

pole as it tore into the hairy side. I saw him plant his moccasined feet, dig

down to get all his weight into the shove, the stab. His back hiked itself up

like an old tomcat a-going into battle. He rammed his pole in and in and into

that boar pig's flank, so hard it stumbled away in front of him.

I heard a hurt scream go up, loud and wild, the sort of sound you'd hear if

somebody took the lid off of hell.

That big, rushing body went over and down in a scramble of hoofs, smacked down

on its side. Then it turned over on its back, all the way over, a-rolling as it

went. It yelled out again in the pain it felt. I saw all four of those sharp

hoofs as they raked up in the moony air. It had gone down so close to me, a big

spurt of blood splashed out on my shoes as I jumped away like a scared

grasshopper.

Reuben Manco stood back off from it, a-watching. I walked toward him, and I

don't take no shame whatever when I say that my knees hit one against the other.

"Luckily I was on the side where the heart was," said Reuben Manco, as quiet and

cheerful as if we'd been out a-gigging for frogs.

The big boar pig still quivered himself, but he was done for. Reuben Manco had

put that pointed locust pole into him like a spear, so hard it came clean out on

the other side. Blood flowed from where it was stuck, shiny black in the

moonlight Reuben Manco turned on his heel and looked to where I'd been

a-standing.

"Probably it was to our advantage that you were right where that chicory grows,"

he allowed, still in his calm Indian-chief way. "Chicory?" I repeated him.

I looked, too. Sure enough that's what the crackly patch was. I saw the bare

spikes of stems, the chubby little leaves, the flowers in the moon that, by

sunlight, would have been pale blue. "Chicory?" I said again.

Tve heard old men say that it's a help against evil enchantment," Reuben Manco

told me.

"Evil enchantment?" I repeated him again, and I knew how stupid I must sound.

Reuben Manco swung back round to look closer at the boar pig. It lay quiet now,

except for a little quiver in its stubby legs.

"You see, this was never a tame boar," he said, still cool, still in charge of

things, the way I'd begun to expect of him. "This one isn't really native in

this part of the world at all"

"That's a true fact, Chief," I said, a-getting hold of myself at last I've seen

such as that, one-two times here and there in these mountains.''

And likewise I knew how came them to be wild in the wildest hollows and woodsy

places. Early on in this century, some Englishmen bought themselves a mountain

or two to make into a hunting ground, and over from the old country they shipped

some wild boar pigs, sows too, to breed themselves up and give them some special

sport But then, along came the war - the first one to have the name of a world

war, in 1914. All those English fellows went a-hastening back home to get into

the fight But the old-country wild boar stock was left behind. It bred up by

itself and ranged round, high and low, a-raiding garden patches and a-killing

dogs that got too close. Hunters had gone out to try to kill them off, and now

and then a hunter had been killed off his own self. And right there before us

lay one of the wild boar pig breed, stabbed through from one side to the other

by Reuben Manco's sharp pole, put through it like a spear.

"Here's what I'm trying to rationalize," said Reuben Manco, and drew himself a

deep breath to help his thinking. "The Druids held the boar in high, mystical

respect They thought it had powers of magic."

He took in another breath, as deep as a well.

"Remember, John," he lectured on, still as calm as somebody at the dinner table,

"Mr. Creed Forshay said that the Voths, or whoever attacked him, promised

something about seven in the way. Seven perils, I would suggest, against anybody

who dared try to follow."

"You're right, he said that thing," I agreed him. "Seven in the way, that's what

he allowed they said." Again I looked at the boar pig, a-lying on the ground,

gone as quiet as a bag of old clothes. "And maybe this was the first of the

seven."

"I agree with you, John," nodded Reuben Manco. "I want to hope so, at least

because, if it was, that leaves only six more for us to face and deal with."

He turned his wiry old back on what he'd killed. He gazed off and up at that

high, steep mountain.

"We'd better get on our way, while that light's at its best." He swiveled his

wise, brown old face round to look at me. "Do you feel as if you could try it?"

Right at that time, with what we'd gone up against and seen whipped and killed,

I sure enough felt I could try it

"Come on, Chief," I said to him.

VIII

But, naturally, it wasn't that easy, nair bit

I went along with Reuben Manco to the cliff. When we got next to it, I thought

it looked another sight steeper up and down than it did from a little way

yonder. I flung my head back on my neck and gazed up and up, and it put me in

mind of once when I was in a big city and my friends had me to visit the tallest

skyscraper they had.

Only, no windows there, the way you've got windows in a skyscraper. No cornices

nor either windowsills. And, sure enough, no fire escape.

"Yes," Reuben Manco was a-saying. "I can make out the way we used to climb here,

years ago. We started on these fallen rocks."

There was a clutter of them there, close up together, like a baby child's

play-toy blocks in a tumble. Reuben Manco hopped up on one, hopped from that to

a higher one and then to the highest of them. "Yes," he said to me again. "Come

on up here and I'll show you."

I followed him, hop by hop. I had it in mind his moccasins were better for this

kind of job than my big old clodhopper shoes. When I was side by side with him

on that highest hunk of rock, he put his hand on the cliff face. Shadows hung

there, in a jaggy, slanty line from up above.

"This crack is what we used when I was young," he told me. "You can see, it's

deep and solid. Back in the times of the glaciers, it must have frozen and then

broken open. And up above, you can see another one running across the cliff's

face, about four feet up. The two of them make us a sort of double grip for both

hands and feet. How strong are your hands and feet?"

"Right good for a mountain man, I'd say," I replied him.

"Yes, I've watched your hands on the guitar. Those fingers look as strong as the

claws of a hammer. I'll start up now, I know the way. Give me a few feet the

lead of you, then come along as I do. As we go up here, I'll tell you from time

to time what to expect to find."

He set a moccasin toe in the lower crack, hoisted himself like a horseman

a-using a stirrup, and got both hands clamped in that upper crack. Face to the

cliff, he began to work his way along the slant He sort of sneaked at it, like a

lizard.

I couldn't hold back if I'd wanted to. Up I hiked my own foot and jammed it into

the crack. I hoisted myself and grabbed the place above. It was inches deep, I

figured, and I started to sidle along and up, after Reuben Manco. My nose was

close to the stretch of rock we had to climb. Granite, I judged it That meant

that once there had been fire there, blasts of it that tore big mountains open

and melted them down and then stopped so the mountains could cool again into new

shapes. I had thoughts the like of that as I dragged myself along, a little

small step at a time-move a foot ahead, reach a hand along, then die other hand,

then bring up the other foot

We kept a-slanting our way up. I reckon we did that sort of journey for two

hundred and fifty feet or more, which took us up maybe for seventy-five. Finally

Reuben Manco's quiet, cool voice bade me go slow as I got to where he'd stopped

and was a-studying. I stole me a look toward where he was. He hung to the cracks

and peered up.

"These seams come to an end at this point," he allowed. "Now, up there, we climb

on a sort of natural ladder. Youll see that there are two kinds of stone here.

Over a long space of time, the soft rock was washed away, and the hard pieces

are left for us to take hold of."

When he'd said that, he reached above him and got a grip someway and started to

climb on ahead, as steady as if he did it every moonlit night of his life.

I hunched along by those two cracks until I stood where he'd stood. He'd already

made it up to about seven or eight feet above me. I could see those chunks of

rock he'd mentioned. They stuck out of the cliff in little points and blobs and

ledges. I laid hold on one and it seemed right solid. I could grab hard onto it.

I reached higher to a one beyond that and drew a breath and started to swarve my

way up. I got my toe into the upper crack and that helped me up to where I was

a-following just below Reuben Manco.

Gentlemen, it was a hard go of it. He was long years older than I was, but he

didn't weigh so much and he was as hard and limber as a braided rawhide whip.

Likewise, as I reckoned, those moccasins he had on made better climbing things

than my big, heavy shoes. Not that I took the time right then to envy him or the

like of that. I pressed myself to the cliff, a-hanging on by my toes and fingers

and maybe my eyelids, while I reached up a hand to grope for a rock chunk to

bear my weight and then inched myself to it. That's how it felt, an inch at a

time.

One thought I did have in my head as I scrambled and scraped my way up. It was

the thing I used to hear old folks say about how you should profit by your

mistakes. I told myself that if I made one mistake on this cliff, just one, I'd

nair last long enough to figure the profit of it And I grabbed on all the

tighter to the next little ledge.

I knew I'd started to puff my breath, not much but some. My muscles felt good on

me, shoulders, arms, legs. I'd kept in shape through the years. I've walked

twenty miles in a day to visit choice friends, and at the end of that day I've

danced at a frolic till near about sunup. I was glad I'd always moved round to

keep strong and supple.

Just once I slipped, and it wasn't purely my fault. A knob I grabbed with my

hand came loose out of the cliff, like an apple out of a barrel, and for one

second I slipped away. But I grabbed on again, with a rock where I'd had firm

hold below, and I hung there, getting my feet set on other places. Of all

things, I thought back on a trick problem I'd had in school arithmetic, the one

about the frog at the bottom of the well, that could climb up three feet and

then slide back two. I used to feel for that poor old frog, with his climbing

and sliding, and I felt glad for him that he got out of the well at last, with

us scholars to figure how long it took him. If the frog could get out of the

well, I reckoned, I should ought to get to the top of the cliff.

Then there came a stretch that was less like a wall and more like the pitch of a

roof, and that was easier and not so nervish. The crawl upward on it was near

about like a rest to my fingers, though the rock was hard and scrapy to my

knees. Reuben Manco hung at the top of that slope where it got steep again. When

I caught up to him, he showed me a winding crack, like a crooked chimney, that

went up the steep new stretch. A-making the climb along there took doing, took

thought. I kept on a-thinking, Reuben Manco knows what he's up to here, and he's

enough well acquainted with me to figure I can do whatever he does. And the moon

was on us, like as if its glow washed us all over. Above the place where the

crack petered out, we came again to just little bumps and juts to hang onto and

try to find more above them. In my time I've heard tell of mountain climbers,

with the one who said he climbed up the highest mountain in the world just

because it was there. All right, this mountain was there, and it had to be

climbed. We climbed it.

Just when it began to appear to me like as if I'd been on the scramble forever

and ever, I heard Reuben Manco from up there over my head, "All right, John,

here we are at the top."

Gentlemen, I was pure down glad to hear him speak those words. I didn't look up,

because that would have meant a-hiking my head back, and I felt better with my

nose close to the rock that right there was right close to straight up and down.

I grabbed a few more rough places, got my feet set where they could find their

place, and made way higher, made it higher. My face came up over the rim of a

ledge, and I could make out a broad place almost flat, and higher up the moon's

face, hung there round and close. Reuben Manco was already on his feet. He

watched while I got a knee up and then the other knee up and crawled on across

the ledge and finally stood up next to him.

And didn't it feel good to be a-standing there, with what seemed to be soft

ferns in a tumbly patch around our feet and the moon a-flooding down its bath of

light on us after we'd finished our climb. I looked round to see just where we'd

come to. The ledge went on as wide as a cow lot. On the far side, with the moon

held from it, was a black, tree-grown hump of Wolter Mountain, but nothing like

what we'd just put down under us. In that direction, I figured, would be the way

to the Voth place and whatever the Voths were up to there where they lived.

Reuben Manco fumbled a hand at the left side of his belt. He fetched it away

with something in it. "Here John," he said, holding out an old army canteen.

"Have some water."

I gopped at him. I'd nair noticed he had such a thing with him. I took the

canteen and unscrewed the cap and poured water into my mouth. I didn't swallow

it right down, I made it roll and wash over my tongue and back in my throat, so

that it seeped into me by trickles. It felt fine. I handed him back the canteen.

"How come you to fetch that along?" I inquired him.

"Don't tell me you never noticed," he half-joked me. "Usually you notice

everything. It's a habit of mine, when I go on an expedition through this

country. I just hook it on my belt, the same way I do my tomahawk. It's apt to

come in handy. But how do you feel, now you're up here?

I opened and shut my two hands a time or two. My fingers felt achy, that was a

fact, and they knew they'd been hard at work, but they were still strong. I

rocked myself back and forth on my toes. I flexed my arm muscles, and I hiked my

shoulders to get the cricks out.

"I reckon I'll do," I replied him. "I'm fair to middling. I feel like as if I'd

been a-chopping weeds in a corn patch, but that will pass off directly, now we

don't have to climb like that again, not right off."

I thought how good it felt to stand solid on that ferny stretch, with the moon

for company to us. Reuben Manco mopped his brow with his sleeve and grinned to

me, then he took a drink from the canteen himself.

"I doubt if well have to do another perpendicular climb like that one. Yes, it

was difficult."

I breathed a deep one. "Maybe that was number two of the seven things they put

in our way," I offered him.

"No," said Reuben Manco, seriously, "I hardly think that. Because the cliff was

already there before any Druidical charms. It's been there since those

beginnings of things we talked about earlier this evening. I suspect we still

have six matters to face, carefully and skillfully prepared for us."

He capped the canteen and slid it back into its pouch and snapped the fastenings

on it. He walked across through the ferns, toward another drop of the cliff.

