11

Cunningham had nearly reached the valley in which the hotel was built when he saw Gray below him, climbing sturdily up into the eyrie of the Strange People. Gray had a rifle slung over his shoulder.

“Gray!” shouted Cunningham.

Gray stared and abruptly sat down and mopped his forehead. He waited for Cunningham to reach him.

“Damn you, Cunningham,” he said expressionlessly, “I like you, you know, for all I think we may be working against each other. And word’s just gone in to Bendale that you’ve been killed by the Strangers. I was going up in hopes of getting to you before they wiped you out. And I already had cold chills down my back, thinking of the knife that nearly went into it yesterday.”

“I’m safe enough,” said Cunningham bitterly, “but I’m run out of the hills.”

“Best thing, maybe,” said Gray. “I’m hoping, but I think there’ll be fighting there tonight. A posse’s going to raid the Strangers after dark.”

“I’m going to raid the hills tonight,” said Cunningham fiercely, “and bring Maria away with me. I’ll marry her in spite of all the Strangers in creation.”

Gray grunted as he heaved to his feet. “You’re a fool, Cunningham, and I’m another. If you go, I go too. I might learn something, anyhow.”

Cunningham poured out the story of what had happened to him during the day, as they made their way down to the hotel. The sole objection to him lay in the fact that if Maria loved him, some day she would tell him who the Strangers were. And she did love him. Vladimir was the only outsider who knew their secret and he was threatening to disclose it, on what penalty Cunningham did not know.

“Maybe,” said Gray quietly, “it would be a good thing if Vladimir did tell what he knows. But I suspect he won’t, and for your sake I’d like to see you safely married to that girl you’re so keen about before he did start to talk. I’m with you tonight, Cunningham.”

“Better stay behind,” said Cunningham curtly. “They’ll be watching for me.”

“No,” said Gray quietly. “I sent some wires today and they may not be strong enough. Two of us might get her out where one wouldn’t. And I’m thinking that if you do marry her and she does tell you the secret of the Strangers, it might avert a tragedy. I’ve done all I can without certain knowledge. Now, watch your tongue when we reach the hotel.”

Cunningham ignored the raging astonishment with which Vladimir saw him, and was savagely amused at the worriment the man showed. Vladimir had sent his servant after Cunningham to kill him, and had been so certain of the attainment of that object that he had already broadcast a tale of Cunningham’s death which laid it at the Strangers’ door.

Cunningham waited for darkness. He was sure he had been watched back to the hotel. But after darkness was complete and before the moon rose he and Gray slipped secretly out of the house. They struck off down the valley, and when the monstrous ball of the full moon floated over the hills to the east, they made their way beneath thick trees, lest the moonlight show them to hidden watchers. They had gone perhaps a mile when Gray pointed suddenly upward.

Far, far up, where a tree-grown peak ended in a bald and rocky knob, fires were burning. Plainly visible in the clear night air, it could be seen that there were many fires and many people about them. Through the stillness, too, there came half-determinate sounds which might have been singing, or chanting, or some long-continued musical wailing.

The moon was shining down upon the valley, with its tidy New England farmhouses—upon Coulters, where uncomfortable rural police officers tried to convince themselves that they would be quite safe in dealing with the Strange People—upon Bendale, with its electric lights and once-a-week motion picture theater. And the same moonlight struck upon a ring of fires high up in the mountains where the Strangers moved and crouched. Old women gave voice to the shrill lament that was floating thinly through the air.

Gray glanced once at Cunningham’s face and if he had been about to speak, he refrained. Cunningham was making grimly for the hills.

The woods were dark. The two men crept through long tunnels of blackness, where little speckles of moonlight filtered through unexpectedly and painted the tree-trunks in leopard-spots. The valley had been calm, but as they climbed, the wind began to roar over their heads, rushing among the tree-branches with a growling sound. That noise masked the sound of their movements. Once they saw one of the Strangers cross a patch of clear moonlight before them. He was moving softly, listening as he half trotted, half walked.

“Sentry,” whispered Gray.

Cunningham said nothing. They went on, and heard voices murmuring before them in a foreign tongue. They halted and swung to the right. Perhaps two hundred yards on they tried again to continue up toward the heights. A crashing in the underbrush made them freeze. A Stranger trotted within five paces of them, peering about him cautiously. Only their immobility saved them from detection.

When he had gone they made for the spot from which he had come. It was breathless work because at any instant a liquid little glitter in the moonlight—a throwing-knife—might be the only herald of a silent and desperate attack.

But they made their way on and upward. It seemed as if they had passed through the ring of sentries. The trees grew thinner. The wind roared more loudly above their heads. And suddenly they saw the glow of many fires before them.

If they had gone carefully before, now they moved with infinite pains to make no noise. A single voice was chanting above the wind’s screaming. Gray listened and shook his head.

“I thought I knew most languages by the sound of them,” he whispered, “or could guess at the family anyhow. I worked on Ellis Island once. But I never heard that one.”