That one was in darkness, the moon didn't reach it. He studied a clump of brush

a-growing close to the edge.

"I'm glad to find this," he allowed, and bent to tear off some twigs of it. I

watched while he rubbed it between his hands and then rubbed his palms over his

face.

"It's cedar," he said. "The smell of cedar is supposed to be a protection

against ghosts and all evil spirits. My people used to burn its needles at their

doorways to fend off any spell of ill magic."

"Is that a fact, Chief?" I said.

"It's what they used to do, and here and there still do," he replied me. "And

they were wise about things like that. Here, let me pick some for you."

He went and stooped above another scrubby clump of cedar, right at the edge.

That was when the edge crumbled itself away and Reuben Manco went right down out

of my sight, like as if a hand had come a-reaching up and snatched him off into

nothing.

I could feel my eyes and my mouth stretch out wide. If the Voths could do the

like of that to us, we were as good as done for, right then. "Chief!" I yelled

out, alone in the moonlight night.

"Here," came up his voice, tight and breathless, from over yonder where he had

vanished. I took quick, long steps, three of them, and looked down and saw what

had gone with him-

He'd stood at the very edge of that shelf to pick the cedar, and a hunk of it

must have broken off under his feet and sent him down into a fall, but not all

the way down. It was shadowed below there, but I could see that he'd been able

to grab hold. There were his two hands, bunched hard to hang onto two tufts of

plants rooted into the rock. But past his hands hung the rest of him straight

into the black shadows, hung above a long, long drop to the far below I couldn't

make out It was like a pit of blackness that he tried to keep out of, tried not

to fall into, as he hung to those plants.

I was down on my knees right the next second, a-bending myself far down into

that night-dark deepness to reach for him. But he was farther below me. I flung

myself flat on my face and wallowed to where my head came over that crumbly

ledge so I could look down. My nose was full of the greeny smell of the ferns

all round and under me. I stretched my two arms down, as far as I could make

them go.

My right fingertips touched the cuff of Reuben Manco's shirt. I hunched a tad on

forward and put out my right hand one more inch and got hold of his tight-pulled

wrist I could feel the hard tendons of it, like wires. I gave thanks that I had

good, big hands for such a grab, that they hadn't given out on me during that

hard climb. I stretched my left arm down, too, until my left hand found and

closed on his right wrist. I jammed my toes down among the ferns, as hard as I

could, to keep hold on the slippy rock.

"Steady now, Chief," I said down to him, not loud, a-saving my breath for what

must be done. "Let me couple hard onto you."

As I said that, I did it. I squeezed his wrists in my hands. I thought I could

feel the blood in him as it beat in those cordy wrists I held, and I knew there

was stick sweat betwixt them and the hard grip of my hands. I mustn't let them

slip off away from me.

Flat I wallowed myself on that ledge, and I prayed it wouldn't crumble any

farther. I pressed out my body to get as strong a hold on that ledge as I could.

It was like as if I printed my shape into the rock under the ferns. No point in

a-letting him go, no point in both of us to go over.

"Now, if you can," I wheezed over the rock into his face. "Let go that brush

with your right hand and grab it to hold my wrist there. Grab with all you've

got in you."

He didn't make a sound. He just did what I bid him. I felt his hard fingers as

they closed on my arm like a noose of rope drawn tight.

"Now, if you've got a good grip there, do the same thing with your other hand,"

I told him. "Your left hand. Get my right wrist in it and hang on with both

hands, hard."

He made that second switch, too. Now I could feel that I had his whole weight

onto my stretched arms and hands. He hung, dead weight, down there, a right

heavy thing to keep hold of, there in the bright night with me flat amongst the

ferns and him on the dangle just below me.

What must I do next? One thing was certain sure, I couldn't spend any long

length of time a-studying what it was. I had to work on just hunches. I didn't

dare double up my arms to heave; that might could break his sweaty grip on me,

or my grip on his, or both those things. I clung hard to my hold on him and

worked a knee forward, a-being careful not to hunch myself up behind.

That knee found a knob of rock to shove against, and I was glad in my heart for

that little help amongst all the stickness. I moved my other knee the same way,

till I lay there with my legs drawn up tight under me like a cricket

"Get set now, Chief," I whispered into the shadows where he hung above all the

nothing. "I'm a-going to yank you up out of that Be dead sure you clamp those

two holds you've got. Jam your nails into me if you've got to, but don't let go.

I'll take three breaths, and then-"

I took a breath, deep. Another breath. A third. In my heart I said some sort of

prayer, though just what it was I couldn't remember later, a prayer to whoever

or whatever might hear.

And I caught the third breath inside me. I jammed my knees down hard, I pulled

all the strength I could into the muscles of my shoulders and back, and then I

heaved myself up on my knees. I felt my chest come up from the brim of that

devilish drop.

As I rose, I yanked Reuben Manco's wrists up with me. Still I didn't dare bend

my arms. I surged away from the ledge where I knelt on it I felt my back muscles

crawl and hump, and next instant I slammed down, full sprawl, on one side. Just

as I did that, Reuben Manco came a-flying up out of the dark and the emptiness

and hit against me, then rolled clear. He was safe, safe.

And safe and limp we lay there all amongst the mashed ferns. We didn't move

except to gulp in lungfuls of air, breathe it out, gulp in more. I knew that I

was one big run of sweat from hair to foot. I felt a breeze on my face, a cool

breeze. It felt right good there.

Reuben Manco was first to speak.

"Aho," he managed, betwixt breaths. "Thank you. Thank you, John. Thank you, my

brother."

His hand groped over from where he lay. It took hold of my hand, as hard as it

had held my wrist when he hung below the ledge.

And well I knew that when he called me his brother, he meant that thing. Meant

it, though he was old enough to be my father, my father who'd died and been lost

to me long ago, before I could truly know him.

IX

After a moment or two I had my breath back I sat up and then Reuben Manco sat up

too.

"Let's take a minute or so to get rid of the shakes," he said. "We can talk

about the next step and what we may have to face. John, you saved my life. I

won't forget it, not if I die tonight or if I live to be a hundred and ten."

"Go ahead and forget it right now, Chief," I said back. "You saved my own life

down below yonder, when you killed that big old boar pig that was a-fixing to

kill me."

"No." He shook his black hair in the moonlight. "You could have escaped.

Standing where you did, you kept his attention so that I could strike him from

the side. But when I fell down there I couldn't ever have come out if you hadn't

pulled me out." He grinned at me. "My brother," he said.

I got up on my feet and looked at that sloping way with the trees on it "What's

a-waiting there?" I wondered out loud.

"That's what we must find out," said Reuben Manco, as he stood up beside me. "So

far, we've made our way past two of the promised perils. There should be five

more to get away from. They'll be set there for us."

He took a step or two. "Come on, John," he said.

So we headed along together, under the pouring glow of that moon up yonder.

Up the slope we went. Reuben Manco pointed out the way we had to go through the

trees. It wasn't a hard path in that kind of bright night, more so because

Reuben Manco remembered so well where he was a-heading. On the far side, the way

flattened out some. It was open there, with a big growth of plants, almost like

a garden.

From what I could see of them, they were mullein stalks, grown up close together

and the most of them I'd ever seen together in one place. They hiked themselves

up in spikes as high as my knee or higher. Their leaves were soft-looking,

hairy. To me it was like as if they come close round my legs as I walked. They

sort of rubbed there, like cats that wanted to be petted. It was like as if they

whispered to me. I looked down at them. They seemed all of a sudden to go dark

and gloomy. That was because of a rag of cloud that went a-sailing across the

sky, then flew off again to let the light come strongish down.

All I'd ever heard for a certain fact about the mullein was an old story, how if

you stomped down a stalk of it to point to the home of the one you loved, it

would grow up strong again if she was true to you. I'd never felt called on to

try that trick, because I'd never wondered myself about Evadare. Other than that

tale, I'd never heard tell if a mullein was good or bad for aught in this world,

except it was hard to kill out when it tried to take your garden.

We waded through those things and got out the other side. We stopped again for a

moment

"That sure enough wasn't one of the perils," I guessed.

"Hardly," said Reuben Manco, "though I don't remember that sort of growth here

when I was a boy. I did have a feeling that those weeds were trying to talk to

us, maybe to tell us to go back."

"Seemed to me they sort of whispered, but I couldn't make out air a mumbling

word of it," I said. "Might could the Druid folks have had aught to do with

mullein stalks?

"Not that ever I heard," Reuben Manco replied me. "Though the mullein was

originally an old-world plant. It got imported to America and made itself right

at home everywhere. But there's nothing about the mullein in any work I ever saw

about the Druids, and I've seen many. With submission, I think I know about the

Druids."

He sure enough did, I allowed to myself, and likewise he knew about a sight of

other things, too. He was good to have along on a chancy job. "Where's our trail

now?" I inquired him.

"Right on ahead."

He moved out on it, though it was nothing easy to make out in that sort of

light. I followed him along through the rest of the empty stretch, and in

amongst some low bushes that had bunches of thorns. One thorn raked across the

back of my hand, and I felt a spot of blood come out there, but I nair said

aught about it. We worried through the bushes, and some open-growing trees

beyond, no great matter to pass amongst them. Then we came to another halt, to

look at what we saw just ahead.

We'd come out in another clearing, with woods grown up to the right and left of

us, and the moon a-coming down from where it had climbed. But right there in our

way, maybe fifty-sixty yards on, was a whiteness that stirred and rippled.

At first sight, I reckoned it was a wall of some kind, a-stretching out away

into the trees this side and that But then I saw the movement in the night. It

had a stir to it, the way you see on still water when a little breeze touches it

The soft white stuff didn't look much higher than a man's head to me, and not

rightly solid, either.

"What In the name of gracious is that?" I inquired myself and Reuben Manco both.

He never replied me aught. Instead he went forward, slow and careful as a hunter

when he's out a-stalking a deer. When he got a few steps closer in, he stopped

and had another look, this way and then that

"It seems to be something like smoke," he said then, "or a thick fog. Right

there, in that single belt of space."

I, too, took a good look at the stuff. If it was smoke or fog, it hung in

almighty close to itself. It gave off a little reflection, not much. It didn't

seem to be slick enough for that. It stirred, and it waited.

"Why don't we move off to the left here?" I said. "Maybe we can find our way

round it."

"That would never work," Reuben Manco allowed. "Look, it stretches deep into the

thick woods there. Even if we found a way around, perhaps we'd get lost from the

way we must follow."

"The way we must follow," I said the words after him.

"I'd theorize that this is more Druidism," Reuben Manco went on. "They claimed

that they could control weather - rain, wind, snow, all things like that. In

England, thick mist is familiar. Sometimes it's forbidding. And if it's there to

forbid us, we're here to face it"

He turned his face to me, and I saw the lights and shadows on it

"Are you game?" he asked me.

"Sure, I'm game, if you are," I said back, for that was all I could say unless

that I'd quit and let the Voths do what they might choose to do with Holly and

Luke. "You know, Chief, I've seen my share of fog on these mountains, daytime

and nighttime both, but I've nair seen the like of that in all my born days."

"I repeat, it's apt to be a Druidic specialty, more or less."

"And you tell me that we've got to try to shove through it," I said.

"John," he said, a deep rumble, the way Indians do when they're pure down

serious, "I've heard it said that the powers of darkness can't prevail against a

pure heart My heart may not be pure, but I hope it's brave."

"Same here," I said.

"All right, here goes. Let's try to stick close together in there."

We walked toward that white quilty wall of mist, side by side. It looked like

piled-up suds before us, all the suds in this world. The air turned sort of

steamy as we came close, and it had a warm, rotty smell, the sort you get from

an old straw stack that's been rained on for a month or so. The closer we

walked, the dimmer the light blurred to my eyes. We came right up against it,

and into it we walked.

"Stay close," I could hear Reuben Manco beside me. His voice sounded like as if

it came through a muffler over his mouth. I took another step in, another. I

felt a sort of slippy mushiness under the soles of my shoes.

By then I couldn't rightly see a thing. It wasn't a blackness to my eyes, the

way it would have been in a dark room, but I just couldn't see. My ears took on

a funny, blocked feeling, the way your ears get when you swim to the bottom of a

pond. I tried to say something to Reuben Manco, but my voice didn't want to come

out and be heard. I moved along, step by step, my feet a-feeling the way. The

ground, or whatever might have been there instead of ground, had gone

mushy-soft, sorry to my feet. I almost slipped and fell, and then I almost

slipped and fell again.

I hadn't better go down, I told myself flat out, because there might not be a

getting up. I tried and tried to feel the way along with my big, thick shoes. My

legs moved slowly. It was tough work to move them, like when you wade in deep

water with mud at the bottom of it. My head felt all stopped up, like as if some

doctor had jammed it full of cotton. I felt dizzy, there was a gone-away feeling

in my mind. And there was more than that to trouble me. Tilings in that mist,

under and all through that mist, seemed to wiggle themselves in around me,

seemed to want to grab hold of me.

It wasn't like as if they had hands or like that. They kept on to try to wrap

themselves on me, sort of, round my legs and elbows and waist, like snakes. I

yanked myself free of them, while I fought to keep my feet with all the

slipperiness and the dizziness. I wondered myself in my heart, should I ought to

say a prayer. Instead of that, while I squashed on ahead by steps and kept on

a-dragging myself free of all those snaky clutches and touches, I found that I

thought of Evadare. I thought of what a little bitty thing she was, but how

brave and how true-loving, and of how maybe she was a-thinking of me her own

self, wherever she was, right then and there. Maybe that helped.

But gentlemen, it was almighty hard, almighty bad. I sort of half-strangled in

the thick, blinding damp. I could scarcely draw me a breath in it. My stopped-up

head wanted to droop on my neck. I knew if I let it do that, I'd sway to one

side or the other, and down I'd go. And if I went down, likely I'd stay down. I

had the notion I could hear voices. They said something like huhh, huhh, though

that might could have been the blood a-beating in my crammed ears. Once a sort

of wiggly arm-thing touched my face and slid down to my neck. I reckon it tried

to wrap itself round and take hold there. Huhh, huhh, beat the voices. But

before I could put up my own hand to fight that arm off, it was gone away. I was

pure down grateful it went.

I don't reckon it was a right long time, nor yet any great distance, for me to

slap and stumble forward through that hellacious mess. But it seemed like miles

and hours till all of a sudden the fog thinned a little bit, then thinned

another bit, and then I could see. And then I could breathe. And then I could

take steps out on what was firmer footing, and then I was somehow free of it,

and glad and happy to see the ground and the trees and the moon-glowing sky.

I dragged a big gulp of air into my lungs and stomped with my feet. I shook my

head and it came clear a little. I remembered Reuben Manco. "Chief!" I yelled

out my loudest. No answer from him.

I gulped more air and swung myself round to look at that mist from the side I'd

come out on. It hung there, clotted together, hung like a curtain, a sudsy

fence. No sign of Reuben Manco in it, either. "Chief!" I hollered again.

That time I reckoned I did hear something, like the bubbly noise made by a

drowning man, and deep at one point in the mist I saw a stir. It churned there.

Maybe somebody tried to struggle in it.

I took one second to tell myself I'd been in there and come clear once, so I

should ought to be able to make it again. No more than a second, though. I

headed right back in, like a frog a-sliding into a pool. I stabbed down my feet

to keep the bottom under me and I groped out to right and left with my hands.

I came on Reuben Manco almost at once. I got a good clamp on his arm and his

shoulder. Out I went backward, the way I'd headed in. There was a weaving push

all round the both of us, wiggly arms or the like. I shoved with my back at

those things, the way you try to slam your way through a thicket of pole-sized

trees. They gave off from my shove. Light glimmered again and I was free, my

knees a-bucking with the effort I dragged Reuben along with me, into the

moonlight

He could barely stand on his feet He looked soaked all over, the way he'd be if

he'd stood under a shower bath with all his clothes on. And, when I took time at

last to notice, I was soaked all over too. Our shirts and pants hung wet and

draggy to our bodies.

He mopped his face and blinked in the pale light we'd won through to. "It's

getting to be routine with you, saving me," he managed to say.

"I'd made it out this side, and heard you in there and went back for you," I

said.

He stood and breathed in air to clear his lungs. His hands rubbed his neck.

"There was a death grip on me," he told me. 'It was choking me. I couldn't

breathe."

I looked him up and down. He was a-getting hold of himself again. "Whatever it

was in yonder kept on a-trying to put its hold on me," I said, "but it didn't

try to choke me. Just once, there was something here at my neck." I put a hand

there. "It just touched me and then it yanked away, like as if it had been

burned."

He stepped close to me and put up his own hand to my throat "Yes," he said, "and

it was because of that Holly's charm you've been wearing, the wise, strong power

of the mammoth image. It must have protected you, John, stood your friend."

"Well, maybe so," I said, because I could see what he meant "Anyway, the two of

us got through all right, and that means we've whipped the third bad thing put

in our way."

He turned round to look at that wall of foamy mist It didn't seem to be so thick

right then.

I would call it a very special, very intricate obstacle, quite originally

conceived and achieved," he allowed, in that way he had that put me in mind of a

teacher with a science class. "The mist, many times concentrated, and within it

what must have been certain malevolent spirits of the mist. But suppose I stop

being the learned lecturer. If that was the third peril, we must consider what

the fourth may be."

We'd come out in what was pretty much open country again, a fairly level piece

of it for a mountaintop. Ahead of us lay stretches of rocks, mostly flat and

deep-set in the earth, near about like a pavement. We started along them. Reuben

Manco squinted up at the sky.

"By the position of the moon and stars, I estimate that we have a good two hours

until midnight," he said. "That should give us time enough before they start

whatever they propose to do with their prisoners. Even if we find ourselves

doing some sort of swim again."

But I wasn't a-looking up at the sky. I looked to where I thought I saw some

sort of light ahead. It wasn't moonlight, either. It had a sort of reddish shine

to it.

"Looks to be like fire up yonder, Chief," I guessed. Do you reckon they're

a-lighting up a patch of woods to show us the way?" He, too, gave it the eye.

"Fire," he repeated me. "Yes. That's exactly the color of that radiance." He

hummed in his throat as he walked. "Suppose you let me adopt the flavory

vernacular of those mountain songs you do so well, John. We've made our way out

of a mist that was more or less like the bottom of the worst lake they could

pour for us with their sorceries. But now, just a short jaunt along the way -

it's like a mountain spiritual I've heard played and sung." He sang it himself,

and his voice was tuneful:

God gave Noah the rainbow sign,

No more water, the fire next time-

"I know that one, Chief," I said to him. I've played it myself and I've always

liked it But it doesn't sound like a threat to me. The names of God and Noah

sound more like some kind of good promise."

"Let's devoutly hope so."

All that while, we'd been a-walking. The red glow got stronger among the rocks

up there where we were headed. That wouldn't be the fire next time.

It would be the fire this time.

X

I'm obliged to admire those Voth brothers for several qualities," Reuben Manco

told me, calm as ever. "They have special powers, and they know how to use them.

They have enterprise, they have a sort of dedicated spirit that we'd better

match in ourselves. However, they aren't being truly original, not just now."

"I don't follow you," I said.

"Look there, John." He pointed. "They've changed the substance of their wall,

but not the shape of it. Nor, in the important sense, the position of it. We're

barred by another wall, fire instead of mist."

We were a-walking closer to it, all the time. It was fire, that was the truth.

Big red tongues of it licked up, right out of the rocky height of the mountain.

Once I'd seen pictures of an eclipse of the sun, how the moon darkens out the

whole red ball of it, and how the sun's flames jump out of the dark where the

moon doesn't get itself in the way. It looked a right much like that I, thought

only it was a straight line of flames, not a circle of them.

Reuben Manco had told the truth. The way it had been with the mist was the same

way with the fire. It reached itself away to left and right, that wall, clean

across the bald where we were a-making our way to it, and each end lost itself

among bunches of trees farther off there. It didn't seem to blaze the trees up,

it just danced in them. What was it that Reuben Manco had come up with?

There'd be no thought about making a turn to go far off and maybe get round it.

Because it was set up in our path. We had to follow that path on through it, or

either on over it. That was a rule of some sort or other. I'd been up against

magic in my time, and the thought made sense to me.

"It may be just as well that we got all soaked through by the fog they put in

our way back there," said Reuben Manco.

I took a look behind us as we walked. The mist didn't seem to hang so high and

solid and white. I thought it looked to be faded down. Maybe it just wasn't

supposed to be there, except to try to stop us.

"What'll we try to do about that fire?" I inquired him. "It jumps up higher and

hotter air step we take to it. Are we supposed just to walk through?"

"No," he replied me, "we're supposed to be kept back. But the fog was to keep us

back, and we walked through that."

While we talked, we came along past a clump of big old mountain ash trees, and

beyond those we had a good notion of what sort of thing we had to do if we were

to get across.

That wall of red fire had a kind of foundation, I'm honest to tell you. The

mountain was ripped open there, a big, deep gully in it from side to side all

that way right and left, with jagged rocks along the edge to us. Up poured those

flames, a-squirting up there, a-hopping and a-flashing. I could make out little

bits of blue and green in the red of them. They must have been eighteen-twenty

feet high, right there ahead of us. Maybe they got high because we'd come so

near to them, maybe they could tell we were there. We came close enough to feel

the heat of them on our wet skins.

"What do we do, Chief?" I asked him again.

"We cross," he replied me. "We can do it They promised us seven perils, and this

is only the fourth. If they put seven in the way, they must have thought we

might get past some of them - as many as six of them. The seventh will be

something special."

"I could wish to know how to get past this one," I had to say. Because, to me,

it looked like one of the seven entrances to hell you hear tell about in the old

folks's tales. That big wild boar pig Reuben Manco had stuck down below could

have roasted to a turn in that fire, while a man was a-singing three verses of a

song.

Reuben Manco moved forward again, careful with his feet, his face sharpened

against the hotness, and I went with him. We got to where we could make out

things clear and plain.

That ditch the fire jumped up from was a deep one. The rocks down inside it

seemed to glower and wink, like red-hot iron in a blacksmith forge. And I

reckoned the ditch was eight feet across at least. There'd be no way just to

walk through it, even if the wet in our clothes would help us. One step from the

edge would take a man down, I didn't like to study how far or where to.

"What do we do?" I inquired him one more time.

"Do?" he said me my word back. "There's only one thing to do, jump across. I

feel that I could do it Try it, anyway."

He made another step, but I grabbed him by the wrist

"Hold on," I said. "Let's take all the difference we can. Let's do something to

help that jump."

"What are you talking about, John?"

"Come back here to these ash trees. And let me have the lend of that tomahawk

you fetched along."

I saw his eyes crinkle up, a-wondering himself what I meant, but he pulled the

tomahawk out of its place in his belt and handed it across to me.

I headed for the ash clump. I looked at one after another of the trees, feeling

them with my free hand. I chose out a sapling, good and tall and say four inches

through just above the roots. I looked it up and down. Then I planted my feet

and swung the tomahawk and made a deep cut into the wood.

"Why this timber-cutting, John?" Reuben Manco wanted me to tell him.

"I want a long, straight piece of this tree," I said, and swung the tomahawk

again to knock out a chip. "There's a kind of jump you do with a pole." Another

chip. It flew off, white as china in the moonlight. "I've seen young fellows do

it at school, what they call a track meet."

"Pole-vaulting?" he yipped out. "That's brilliant, John, it's the right thing.

I'm ashamed that you had to remind me."

"You've likely seen it done," I said, chopping.

"Why, man, I've done it myself. I was a pole-vaulter, long ago at Dartmouth." He

thought that over. "It was only an intramural meet, though. Not varsity."

The live ash wood was no soft thing to chop through with just that light

tomahawk, but I worked my way round and round above the roots, like a beaver. I

had wood chewed out on all sides. Reuben Manco came and leaned his weight to it.

More hacking, and it began to creak and crack when he shoved. Finally it broke

clean off. I bent over and swung the tomahawk to set it free from the stump.

Then Reuben Manco took the tomahawk and went to work on the branches. They were

tough, too, but clearing them away was quicker to get done. We lopped off the

top of the sapling, where it was maybe near about the thickness of my wrist from

one side to the other. It was a nice straight pole, a good sixteen feet long as

I judged. But when I picked it up it felt to be as heavy as iron.

I'll go first," said Reuben Manco. Tve done pole-vaulting. I understand it"

"Nothing doing, Chief, I was the one thought of the thing. I get first jump."

He spread his hands and hunched his shoulders, giving In but not wanting to. He

took the pole and hefted it.

"better go with the big end first, you can get a better grip on it where it's

thinner," he said. "Let it carry you as high as you can make it, and that should

put you on the far side. John, you're my brother now. Do it and get there

safely."

"Thanks," I said. "I do my best most times."

I put up a hand to shield my face from the heat and walked in as close as I

could get without a-scorching myself. The flames jumped up there, high as a barn

roof. At the edge of the ditch I saw some solid rocks all bunched together, and

that's where I told myself to plant my pole to go up. Back I came, and pointed

out the place to Reuben Manco.

"Good," he said, like a coach. "Now make it a steady run, long steps, and be

ready to fly up when the end of the pole goes home at those rocks. Every god

there is in heaven is watching you, John, giving you strength."

"Thanks," I said again, and picked up that pole.

I stood a moment with it hiked up in my two hands while I studied the way I must

run in. The ground looked more or less smooth and firm, all the way there. I

gulped in some air and ran forward.

The heat slapped my face like a shovelful of hot sand. I knew I mustn't slack

off. In I ran, saw where to slam down the point, and down I slammed it and

jumped my best

I flew up and up, the pole a-carrying me. As I rose into the air, that good ash

sapling sprang me higher. I seemed like a flag that fluttered in a wind. I saw

red light all round me, felt the curling flames hit at me, a scorching tug at me

all over. I hoped with all my heart that my jump was long enough, that I

wouldn't pop down into that burning ditch. And all of a sudden I was down on

solid ground beyond, just one stumble then a-running from the heat of the

flames, while with me I dragged that pole of ash. Steam jumped up from my wet

clothes into my face.