They went down on their hands and knees for the last hundred yards. Then they could see. And Cunningham stared with wide eyes, while Gray swore in whispers, shaking with excitement.

There were a dozen huge bonfires placed in a monster circle twenty yards across. They roared fiercely as the flames licked at the great logs they fed upon. And the wind was sweeping up from the valley and roaring through them and around them and among them.

The rushing of the wind and the roaring of the fires made a steady, throbbing note that was queerly hypnotic. The flames cast a lurid light all around, upon the trees, and the rocks, and the Strange People, and the vast empty spaces where the earth fell away precipitously.

A single aged man chanted in the center of the twelve huge beacons. He was clad in a strange, barbaric fashion such as Cunningham had never seen before. And the Strange People had clasped hands in a great circle that went all about the blazes, and as the old man chanted they trotted steadily around and around without a pause or sound.

The old man halted his chant and cried a single sentence in that unknown tongue. From the men in the circle came a booming shout, as they sped with gathering speed about the flames. Again he cried out, and again the booming, resonant shout came from the men.

“The sunwise turn,” panted Gray. “Widdershins! It’s magic, Cunningham, magic! In New Hampshire, in these days!”

But Cunningham was thinking of no such things as magic, white or black. He was searching among the running figures for Maria. But he did not see her. The barbaric garb of the Strangers confused his eyes. That costume was rich and splendid and strange and utterly beyond belief in any group of people only eight miles from a New England mill-town with an accommodation train once a day.

“Magic!” cried Gray again in a whisper. “Cunningham, nobody’ll believe it! They won’t, they daren’t believe it! It’s impossible!”

But Cunningham was lifting himself up to search fiercely for a sight of the girl he had found at the end of the route to romance and to high adventure. Here were strange sights that matched any of the imaginative novels on which aforetime he had fed his hunger for romance. Here was a scene such as he had imagined in the midst of posting ledgers and day-books in a stuffy office on Canal Street. And Cunningham did not notice it at all, because he was no longer concerned with adventure. He had found that. He was fiercely resolved now to find the girl who loved him and whose love had been forbidden by the laws of the strange folk of the hills.

He saw her. Not in the circle. She was crouched down on the grass amid a group of women. Rebellion was in every line of her figure. Cunningham loosened his revolver. It was madness, but——

A shout rang out sharply. And the running line of men broke and milled. Cunningham saw a hundred hands flash to as many knife-hilts. He saw the sheriff and four frightened-looking constables come plunging out of the brushwood, shouting something inane about halting in the name of the law. There was a shout and a scream, and then a man’s voice raised itself in a wild yell of command and entreaty. Cunningham’s own name was blended in a sentence in that unintelligible language.

The Strangers darted for the encircling woods. The women vanished, Maria among them. There was only a blank space in the open lighted by monster flames, and the sheriff and two constables struggling with a single figure of the Strangers.

“Go git ’em!” roared the sheriff, holding fast to the captive. “Git ’em! They’re scared. Ketch as many as ye kin!”

Cunningham felt Gray holding him down in an iron grasp.

“Don’t be a fool!” rasped Gray in a whisper. “It’s too late! The Strangers got away, all but one.”

The other men were racing about here and there. They found nothing but a bit of cloth here, and a woman’s embroidered cap there, left behind in the sudden flight.

The struggle in the open space ceased abruptly. The sheriff triumphantly called to the others.

“I got one now! Dun’t be scared! We got a hostage!” He reared up and yelled to the surrounding forest: “Dun’t ye try any o’ your knife-throwin’ tricks! This feller we got, if we dun’t get down safe, he dun’t neither! Dun’t ye try any rescuin’!”

He bent down to jerk his prisoner upright. And Cunningham heard him gasp. He chattered in sudden stillness and the others huddled about him.

“Dead!” gasped one of them.

“He stabbed hisself, I tell ye,” shrilled the sheriff. “He stuck his own knife in hisself!”

The five ungainly figures stared at each other, there amidst the roaring, deserted bonfires. One of them began to whimper suddenly.

“They—they’ll be throwin’ their knives all the way down to the valley!” he gasped. “They’ll be hidin’ behind trees an’ a-stabbin’ at us.”

The sheriff’s teeth began to chatter. The others clutched their weapons and gazed affrightedly at the woods encircling them.

“We—we got to try it,” gulped the sheriff, shivering. “We got to! Else they’ll get guns an’ kill us here. If—if ye see anything movin’, shoot it! Dun’t wait! If ye see anything, shoot....”

With staring, panic-stricken eyes, they made for the woods. Cunningham heard them crashing through the undergrowth in the darkness, whimpering and gasping in terror at every fancied sound.

They left behind them nothing but twelve great fires that began slowly to burn low, and a crumpled figure in barbaric finery lying with his face upturned toward the sky. It was the young Stranger who only that afternoon had told Cunningham of the girl he had loved and lost because she was not of the Strange People. He had stabbed himself when captured, rather than be taken out of the hills and forced to tell the secret of the Strangers.