"John!" yelled Reuben Manco's voice. "Are you all right? Did you make it?"

The flames roared a noise like wind. I put up my own voice loud enough to yell

back.

"I'll fling this pole back for you, Chief," I told him. "I'm a-tying something

to it that maybe helped me through - look for it when it comes!"

From off my neck I hiked the elephant charm. The leather thong was still clammy

wet, though it had just come through fire. I tied it tight round the pole, about

three feet from the small end.

"Stand by yonder to get it!" I hollered him.

I upped that heavy chunk of wood and balanced it on my left palm. Then I walked

in as close as that jumping, blazing heat would let me. With all the strength I

could get up, I flung the pole like a spear. It sailed through those flames like

a big, long bird.

"I've got it!" I heard Reuben Manco call out through the fire. "Here I come!"

I pulled back to wait, all I could do.

I couldn't make him out through the red curtain of fire. It jumped up like as if

a high wind blew into it. I heard it crackle, a hungry, ugly crackling. Maybe my

jump through there had done that to it. Maybe it was a-getting itself ready to

gobble Reuben Manco.

"Here I come, John!" he yelled again, louder than the crackle.

I stood as close to that glaring, blinding heat as I could hold myself. It hurt

my eyes to look into it, but I looked. Yonder came something, a dark something

a-flying up high into the brightness. It hung there for what seemed a long

second, while the tongues of flame licked all over it. Then it shoved on through

the brightness to the side where I waited, and it came a-slamming down. It

passed with its feet on the rocks and then it stumbled toward me and went down

on one knee and one hand. As I ran close, Reuben Manco stood up.

I grabbed onto him to see was he all right. His clothes steamed, like mine. He

shook me off and stooped down.

"Get that pole that helped us vault across," he wheezed at me. "It's picked up

power from what it did."

I grabbed up the pole. It was scorched all over from its three trips through

those flames. We moved back away from the heat and the glimmer.

"Does it occur to you, John, that the foggy, foggy dew is somewhat dried off our

clothes?" said Reuben Manco.

I looked down at myself, while I carried the pole. Sure enough, what he'd said

was true.

"The Voths didn't count on their foam barricade helping us against their fire

barricade," Reuben Manco half-laughed. "In that particular, at least, they

canceled one peril out with another. I ask myself if Cherokee magic wisdom,

seasoned here in its own native land, may not be better than Druidic magic

wisdom, transplanted here."

We stood off and looked back at the fire. It seemed to be a-burning lower. Or

possibly it had looked higher and burninger when we'd been over yonder, at the

other side of it.

"What about this pole you told me to fetch?" I asked. "It's a right heavy chunk

of wood to wag along with us."

"You're right, and I did remark that it was much heavier than a true vaulting

pole," said Reuben Manco. "But it served us against evil magic, and that gives

it strength. Put it down here, John."

I did so. He squatted beside it and put his hand on it. He began to sing. I

could hear him, but couldn't make out the words. They were Indian words,

Cherokee words, a prayer of some kind as I figured. So I stood beside him and

said a prayer of my own. In it, I reminded whoever might have an ear to the

other end of the line that we two were up on Wolter Mountain, a-periling our

lives every step, to help two other folks, young folks who didn't belong to be

in their bad trouble.

After a minute or so that-a-way, Reuben Manco got up and pulled his tomahawk out

of his belt.

"Ash wood," he said. "And it's stood our friend already, it's lifted us over

their wall of fire. That makes it an ally. Ash was a sacred wood to the Druidic

priests in sacred times. Ash and oak and thorn - that was a pagan oath. It's in

a song they call Glasgerion."

"I recollect I've heard that song, though I don't sing it myself," I told him.

"I've always had it in mind that oak and ash and thorn meant the trees the cross

was made out of, with the thorn for the crown of thorns."

"No, those were all trees of power before ever the Crucifixion took place.

You've already heard considerable talk about the oak as a special object of

veneration with the Druids. But maybe this ash will stand by us."

He set himself a-straddle of the pole and came down with the tomahawk, skillful

as air woodcutter I'd ever seen. He made a split in the narrow end, chopped

again and again, and then I took one split of it and he took the other. We put

our man on it as hard as we could, and dragged that pole in two for several

feet. Then Reuben

Manco cut off two chunks from the end he'd split, each about three feet long or

so. He gave me one of them.

"It feels like a good club," I allowed, giving it a heft.

"Well carry them along," he said, "no telling for what need."

Then he fumbled his canteen out of its carrying pouch. "Here, John," he said,

and reached it to me. "We deserve a mouthful of water just now. I could wish it

was a mouthful of that prime blockade down in the Forshay cabin."

"I could wish the same," I said, and drank. He took the canteen back and had a

cut out of it in his turn. Both of us swished the water round and round in our

mouths and let it seep down. That made us feel better.

"And here," said Reuben Manco. He took the elephant charm off of where it hung

on his neck and passed it to me. "That's a help, too. Wear it and trust in it."

I slung the thong over my head and tucked the thing into my shirt.

"I make it four perils that we've met and somehow circumvented," said Reuben

Manco as he pouched his canteen again. "Though perhaps circumventing isn't the

exact term when sometimes you go straight through. We killed that wild boar sent

to put his tusks into us. We escaped falling down that high cliff, or anyway I

did when you pulled me up from where I hung. We half-waded, half-swam, through

the mist. And we vaulted over the fire."

I took a look back at that fire. It seemed to be fading down into its gully.

"You reckon all these things are Druid doings," I said.

"Manifestly they're Druidism," he nodded his black head. "The boar, I told you,

was an animal of magic to the Celtic peoples. Steep heights of land were places

of special power. The Druids knew and governed the spirits of mist and fog. And

fire-it was sacred and mystical to the Druids and to almost everyone else. Even

to the Cherokees, my people."

"If there was just one Voth to tackle-" I began.

"But there are two," he said. "Brothers. A pair of brothers, as wise partners in

magic, can have more method and power than just two magicians working

separately. I daresay there's a mathematical explanation if we had time to work

it out. Two brothers, adept and prepared and determined, can present more than a

simple double problem."

"We're even and square with them, anyway," I said. "You called me your brother,

Chief, and I reckon if you say that, it's so. And it might could be that our

kind of brothers - the kind that chooses out one another - have a chance to turn

out better than just brothers born to the same father and mother, brothers that

have to do the best they can with just their own blood kin."

Reuben Manco laughed at that one. He sure enough laughed, in the moony night on

that mountain stuck so full of perils brought out and set against us. I saw his

white teeth shine. He put out his hand and gave me a good whack on the shoulder.

"John, you're magnificent," he said.

"Oh," I said, "I'm not about to claim magnificence to me. Mostly, all my life,

I've just strove to be a natural man."

He laughed again, and gave me another whack

"Whatever you are, you aren't an unnatural man," he vowed. "We've put ourselves

into a desperate situation together, but since we're in it, I'll say to the

world that I couldn't ask for a better partner."

Then he looked ahead of us. The fire behind us made it seem darker off yonder. I

made out belts of trees, and here and there rocks a-sticking up amongst them.

"Come on, John," he said, "let's see what comes next" As we started out, side by

side again, I began to wonder myself about what the fifth peril would be. Then I

told myself inside me, better not go to guess at that. Because, guessing at one

thing, you might could start a-fixing to meet just that one thing. And all the

while another thing, a worse thing, might really be on the wait for you.

XI

It was high time to look ahead, all right. There was more light than before,

with the moon swum farther up the sky. We could see that the balded-out place on

Wolter Mountain top ran on into where trees grew up a rise yonder. Those trees

looked right thick-grown, a-hanging darker and closer to one another than the

ones we'd come through so far.

When I started in to take longer steps so as to go faster, Reuben Manco hung

back. So I slowed down to stay with him.

"There's no headlong hurry for us, John," he said. "We mustn't get there tired."

That made me to take note that we'd been through some right tiring things. The

scramble along through the woods from the Forshay place, then that squirrel

climb up the cliff, the heave and strain to get Reuben Manco up from where he'd

fallen down, then the soggy mist and what had amounted to a swim in the deepest

part of a pond. The jump over the fire hadn't taken so much to do, but the other

things had sure enough told on us.

"You're right, as usual," I allowed to him. "But I feel right spry on my feet

just now."

"As I've said, we have plenty of time before midnight," he repeated to me. "At

this point, I doubt if we have to travel more than two miles or so. Well either

be where we're going in ample time to stop what we must stop, or well never get

there at all. The perils still waiting ahead may account for us if we don't be

careful."

As I walked slower with him, I saw the thing he meant It was a-getting better

all the time to be out there in the night with Chief Reuben Manco and hear what

he had to say about our job, about air other thing he cared to mention to me. I

took me a look back that string of fire that had jumped up so high and hot

looked sort of dimmed down now, low and fainty and near about to die into

itself.

"Yes, you can see that those flames are dwindling," said Reuben Manco. "They

were bright and fierce when we had to jump through them, but we did that. Now

they're no good any more, they're useless to our enemies. The same with the belt

of fog; we had no more than made our way through that than it began to dissolve

behind us."

Which was flat the truth, I reckoned.

"That fire and that mist, they weren't natural," I spoke my own thought. "Not

like that old boar pig, down yonder at the foot of the mountain. He was as

natural as air living soul could call for."

"He wasn't quite natural in that he wasn't truly American," said Reuben Manco.

"He was an example of a stock recently imported, which causes trouble. I read in

a newspaper the other day about an effort to ship those wild boars out of the

parks to where hunters can kill them. I can give you what the park

superintendent said, almost word for word. He pointed out that, because that

species of wild boar is non-native, it disrupts our natural environment."

I thought that over, a long enough time to take two steps and a breath.

"You might could say the same about white men a-coming here to America," I

offered him then. "The Indians had lived here all those thousands of years, and

nair ruined things. It's taken the white folks to do that, all across America."

He laughed one of his laughs that you scarce could catch. "I hear you say that

with admiration, John. It supports my notion that you have Indian blood in your

veins. Anyway, you think for yourself. And if a man can't do that, he isn't

really thinking."

"There may be a whole lot in what you say," I agreed him.

He pointed on ahead of us with his stick. "You can see quite a belt of forest

along there. It's heavily grown up here on the height, more than I remember. No

timber-cutter has ever come near it, by its looks. What can we expect from that

particular growth?"

"I don't rightly know how to answer that," I said. "Maybe oak and ash and

thorn."

He shot me a quick, scowly look. "Whatever made you say those names?"

"Likely because you mentioned them, just a while back."

"Yes, so I did." He hiked the chunk of ash tree in his brown hand. "Those are

three powerful trees, John. At least, so Druidic religious philosophy sees them.

We were speaking of non-native influences abroad here tonight. Druidism is one

of those, and you and I hadn't better stop with defeating it just locally. We'd

better close it out. Completely."

And he bit his teeth together on that. You could hear them click. I looked up

again at the moon. The light was strong, but it made things look worse, look

scarier, than the sunlight would. Special bad just then was the look of those

dark trees we were headed for.

The way I do now and then, I thought of something to make into a song. I

whispered words to myself:

Moon over Wolter Mountain,

What makes your face so white?

Strange things past all our countin'

Sneak out here in the night-

Reuben Manco spoke. He'd been a-looking up at the moon, too.

"She used to be a goddess," he said. "Not just the Druids called her that, not

just Europeans and Asiatics. The Cherokees did. Sometimes I feel a touch of

sadness when I think that men have gone to the moon and proved her to be just a

silent, dusty rock."

"Do the Voths think the moon's a goddess?" I wondered him.

"Undoubtedly they do. That's why you and I are out here tonight, to prevent them

from worshiping the moon in their balefully interesting way."

We kept on our walk toward where those trees grew. I thought of more words of

the song, even something of a tune to put them to:

We travel our way and wonder

If all of our hopes will fail;

Moon in the sky up yonder,

What makes your face so pale?

If so happen I'd fetched along my guitar, I could have tried it out, smoothed up

the words and the tune, made a sure enough song of it. Only, if I'd fetched my

guitar, up that steep rough climb and on through the mist and through the fire,

it likely wouldn't have been such a great shakes of a guitar by now.

Even in the light of the moon we'd spoken of, those trees looked black as ink I

reckoned to myself that I'd nair seen trees that dark-leafed, that secret to

themselves. I'd always liked trees of all kinds, I'd felt I belonged along with

them. Maybe it was a bad feeling now because people, the wrong ones, had fooled

with trees on that mountain, made them to do wrong. I walked with Reuben Manco

toward them.

We got close enough to make out how near one another the trees looked. They grew

close up, side by side, like the poles of a fence. Their branches all twined and

twisted together. And the moon nair put a beam to them. Reuben Manco took me by

the arm to make me stand.

"Let me go there first," he said, and I let him. He walked up under the branches

of those close-growing trees. He walked slow, he was springy on his toes, like a

man set ready to pull back quick if he had to.

"One thing is certain," he said over his shoulder to me. "Nothing like this

grove was here when I used to come up as a boy." He stood almost against the big

stem of a tree. "This is an oak," he named it.

"Oak," I repeated him, a-coming a few steps closer, with in my mind what he'd

told me about oaks and Druids. "And, twisting around it," he said next, "some

branches of thorn."

"Oak and ash and-" I started to say.

"Just stop right there," he spoke, quick and sharp, to cut me off. "Be careful

with those particular words in this situation." He turned his back on that fence

of dark tree trunks. "Well, John," he said, "there's nothing for us to do but go

through here."

Right like that he said it, in the calm way he'd said things all along. I nodded

to him in the moonlight I'd already heard how he felt there must be no a-going

round, no dodging a peril that-a-way. Perils, I repeated the word inside myself.

I was a-starting to get a little small bit tired of perils. They wore you out,

they wet you down and they scorched you. It got common, I felt as I wondered

myself just how long a good man's luck could hold out against perils. Hardly

forever, anyway.

Reuben Manco had gone back up against those trees. He poked with his ash stick

into a space betwixt two of them. It didn't look bigger than a hand's width.

"Here," he said to me, and next moment he'd squeezed himself in.

With him shoved out of sight that-a-way, I naturally had to follow. I fought

hard to get through that little small slice of an opening in bewixt two tall,

rough trunks. Oak they were, by the feel of them. The darkness seemed to jump in

round us like a blanket flung close.

Mostly I do all right in the dark. Like maybe I've mentioned one time or other,

there's an old notion that a child born in the night can feel his way anywhere,

and my birth time had been near about the stroke of midnight back yonder. Maybe

that's what put my feet to a good feel of their way amongst the roots twined

under them. But, gentlemen, it was no easy trick to work among the trunks.

I put out my ash stick to seek for openings where I might get through. I scraped

my shoulder and my cheek on branch stobs. I felt with my other hand. I ask

myself today, did those tree trunks have a strange feel to my finger, did some

of them seem to have skin on them instead of natural bark? Did one or other of

them have a throbby beat in them, like blood in a living thing? It might could

have been I was imagining stuff the like of that, a-being up there on creepy

Wolter Mountain that-a-way, and closed in now by tree with branches crisscrossed

to hold me, thorns to rake and jab at me. That sort of thing, after what I'd

already been through with those other perils, on my way to do what we'd decided

must be done. But if it was my imagination, then it was right powerful for

strength.

I feared I'd lost touch of Reuben Manco, but then I came almost up against his

back, my hand on it though I couldn't rightly make him out. Branches crowded

between us. Maybe he'd stopped so I could catch up, maybe he'd been caught

there. I didn't get round to asking him later on.

"Use your ash stick, John," he said, in a breathy whisper. "Perhaps it can help

you some way. Push in now, there where it seems thickest."

It seemed thickest all the way round us right then. Over us the branches strung

and wove themselves together, dark and heavy, a-making a thatch like a roof. I

couldn't see one scrap of the light that moon made in the sky somewhere else,

the light we'd had to help us so far. All we had was a blackness so thick it

seemed to close on us like muddy water, and trees and sprouts and branches close

round us like as if they were woven tight as a basket.

I pushed with my stick, the way he'd told me. And I could swear, it made a way

for me. Reuben Manco moved a step ahead. Likely he was up to the same trick. A

branch of thorns came down on my neck and shoulder. It didn't fall, it came

down; and it raked me deep, like the claws of an animal, I thought. When I tried

to yank clear of it, those thorns shoved themselves tighter, deeper. I hit at it

with the stick, and right off it let me go.

"Ash is on our side, John," Reuben Manco got tight words out to me. He was

a-striving with all his might, too. "Ash - it will work for one man as well as

another."

Because he'd prayed over it, because ash had helped us jump and sail up over

that wall of fire, he knew that thing. I harked to him, and felt better. I made

a swing with my stick at a great big tree. I swear on my soul it pulled off away

from me and let me step past it. I vow, that was a creepy thing, a tree on the

move, even on the move out of my way.

All that time, thorns raked into us here and there and up and down. My shirt was

ripped, my pants were ripped. Thorns stabbed amongst my hair, they clutched

there like fingers. They pushed into my scalp, they seemed to grope for my eyes.

I whirled my stick round my head to drive them away. Without that stick and

Reuben Manco's prayer on it, what might could have happened? I don't care to

wonder that.

Perhaps our ash sticks made the ash trees in there more or less leave us be, but

the oaks and thorns wanted to hold onto us there, do something to us. A-batting

and a-whacking, I wished my eyes could get used to that dark. I felt branches

all round my knees and ankles, like as if they tried to catch me in their forks

or wrap round me. They were like snakes. They had Me, and I pure down hated

them, I wished with all my heart I had an axe, or even Reuben Manco's tomahawk.

Though that might could have been the wrong thing.

Anyway, the ash club likely was better than an axe. Reuben Manco must have

reckoned that, for he never drew out the tomahawk. We fought on, deeper and

deeper among the trees, with the big wonder in our hearts if ever they'd come to

an end at all. Sometimes it was like a-being in the middle of where a house had

fallen in on you, boards and beams and timbers and rafters all round and over

you. They shoved, they dug. I had to hike the muscle of my arm to use my stick

to prod me some room in all that shoving, smashing clutter.

I reckon I must have been bleeding from a dozen places when I saw a little scrap

of soft brightness somewhere ahead. I shoved toward it, among those crowding,

grabbing trees. Branches tried to hang onto me, but I fought loose of them. I

came out into open ground betwixt two big, rough oak trunks, and for a second

there I thought I'd fall down. I leaned hard on my ash stick and gulped in air,

the way I'd done when I got out of the mist.

"Are you all right, John?" the voice of Reuben Manco inquired me.

I looked round and saw him then, half a dozen steps into the open. The moon gave

me a good clear sight of him. His black hair was flung air which-a-way, and one

of his sleeves was ripped from the shoulder to the cuff. His elbow poked

through. He was a-resting on his stick, the way I did.

"So we've made it past another peril," he said, as quiet and cool as if he'd

been a-mentioning the time of day.

"I reckon so," I replied him, "and we look as if we'd fought our way out of a

hard times party."

I dabbed at my own hair. A thorn was still caught in it, as big as a six-penny

nail and as sharp as a wasp's stinger. I looked down at where blood showed,

black wet, on my sleeves in the moonlight. My shirt was torn half off me, my

pant legs were torn. I felt my cheek. It was chopped open and bleeding.

"Look back at those trees," Reuben Manco bade me.

I turned round, my legs steady now. By heaven, the trees looked just like a

grove of trees. They weren't set as thick and tight as I well knew they'd been.

"We won past them, and the power is departing from them," said Reuben Manco.

"They were our fifth peril, John. Two more wait for us ahead. And quite likely

they'll be the most perilous of all."

"You've got to give it to those Voth brothers," I made out to remark. They're a

hard-working pair of somebodies, and that's the true word for us."

Reuben Manco laughed. It was a hard, ugly laugh this time.

"And I imagine their hard work and planning wasn't for nothing, John. Quite

likely this fifth peril set things up for the sixth peril that will be coming."

"What way could it do that?" I asked.

"Look at how those thorns scratched and dug into our flesh," he said. "Look at

the wounds all over us. Both of us are bleeding."

I studied my arms and hands and I felt my face. "I don't reckon I'm a-shedding

enough blood to make me weak or the like of that." I swung that ash club he'd

given me. "I can still use this."

"Will that ash club be enough?" he wondered us. "Look on ahead, John, the way we

must go."

There was light enough to see right well. We stood and faced rocks now. Whatever

trees we'd had to push through were all behind us. I saw roughish country, with

chunks of dark stone shoved up in it, here and there. Those chunks looked like

sheds and walls and houses, some way, put up by who could say what crazy-headed

builders.

"Shoo, Chief, we can make it through there all right," I said at once. "I don't

see air great steeps or heights. We may have to pick our way amongst those rocky

things, but we can see to do that. It won't be a caution to what we've come over

already so far."

"John," he said, the tiredest and saddest he'd made himself sound so far, "I

told you I didn't recognize that enchanted grove we conquered somehow. But I do

know those rocks, and I know what we were told lurked there."

"Lurk?" I repeated him. "That means hide, is that right?

"Yes, that's right I was never allowed to go as far as that interesting rock

arrangement when I was a boy."

He sat down, Indian fashion, on his moccasin heels.

"You sit down, too, and catch your breath," he said. "I'm going to have to

explain to you about the Raven Mockers."

XII

That's what Reuben Manco said: the Raven Mockers.

I'd heard the name of them before that, one-two times from Reuben Manco his own

self and a couple times more from other old Cherokee fellows I've known well

enough for them to talk to me about it. Maybe it sounds foolish to put all these

things out and say I never once had aught of a notion they weren't gospel truth.

But after what had already gone with us, that hard, far way up Wolter Mountain

in the night, to hear Reuben Manco's talk was like to hear somebody's talk in

your dream. Because whatever's said in a dream, air word and air sentence sounds

like the true gospel truth. You're in the world of that dream where things are

different from when you're awake.

He explained me things about the Raven Mocker belief while we sat there

together, and later on when the business was all over and done with he filled me

in a heap more about them. By that later time I'd had me a plenty of good

reasons to believe. And here today, I reckon folks in general should ought to

know what the Raven Mockers are, and what they can fix to do to you.

The way he told me about it then, they're one of the things the old-time

Cherokees call anisgina, a name they use that means different kinds of pure down

bad creatures. It doesn't mean only the ghosts of dead folks a-using round to

get into mischief, but likewise other sorts of things that aren't ghosts

exactly, but aren't a natural kind of thing either. Evil spirits, I should

reckon, is like enough as good as a word as you can say for it in the American

language.

Amongst those anisgina things, I should offer that the Raven Mockers can be put

down for near about the worst of all. They were given that name because they can

fly if they want to, and when they fly, they make a noise like a raven. Reuben

Manco imitated it for me, faaa-kraa, a pure down ugly noise. They make it their

chief business to help a man to die, you might could say. If somebody gets down

flat on his back, bad sick or wounded, the Raven Mockers fly in and crowd all

round and over him like a bunch of, well, like ravens. Most times they make

themselves right hard to see by air real man or woman except maybe a wise old

Cherokee medicine man. And the medicine man has got to pray his strongest

prayers and work his best and fastest and sensiblest with all the magic he

knows, so as to keep those Raven Mockers off from the one they're out to kill.

Recause they're a-fixing to suck out his life, suck the very blood out of his

heart. I've heard tell some such tale about another sort of things in the

countries of the Old World. Only folks from over yonder call them vampires, and

their voices shake just to say the name.

Raven Mockers can make themselves seen or unseen whichever they like. They can

even pass themselves off to be just ordinary folks. Another time than when we

were up there on that mountain, Reuben Manco narrated to me about a Cherokee

hunter who was a-following a deer on a lone trail through some woods and came up

on what he reckoned was just a stranger man and his wife, a-sitting in their

camp. He sat down with them, the friendly way Indians can have with other

Indians, and he thought they were all right till he made out what they had

a-cooking on a green twig over a fire, to eat for their dinner. It was a human

heart. So then, he quick got right up and took on out of there fast as he could

run, and right glad he was that he got away and lived to tell of it.

But what Reuben Manco gave me while we sat together in the light on the moon was

just only his main rundown of the facts on the Raven Mockers. For they were what

he purely expected we'd run smack into if we kept on a-going that way we'd

taken.

Anyhow, we'd have to keep on a-going, or else turn back and know inside

ourselves that we deserved the name of cowards forever. It was one or the other.

But as I sat on the rocks and heard his talk, I had it in mind that all those

promised perils we'd met and found our way through weren't perils any great

much, not compared to what seemed to be a-hanging round to wait for us up ahead.

When Reuben Manco was done with what he'd taken the time to tell me, we both

stood up again and kind of stretched.

"Brother John," he said, "did you ever stop and meditate, what trouble you can

get into when you're being unselfish?"

"I reckon that thing can be truly said, Chief," I replied him. "But I also

reckon that no selfish fellow gets it one tad easier or happier in life than the

unselfish ones."

"We won't quarrel about that," he grinned. "And forgive me for wondering if you

were sorry about this project of ours."

He and I drank another mouthful of water each, and there was just a little small

bit of it left to slosh inside his canteen. Then we studied all those rocks up

ahead of us.

They stood a-waiting there yonder, clumped up together in the night. They were

sort of like a settlement of houses, I thought, only no windows to have lights

in them. Some of them were big-house size, and back in the midst of them was

stuck up a sort of rocky finger, like a crooked steeple for a church. It didn't

go straight up in the air like a sure-enough steeple. It angled off to the side,

all black and secret and knobbed, and it looked to be a-pointing toward a

blazing star near where that full moon hung so pale.

"Hold on a moment before we go closer," said Reuben Manco. "Here, right here

beside us, is what I hope can bring us some good luck."

I gopped down at the brushy clump his finger pointed out to me.

"Shoo," I said, "that looks to be just only some cedar scrub."

"That's exactly what it is," he agreed me. "And cedar has always been a

particularly good medicine tree for us Cherokees, because it's a bad medicine

tree for all kinds of anisgina."

He went close to the clump and bent himself down and twisted off green, leafy

twigs from it. He crushed them hard betwixt his hands and then rubbed the juice

of them on his face. "Do as I do, John," he bade me. "This may be the very help

we need."

So I laid down my ash stick and pulled myself some little branches of cedar.

Their hard green needles mashed up when I pressed them in my hands. I laid them

up against my face and rubbed them there, the way he'd done. They stung where

they came to the cut on my cheek. The smell of them was sharp and right good.

"Use more," he kept a-telling me. "Use plenty of them. Rub them on your neck,

that's what the enemy strikes for. Yes, and up and down your arms, too, and

wherever else your skin is exposed."

Then he started in to sing under his breath. Likely it was the same prayer song

he'd hummed and crooned over those pieces of ash tree we had.

I'd have sung that song if I'd known it, but, not knowing it, I kept still.

Otherwise I did the same thing he'd done, I dabbed those cedar leaves all over

me where I showed out of my clothes. On the places the thorns had raked me,

their juice smarted. Reuben Manco kept on a-breaking off more little branches,

and he stuck them into his belt all the way round. I copied that, too, and I

shoved others down inside the high tops of my shoes and drew up the laces as

tight as I could, so as to hold them there. We both chewed up some tags of the

cedar. They were tangy sharp on my tongue, made a good taste there. And I poked

a big green cedar twig into the ring that held the elephant charm to the thong

round my neck.

Reuben Manco showed me how to rub yet more cedar all over the length of my ash

stick from one end to the other. After that, he gathered near about all the

branches we'd left on the clump. They made a good armful, and he took a string

from his pocket and tied them together. He ran his arm through the loop and

slung the whole bundle to his elbow.

"That place up ahead has always been described to me as being as much like hell

as possible," he said, calm and quiet "Do you believe in hell, John?"

"I reckon I do believe in hell," I replied him, "and I'll wager you it's so full

of sinners that their feet stick out the windows."

He laughed at that, a truly happy-sounding laugh. "I believe in it too," he told

me. "I've seen too many outlying precincts of it lately for me to be skeptical."

He hiked up his bundle of cedar again.

"All right," he said, "we're probably as ready to go ahead there as we can

possibly manage."

Side by side, we made ourselves walk toward that big old clutter of rocks where,

he'd said, trouble was right likely to be a-waiting for us.

The light right then and there was more or less about what I'd have expected to

find on the moon itself, up yonder sometime when you could see things by what

was reflected from off the sun by the Earth; Earthshine, I reckon is the best

thing to call it. Where the rocks stood huddled in that light, they looked all

softly gleamy, but another sight less than as gleamy as the moon was. In the

shadows that lay down amonst them, things were as deep black as if they'd been

painted over there with tar.

And one thing I could feel right off, that stretch of the rock of the mountain

down under our feet was plumb bare and solid and bald. No ferns or tufty grass,

nor yet even moss, grew there. The last growing stuff we'd come across was that

one scrubby bunch of cedar, back yonder. In air place else, it was like as if

somebody had come along with a chunk of fire and burned off each single scrap of

growing thing that otherwise might be there, might be popped up here and yonder

betwixt the rocks. Time and again since that night, I've wondered myself if that

was what had happened, if there'd been truly some kind of burn-off there, for

one reason or another.

Our two pairs of feet, his in moccasins, mine in shoes, made little clinky

sounds on the face of that dry rock as we made ourselves walk closer, closer. On

there ahead, the big clutter of boulders looked more like a bunch of houses than

before, and now I could make out what looked like a dark alleyway in amongst

them.

That put one more creepy feeling into my mind, as I kept a-tramping along, one

foot in front of the other. Those big house-shaped chunks of stone had to be

just chunks of stone, I lectured to myself. There wasn't air point in imagining

that they had roofs and walls to them.

And naturally there couldn't be windows, not anyway toward us as we closed in.

But what if there were windows, and, all of a sudden quick, something or other

lighted a lamp in one of them? I shook my head, hard, to get shed of that ugly

fancy, but somehow it didn't seem to shake out.

"Come ahead, John," Reuben Manco half whispered to me, though he didn't have the

need to tell me that I was a-coming ahead, all right, with that stout old chunk

of ash tree clamped tight in my right fist.

By then, we'd brought ourselves along right close to the first big rock beside

where the black alleyway-place opened and took itself in beyond. That rock was

house-size, all right. If it had been a sure enough house, it would have been a

good comfortable size for a family of, say, four. It was tall enough for two

stories, and up at the top it rose like the peak of a roof. I'd come near enough

to it to make out that its side looked to be how a rock is that's been split off

from another chunk of the same stuff. It hadn't been left right smooth, but not

right rough, either. You can see pieces of slate broken off like that, pieces of

shale broken off like that. Broken granite or limestone is more rough and jaggly

and all mommicked up to the look. I reckoned that, by bright sunlight, that

house-shaped rock would be a pale brown. But by that light of the moon, it was

more tawny than pale. And it had that sneaky look of a house, so much so that I

wondered right out loud, "Why in hell doesn't it have windows?"

"I can't help but ask myself the same question," said Reuben Manco's soft voice

alongside me. "I can feel myself being looked at"

And that was what, that feeling of something a-looking at us. The way it had

been down below on the Forshay place when we'd had that notion of spies a-using

all round about us here and there. Only up on that mountain, it was a right much

stronger feeling.

Did you ever have to march down the street in a parade, with a whole slew of

folks all pushed up together along the curbs and a-giving you the eye? You can

feel the weight of their eyes when that happens, and I felt it right then and

there, high up on those rocks in the light of the moon, as Reuben Manco and I

passed along close to that big house-looking chunk and pointed ourselves to go

into the dark passageway where God and all the angels knew what might could be

a-waiting there to tole us in.

For about a second's time I did think there was a window up in the rock, after

all, though likely it was only a flicker in the moonlight on one place of it.

Reuben stopped at the mouth of the dark open place and tried his best to see

into it. After a moment he started on in, with his stick held out in front of

him to feel the way along, like a blind man with a cane. I made myself follow in

back of him. In the moonless alley, he was only just a black blob there a-moving

in front of me. I knew that the rocks made high walls to the two sides of us;

rocks as dark as inside a cave, and with no windows in them, either.

My shoes made echoes in there, echoes that growled. Reuben Manco's moccasins

just shuffled on their way. And there, too, we could hear those ghosts of

voices, but not quite the same voices that had seemed to speak to us at those

other creepy places. These said something like oooh oooh, so pure down sort and

sad you had to strain with your ears to hear it. Oooh oooh, they said to us,

like as if they tried to answer the sounds of our feet. I wondered myself what

it was they were a-trying to say to us, was it good or bad.

The passage wound and wound betwixt the tall rocks, this-a-way and that-a-way.

Time and time again, we bumped into those rocks as we groped ourselves along. It

was that plumb hard to see where to go. At last, before we knew that we'd come

to it, we found ourselves out in the open, where a soft wash of light shed

itself down.

There was a space amongst the rocks that had shoved all round us. I felt there

was something up overhead, it might could be even a growth of some kind, though

we hadn't seen air growth in air place, all along the way past the cedar scrub.

Maybe it was just some more rocks up there above us, opened out with cracks

betwixt them to filter down enough light for us to see by a little. And what we

saw there didn't comfort us, not one bit at all.

Because, over yonder to one side, in an angle of two split-apart rocks, there

stood a skeleton. It was as pale as cream and as silent as the stones

themselves, a-seeming to look on us with those shadowy eyeholes in its bare

skull

I recollect that I said something I wouldn't want written down for my last words

on this Earth. I hiked up my old ash stick, ready to hit out with it if I had

to. But Reuben Manco took it easier anyhow.

"When somebody shows us that many naked bones, he's past being dangerous," he

muttered to me, and it was good to think that

He craned his neck to look all round the open space. It was as big as a big yard

in there. The bottom of it was as hard as a paved floor, and the rocky sides

rose up high all round us, with starry sky far up above. As we stood there to

look, I thought that there were things a-sliding over us in the air. Not bats.

They were another sight too big for bats. The flew back and forth, too fast for

us to get a good look at them. Maybe I wouldn't have much relished a-having a

good look at them.

Meanwhile, Reuben Manco walked, slow and steady, toward that skeleton stood up

in the split corner of the wall. After just a second, I walked there likewise.

"Nothing to fear," said Reuben Manco, a-talking quietly as he always did. "It's

just a set of human bones. Perfectly articulated. It was deliberately set up

there, as you can see. Undoubtedly somebody died here, and his flesh is gone."

I gave it a study, close up.

"Look, Chief, it's been fastened to the rock," I pointed out. "Looky there, it

was chained in place."

That was a fact. Round where its waist had been, where naught remained except

the knobby backbone, a ring of links held it up against the rock so it wouldn't

fall. I could see the lean bones that had been the hands. They were joined in

front. The bony fingers were twined together, the way you hold your hands to say

a prayer.

"And he was spiked through the head," said Reuben Manco.

That was the truth, too. A big, rough, black-looking spike had been driven right

betwixt the empty eyes, and into the rock beyond. I came closer to look at it.

"It's iron," said Reuben Manco. "Eaten with rust."

"I judge that his folks have given up a-waiting for him to come back home."

"The spike through the head was a ceremonial business with the ancient Druids,"

said Reuben Manco, very softly. "Well, whoever he was, he died an ugly death.

And so did his companion there just at his feet.

I stooped and saw what he'd made out in the darkness at floor level. More bones

there, laid flat and fallen apart, beside the standing skeleton.

"Two of them," said Reuben Manco.

And two of us, I thought. We'd have to look sharp if we didn't want to be left

as bones our own selves.

"How do you reckon they got killed here?" I wondered us.

"They must have come for what they thought was a good purpose, John. The way we

have come. It's an extremely bad place to come."

Again he studied those two sets of bones, all over.

"I don't see any sure evidence of any violence, though of course it may have

happened just to their flesh. Well, but theorizing seldom helps very much. Let's

keep going along."

We could make out, just barely, where the alleyway went on beyond to another

open space. It looked even darker and narrower, the alley, than where we'd first

gone into it. Reuben Manco reached out with his stick and felt his way in, and

again I followed along on his heels. As I did that, one of the flying things

swooped down close to our heads, and I thought I could see its eyes like soft

sparks. Then it was gone away somewhere, out of sight again.

I puzzled myself about the Raven Mockers he'd told me those things about. It

stands to reason, tales of such a sort come down from something that was real,

or anyway had been real one time. I recollected all that talk with Holly and

Luke at the Forshay cabin about old, old kinds of men, or you might could call

them just half-men, that the science folks thought had been in America all those

long-ago ages back yonder. Half-man things would naturally hate true men; maybe

because they were too close the same in some ways, too far apart in others. I

tried to study what it had been like in those early times, with wars betwixt men

and half-men. They would have had to be pure down terrible wars, fought till one

side or the other won. I'd been in a war myself, and, gentlemen, that had been

terrible enough. War is hateful. Too bad that's how we go about to settle

things.

This part of the alleyway was narrower than the first part, as I said. And it

was another sight darker, too. I figured maybe the rock had closed itself clean

over, above our heads. We walked single file in that choking blackness, me

behind Reuben Manco. I could feel one wall with my stick and the other one with

my hand. I heard our feet when they made more echoes in there. Or was something

a-moving along with us? No telling, not for sure anyway. I wonder myself now if

I wished I could be sure.

We came out again into more open space, stretched out far wider than the last

one, and the moon glowed down to show it to us there. High walls of rock all the

way round, but this time they weren't solid. They had caves in them, each one as

black as the night of judgment day. A whole long string of caves, all the way

this and that. Softly, softly as something you can barely remember, softly as.

the sound of water far, far off, I heard oooh oooh oooh, soft and sad. And I

wished to heaven it wouldn't make itself heard.

In the middle of the rocky open space there lay water. I could make out the

shine and flicker of it in the light of the moon and the stars. First off, I

couldn't give the least notion of a guess how deep it lay, nor yet if it stirred

with some kind of current to it. But it was big enough for a big swimming pool,

if some strange creature or other felt like a-going in for a dip.

And at its edge stood the first tree I'd seen since we'd cut the cedar branches

back yonder. It wasn't a tree much bigger than a tall bush, and right there in

the month of June it didn't have air single leaf a-growing on it. It's branches

clawed out their naked twigs like the prongs on the antlers of a big buck deer.

I near about expected it to toss those antler-branches.

Reuben Manco wasn't a-looldng at the tree, not right then. "I can see a way out

for us on the far side, just over there," he said to me, and he let his voice

sound happy to say it

But right when he spoke was when the soft oooh oooh turned all of a sudden to a

loud, nasty kraa^kraa-kraa, all over the place. And things came a-stealing out,

on all sides of us, from those dark caves every which-a-way in the moonlight.

XIII

Gentlemen, how can my poor tongue tell you what those things looked like? How

can I tell you aught about them unless I try to say how they looked?

Naturally, I didn't see them plain, not right off when they were a-coming out of

their dark places into the moonlight, to slide into a sort of circle round us.

My first thought was, they were dark and sort of secret - they stood up but they

weren't right tall. Maybe five feet or so, for the most part. They looked to be

draped and folded round about, like as if they had on cloaks or blankets, like

the old-timey Indians. Their heads were round and dark, with a knobby look all

over them, and the heads and those wrappings were the same sooty-looking color

that, in the sunlight, might could have been a deep, dirty brown. They'd come on

out and spread this-a-way and that to surround us, and they stood and looked on

us with eyes like coals of fire that had died down to a scummy pink.

"Stand back to back with me, John," said Reuben Manco, calm and quiet and

steady, the way he'd talked from the first of things. "Stand and face them on

your side and I'll face them on mine."

I felt him brush against my shoulder as he moved on round behind me. I did what

he said to do. I faced my side of that circle.

In that much of the surround I could see, one of them came on a little out from

amongst the close bunch of its fellows. I don't truly reckon it was air much

different from the others, saving that it was a shade bigger perhaps, but it

acted like a leader amongst them. It came on a couple-three steps,

stiffy-legged, toward me. I could look on it and see it, plainer than I could

see the whole pack of them at the one time.

Right off, it put me in mind of something. Its face looked like a mask, but it

wasn't. That was its sure-enough face. What showed of its darkness when the moon

came down on it, was like those rocks up off the way to the Forshay spring on

the mountain trail. And enough like a mask that you'd wonder yourself why it

didn't take the mask off. Only no such thing. It wouldn't have come off.

It had that monkeyish look to it, only not just monkey, either. Monkeys are

funny, and this wasn't funny. I mean, the skull was squashed low and shallow

above and its jaw was wide and shallow below. Its mouth hung loose and ugly and

went all the way across, and its two pink-shining eyes hung deep back in it, in

hollows like pits under two big bony brows like jackknife handles. But not funny

like a monkey, or either with that sad monkey look It was pure poison mean. And,

I reckoned, hungry.

For a second there, face to face with it, I told myself we'd been gumps not to

fetch along those guns Creed Forshay had wanted us to take at his place. But in

the same second I likewise told myself that a gun wouldn't be air good

whatsoever against such a thing as that, not the biggest gun a man could tote

along with him.

Meanwhile, I stood there and saw it, and it sure enough saw me. It gave me a

good stare with its glowing eyes, the way it might be a-trying to figure out

some way to get a hold of me. I grabbed tighter hold on my ash club.

All through the rest of the close-standing bunch behind that one I could hear

that sigh of sound, oooh oooh, like as if I was a-being mourned for without my

being done for yet. But the one who had stepped out there in front of me made

nair sound whatsoever. It stood, and then it took one more stiff step on what

must have been short legs and big, lumpy feet. Its coals of eyes glinted at me.

"Just stand steady, John," said Reuben Manco next to my ear. "I think they're a

trifle afraid to close in if we face them."

I couldn't reckon what might could be a-going on, that side where we stood his

watch. But one, at least, of that dark, ugly crowd was a-trying to set itself to

close in on me. It stirred another slow step closer, and the drapes of dark

stuff round it opened up.

And then I could see it wasn't a-wearing a cloak or blanket, nothing of the

sort. No kind of clothes at all. For the long, jointy arms spread out to either

side. And the drape spread out with them and stretched from them. It was grown

to them. It was part of them.

I could see a dimness of the moon's bright light that soaked through that

stretched-out stuff. That stuff was a kind of skin. It grew downward from the

wrists and elbows of the long arms, it was fast to the two sides of the squatty

body, all the way down to the ankles of the short, chunky legs. It was like the

spread of an umbrella, or of the wings of a bat. Only it had no ribs to it, just

the wide-pulled stretch of it you could see the moonlight through.

Right at that moment was when I told myself for sure that these things must be

the Raven Mockers I'd heard tell about from Reuben Manco.

I don't rightly know today whether I was scared at that time. A thing can come

along and happen to you, and you don't have the time to make up your mind if

you're scared, because there's so almighty much else you've got to tend to

somehow. Right then, I seemed to tell myself that if these were the Raven

Mockers, I was plumb lucky that one of them had moved out to be ahead of the

others. Because that-a-way, it had made itself some sort of leader. And if

there's a bunch of anything against you, pick out just one of them to be the

leader and try to settle things with that one. The others just might could wait

back and watch instead of a-ganging up on you.

When I made up my mind to that, I decided to say something.

"All right," I told that Raven Mocker who had stepped out to me, "I don't

rightly know if you're the meanest one in this crowd, but I reckon you're sure

God the ugliest. Nobody can deny you that."

It stood there and seemed to hear me, and it winnowed those wing-skins wider. I

studied that maybe it wanted to wrap me up in them. With the wing-things spread

out tight on the arms, I could make out that it had hands, too, held open. The

fingers were long and knobby-jointed, like stalks of dry cane. They had the

meanest-looking of claws spread out at their tips. Its head tilted to one side,

and I had a better look at the monkey face. Its brows were pulled together into

a frown, the mouth stretched into a grin, and in the mouth were great big teeth,

ragged and stale-looking in a ray of the moon. It was as ugly-looking a face as

I've said.

Back to back with me, Reuben Manco mumbled words in his Cherokee talk. Prayers,

I made no doubt. I wondered if one of the Raven Mockers yonder was a-making a

move toward him, too, but I didn't dare look back to find out. I had my own

business to tend to, right there in front of me.

"All right, come on," I dared that one who'd dared me. "Come ahead, and don't

stop and tarry by the way. You're a-looking for trouble, and I've got a good

lavish plenty of it for you, right here and now."

I hefted my stout ash club a little more than waist high in front of me. I

grinned my own teeth at the Raven Mocker, though well I knew they didn't look so

deadly hungry as its teeth. I moved my feet a little apart, the right one

forward, to stand more solid and ready.

Another windy flap of its spread wing-skins, and it came a-squattering in at me.

All the others sighed out oooh when it made its move. I saw it open its

wing-things all the way to fling them round me. Then I slid my right foot in

toward it and made a swing with my club. It slammed right straight in at the

Raven Mocker's knobby dark head, but it didn't hit against aught that was

rightly solid. It felt the way it would have felt if I'd smacked it into

fast-flowing water, it bobbed in my hand was all. But, solid whack or not, the

Raven Mocker went back into a stumble. I saw it near about fall down. It flapped

the wing-things to stay on its feet or hind paws or whatever you want to call

them. It hollered out kraa-kraa, and well I knew that it could be hurt and that

I'd hurt it The whole circle of the others moaned oooh all together, and to me

they sounded bothered.

The one I'd hit that hard lick just tottered and scraped with its feet to grab

hold of the ground under them. A man would have gone flat down under a whack

like that, but the Raven Mocker was no man, was nothing to be fought like a man.

It got itself steady and came a-stumping in toward me again, with its wings

spread. I jabbed at it with the end of my club, hard as I could jab.

Like before, I didn't hit a solid thing, no more than I'd seemed to hit aught

real when I slammed down at its head. The ash wood just drove and sank on

through whatever that ugly dark body was, went right on through like through a

bucket of slush. I almost stumbled down on my face. I felt the wing-skins as

they brushed in to try to wrap round me, and I got a whiff of smell like from a

snake den, but I straightened myself up away and out of reach from them. Next

moment, the Raven Mocker had stiff-legged on back away from me, three-four shaky

steps, and the other behind it gave back a little too.

Kraa-kraa-kraa, all of them made their hellacious ear-hurting noise together.

Some of them had sort of climbed their way up in the air, a-beating their

wing-skins to flop and flutter clear from the ground. I tried to crowd my back

up against Reuben Manco's, but I couldn't find him there to crowd to. He had

gone away from behind me.

"Chief!" I hollered out my loudest, and swung my head round to look for what had

gone with him, my eyes off from the ones at my own side.

Then's when they all rushed me, and quick I hit again, before they were close in

enough to do their own hitting. I felt the flap of their wing-skins. One of them

scraped my face. It had that sickly snaky smell, it felt sweaty and dirty. They

were all a-trying to grab onto me, swaddle me up, maybe shut off my breath. I

fought back at them and only half-felt them, it was like a swim in the

almightiest nasty water in the world. One had its claws a-driving at my throat,

but it snatched them quick back away with a kraa-kraa howl that all but deafened

my ears. That loud racket made the rest of them pull off away, and I wiggled

myself out from amongst them. The cedar, or that good ash pole, or the elephant

charm slung round my neck, or likely all three-they'd helped me get away right

then.

"Chief I" I yelled again.

Then I saw where he'd gone off to. He'd likewise pulled himself clear somehow,

had broken his way out through that dark, flopping crowd. He'd made a run like a

rabbit toward the pool yonder at the center of the open space, with all the

stars a-hanging down overhead like ripe shiny fruits about to drop. I saw him,

all stooped over by that naked tree with its bare twiggy branches like deerhorns

above him.

That very same moment I saw him, the whole bunch of the Raven Mockers wheeled

itself around, and I reckon they all saw him, too. One and all, they started to

stumble that-a-way to get after him again.

But Reuben Manco had quick grabbed him up a scatter of twigs from under the

tree, and he'd struck fire right against the roots. I reckon he must have used

one of those flip-on pipe lighters. I saw a finger of flame blaze itself up, and

then he had gone down on one knee beside it, a-doing something or other I

couldn't make out. Up came vapory curls of smoke, full of sparks, from that fire

he'd set there.

The Raven Mockers all sighed out together at that, miserable and creepy-sounding

with their awful voices. They sort of teetered on their lumps of feet and

flapped up and down with their wing-skins. Just right then, they weren't

a-pushing close round me. So I up and ran like hell and got myself to where

Reuben Manco was.

The tree had burst up all a climbing blaze of fire. Its wood must have been as

dry as a twist of hay. I saw the hot flames as they jumped and scrambled up into

those antlery branches, a-making each twig burn like a candle. The flames made

red, bright dances of glow on the rocks round about, and on the water. Reuben

Manco swung himself round to face me. His face flickered in the firelight.

"Here, John, use this," he said.

He shoved something at me and I took it. It was a bunch of those cedar twigs

he'd fetched along, all wrung tight round one another and set afire at one end.

I got a tangy whiff of the smoke. "Use that against them," he said, and lifted

up another burning twist in his own hand.

I made a quick turn round on my boot heel, under the trembling light from that

burning tree. The Raven Mockers had come to group themselves round us again, but

this time they hung back off. One held up his wing-skin like a cloak to hide his

monkey face from the light and smoke. I saw their eyes sort of shimmer, saw the

jaggy teeth in their open mouths. I waited for them to try a rush at us. But

they didn't rush. They stood where they were, with their big ugly mouths gopped

open.

"Easy, John," said Reuben Manco. "We'll make our own approach march this time."

Slow as slow but steady as steady, he made a step forward. Another step, more

steps. He carried his cedar torch held up high over his head, his ash stick low

and ready at his side in the other hand. I kept along with him. He waved his

torch and it gave off a swirl of bright, hot sparks. In front of him, the dark

line bowed back in a waver.

By God, they acted scared of us.

"I think it's going to work," said Reuben Manco, barely loud enough for me to

hear the words.

We kept a-walking on toward them, and they kept on their way back, not fast, but

on the move. I recollected what Reuben Manco had allowed to me about the power

of cedar smoke with such things as that. It appeared like as if they just

couldn't much stand up to the smell of its burning that-a-way.

Reuben Manco swung his torch back and forth across him from left to right, as

far as his arm would go both ways. More sparks danced up from the burning cedar.

The braids of his hair danced on his shoulders. The light flickered in and out

on those big, staring faces, dark and monkeyfied, and the fire-coal eyes in the

faces blinked off as they turned themselves away. I swung my torch, too, while

we walked toward them. We walked close. That part of the line we walked at gave

back from us, and back, the two ends not moving as fast as the middle. The line

made a bow away from us. The wing-skins fluttered in it, the faces bobbed and

scrunched and turned away.

"Swing your fire around and around, John," Reuben Manco told me. "We don't want

any of them closing in and getting behind us."

I whirled my torch round my head. It stirred the air and made the fire blaze up

and crackle. I heard oooh as the ones in front backed away from the cedar smoke

that smelled so sharp and strong in the air. They weren't about to wait for us

to come to them.

"Straight ahead," said Reuben Manco, a-going straight ahead his own self.

And I said inside myself, if this sort of night had to be passed up on this

mountaintop so full of what shouldn't ought to have ever been, I sure enough had

the right sort of friend along with me. For he was a medicine man of the

Cherokees, the tribe that was called one of the Civilized Nations, but which

hadn't purely given up all of its old, old ways and knowledges just to be

civilized. Now Reuben Manco was half-whispering, half-singing again in his

Cherokee language. It must have been another song to drive bad medicine away,

drive it before him. The way it was the other times, I didn't know enough

Cherokee to join in with him. So all I could do was whisper my own prayer under

my breath.

What I said was the Twenty-third Psalm, Though I walk through the Valley of the

Shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil. Not that I didn't fear the evil there

where we walked, there where Death flung his shadow on us, hungry for us,

killing mad at us. But if I feared it, I faced up to it anyway. A man's got to

be a man sometime. You show me one who was nair afraid, and I'll right away show

you one that nair in his life came up against aught to fear.

We'd headed ourselves at the center of the line, I say. Oooh, they moaned, and

they opened out and off from one another, and we were a-going through the empty

space. We whirled our torches all the time. I wondered how long the burning

cedar would last. And then we'd come clean through, out to the other side of

their open line, and I looked back as I went.

The Raven Mockers had bunched up together again. Two-three of them rose in the

air, a-flopping those ugly wing-skins. They looked like floating kites, but I'd

have hated to know the boy who'd care to fly such a looking kite. Reuben Manco

kept on a-slogging ahead. He pointed himself for where there showed a gap in the

rocky wall round the place, and the moon shone down into that gap.

"We've daunted them, John," he said, and went back to his song.

I hoped to heaven that he said the truth. I looked back one more time. Sure

enough, they'd started to move after us again, but they didn't try to push at

all close.

"Mind your feet, John," said Reuben Manco. "Mind your feet, don't stumble, and

don't be afraid. Because there never was a better time not to be afraid."

In front of us, something moved and squirmed on the bare earth. I felt air hair

on my head stand up, for it was like the biggest snake you could see in your

worst bad dream. But it was fast to the ground at one end, like a big old root

a-coming up out of there, only no tree or bush or aught else that it might could

be rooted to. It sort of slithered toward us where we walked. Reuben Manco

stopped in his tracks, and when its small end whipped toward him, he jumped high

and over it and ran a few steps out on the other side. Next moment, I'd jumped

over it, too, and I ran, and I felt my heart go thumpetty-bang inside me. Reuben

Manco had slowed to a walk again.

"We're all right now, it's fast to the ground," he said, in that same calm voice

of his.

"What is it, Chief r

"No time to tell you just now, but the old Cherokees had legends about such

things. Don't worry, we're leaving it behind us."

But the Raven Mockers followed, a good piece back.

We were a-coming to the gap. On both sides of it rose the rocks, with big chunks

on top of them, set the way you'd think they were ready to fall down air moment.

But we went on through. It wasn't a long ways through, nor near as dark as the

way in had been.

All of a sudden, I felt some better again. For we'd come out yonder on the far

side of the rock wall, with trees a-growing in front of us, and the moon almost

straight up in the sky overhead. The stars still stared down on us, but not

quite so much like the eyes of the Raven Mockers. I looked into those dark

trees.

"Right off, I think it looks sort of familiar just here," I allowed to Reuben

Manco. "I've got it in mind that, in through these trees a little small way, is

where we come to the Forshay spring and those funny-looking rocks, and the trail

to the Voth place forks off there."

"You make me glad to hear we're that close," he said back to me. "Because it

must be nearly midnight, and midnight on this day of the year, under the full

moon, is the time for the principal Druidic sacrificial ceremony to begin."

I looked up yonder to the pale bonfire of the moon, and all at once I saw that

clouds were on their way up to it. On their way all round the sky from above the

trees, a-climbing, a-climbing, heavy and dark as the flow of a muddy winter

pond.

We picked up our feet and started our walk toward that patch of trees I reckoned

I knew.

Oh yes, I thought to myself, and I've done a sight of walking in right rough

dangerous places tonight, done it by the mountain man's two-foot rule - two feet

and a long step betwixt them. When could I stop and rest? Not now, anyway.

"We were lucky back yonder," I said.

"We were ready, we were able to stand them off," he replied me. "We weren't off

guard, like Mr. Forshay was when he was knocked down and his son and Holly were

captured."

"You think that those were Raven Mockers at the cabin?"

"Probably. Seven perils in our way, and I conjecture that those Raven Mockers we

just got away from were the sixth of them."

I ran things over in my mind as I walked.

"Six, that's right, Chief," I said. "The boar pig. That near-about fall off the

cliff. That foggy patch. The fiery place where we pole-vaulted over, and then

that grove of ash and oak and thorn." I nodded my head for each one. "And sixth

was back in yonder, where a couple of times I wondered myself it we wouldn't be

stopped."

"Neither of us was exactly ready to be stopped," he said. "Yoiu're a tall,

strong man in your prime, and I'm still a going concern at my age. Raven Mockers

are mostly deadly to those who are weak or sick or wounded."

"They sure enough wanted us," I said, my eyes on the trees we were headed for.

"But we stood them off. They were the sixth peril, if I'm not getting boresomely

repetitious. Which leaves us one more."

In the smoky-dark clouds over the trees, a fork of lightning crackled for just a

second. We walked. My feet were heavy in my boots. I'd got myself plumb worn

down with all this we'd been through.

"What do you reckon the seventh peril will be?" I asked.

"Without trying to be arbitrary, I wonder if it won't be those Voth brothers

themselves. And the god they worship."

XIV

I took a quick, hard look at that wise old Indian, and he looked back at me,

with the pale light a-soaking down on us.

"Whatever god?" I repeated him, and it must have sounded as dumb as most

repeated things do, for he laughed a soft laugh.

"Baal," replied Reuben Manco. "I've told you about Baal, the chief god of the

Druids. Of the same name as the god of the Babylonians and the Assyrians, and

the Philistines in the Bible. He's not so widely remembered these days, Brother

John, not by the world at large. About all we can be sure of from those old

stone images, is that he had a beard."

He was a-grinning to himself about that, I couldn't for sure tell why.

"He had a beard," he said again. "It would appear that beards usually go with

gods among ancient peoples of the Old World. Zeus had a fine, curly one. Wotan

had a beard, and so did Thor. So did the Baals in Babylon and Assyria, and

before them in places like Akkad and Elam - big spade beards, carved out of

immemorial stone. And how about the god you were brought up to worship, John,

doesn't he have a beard, too?"

"Why," I said, while we tramped along, "come to think of that, I used to always

kind of reckon he did."

"Of course your white man's god has a beard," said Reuben Manco. "Look at the

portrait Michelangelo painted to identify him, in the Sistine Chapel. But," and

he grinned that grin another time, "the Indians never saw a beard on God,

whatever they decided to name him."

In the moonlight he put up his hand to his brown cheek, where no beard grew.

"Never with us Cherokees," he said, "and never with the Algonquins who called

him Manitou, nor yet with the Sioux who called him Watonka. Not yet with

Huitzilo-pochili of the Aztecs, nor Pachacamac of the Peruvians." He kept on

a-grinning and a-patting his wise, brown face. "So, my brother, perhaps I'm not

obligated to fear a god with a beard. Anyway, I'm not going to fear Baal. Come

on, let's find out what he amounts to."

He picked up his moccasined feet on the way to the trees. I went along beside

him. It's right hard to say just what way his talk made me feel better, feel

more like a-getting at things and a-winding up this business right, but it did.

It came to mind that I was smooth-shaven my own self. I wondered would it help

us. I sure enough hoped my best that it would.

Not that I was too smooth in the face at that, it struck me as I walked toward

those trees I felt I knew. It was getting on to midnight, and I'd been up right

soon that morning, near about eighteen hours back, and had shaved at the Forshay

cabin. I put my memory back over the doings of the day, and there'd been a right

much of stuff to happen to all folks concerned in them. I could even remember

what we'd had to eat. Eggs and all like that for breakfast, then Luke and I had

gone to Sky Notch to get Holly Christopher and fetch her back. And for noon

dinner, peanut butter sandwiches along with all the talk. After that, Holly and

I had gone to find Reuben Manco and beg to him to help us. Reuben Manco's good

venison stew for supper. And betwixt all those things, the magic we'd made out

to do, out where the cross thing from up at the spring was buried and spoken

over, then in the cabin the spell against those spying eyes of whatever they

were in the heads of. And Holly and me, a-going up the trail to visit the Voths

in their hellacious house.

All those things had been strange and scary, here and there. But other different

things had been a-going on. Holly and Luke had started out to act like fond

lovers, even that short day together. And Reuben Manco and I, we'd found out

that we were like brothers, and he said that word to me, called me Brother John.

Yes indeed, gentlemen, enough stuff had gone on betwixt sunrise and midnight to

last the ordinary sort of folks a month.

"How much time have we got, Chief?" I asked.

"Time enough, Brother John. Just about time enough, as I estimate. I don't think

it's any too much time."

"We're getting right close to where I'll know the way in."

"And I'm delighted to hear you say so."

Another flash of lightning on high, that squirmed over us like a fiery crawling

snake, and a sort of drummy roll of thunder. Weather was a-getting ready to

happen. We tramped our way along to the trees, and we got to them. I felt my way

in shadows to where the land banked down.

"Here we are," I said to Reuben Manco, and swung myself over the bank and landed

on my feet on the trail below. Next moment, he came down, too.

Sure enough, there was the spring that gave water to the Forshay place. We could

hear its ripply voice in the darkness of the cave where it came up. I tried to

look down along the trail that led slanting on the ledge of Wolter Mountain. I

couldn't see it at all plain, but I knew it was there. All of a sudden quick, I

felt better, like as if new blood pumped into my tired body. After those perils

in places strange to me, I was on ground I'd been on before, I could be sure of

where my feet stood.

"And now," I said, "just along here a tad. Here, Chief, we're at where those

stones make their figures by the trail. Over across them and beyond, and we're

on the way to the Voth house."

Reuben Manco had stooped himself over at the spring, to fill his canteen. He

straightened up again and came along to me, a-holding the canteen out.

"Aren't you a trifle thirsty?" he said.

"I thank you," I said back, and hiked the canteen up to take me a big mouthful

and slosh it all round in my throat. It cooled me, made me feel better still.

Reuben Manco took him a drink, too, and screwed the cap back on the canteen and

slid it back into its pouch.

"Up this way, you said," he grunted and walked on to where those stones were set

on the slope.

"Hold on," I said. "Wait up. Hark at me, Chief, I know the ground beyond here.

You'd better let me lead the way."

"You know the ground beyond here," he repeated me. "And also, you know the Voth

brothers, and they're well acquainted with you. They'd recognize you on sight,

but I'd be a stranger to them. Therefore, let me go first."

"I don't understand that talk, Chief," I tried to argue him.

"But you call me Chief, so let me give this one command." He pointed. "I'll go

ahead now. You wait here until I've crossed the rocks, am out of sight. Then you

come along. And wait at the top and make sure I'm out of sight on that other

trail again, before you try to follow me."

"Why in hell's name do you want to be that far ahead?

"Brother," he said, his face shoved dose to mine, "you and I were both in the

Army, in combat service. We both know what war means. I judge that we both have

been on patrols behind enemy lines. You know how there's a getaway man assigned

in a patrol, the last one on the open order march. If the enemy gets the main

patrol, the last one is supposed to be missed, stays free and active. That is,

if he's any good at being the getaway man."

"Don't you get to thinking that I'll be a-running away if they grab you," I sort

of snarled, and he smiled.

"No, John, I don't think that at all. But I do think you'll be free and

unnoticed if they have their notice concentrated on me. And you'll also do

something about it Do as I tell you, now, I'll be all right up front"

And with that, he turned and put himself to scrambling across all those rocks

and boulders.

I watched him go out of sight at the top of the slope, the way he'd said for me

to do, before I went up after him. I tried not to look at those image-faces

amongst the rocks, they'd have put me too much in mind of the Raven Mockers. I

hoped we'd left all such behind, but then I wondered myself if that might not be

a vain hope.

In any case, Reuben Manco sure enough seemed to know what he was up to; though

what in the name of gracious he'd be up to on that trail, the one place they'd

be most bound to watch, was far and away beyond me.

I waited a second amongst brush at the top of the slope, a-looking along that

trail I'd traveled the day before and the day before that I could make it out

betwixt the trees. The moonlight just barely speckled it in the places where the

leaves didn't shadow it Reuben Manco didn't show on it that I could see. I

picked up my feet and followed after, the way I'd been a-following after all

this long night on the mountain.

Now, there was no noise to either side of me where the trees grew thick and

brush crowded all the space amongst them. No bugs a-chirping, no tree frogs, no

nothing. That surprised me some. Had maybe Reuben Manco's passing ahead shut

them up? But if air living thing could move without a noise, that living thing

was Reuben Manco. I looked up to where a chunk of the night sky showed through

the trees. There was the same moon, like a pale shiny millstone. It had ground

its way almost all the way up. I reckoned maybe a half hour's time before

midnight. If that was when the Voths would do whatever they'd do to Holly and

Luke, we were a-cutting it fine.

Patrol work behind enemy lines, Reuben Manco had compared it. All I'd thought

about such a thing in years was that I hoped I'd nair have to do such a thing

again, but here I was, a-doing it. This was enemy ground all right, this trail

that belonged to the Voths. It was a wiggly trail, another sight wigglier than

I'd recollected. It even seemed to wiggle as I walked it, like a walk on the

back of a big old snake, a mean one that might could turn and sock its fangs

into you. I set the heels of my boots down first and then the full sole, so as

not to scrape on a pebble or rattle a piece of grass. I was a-moving right

quietly, as quietly even as Reuben Manco his own self must be.

Anyway, I still had my good ash club. If I came up against one of the Voths,

we'd find out if it wasn't just a little bitty bit harder than his head.