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The Slayer of Souls

by Robert W. Chambers · English · Gutenberg #36281 · 372,428 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Slayer of Souls

Author: Robert W. Chambers


        
Release date: May 30, 2011 [eBook #36281]
                Most recently updated: June 1, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SLAYER OF SOULS ***

[Illustration]




THE SLAYER OF SOULS

ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

AUTHOR OF “IN SECRET,” “THE COMMON LAW,” “THE RECKONING,” “LORRAINE,”
ETC.


NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

_Copyright, 1920,
By Robert W. Chambers_

_Copyright, 1919, 1920, by International Magazine Company_

_Printed in the United States of America_


TO
MY FRIEND
GEORGE ARMSBY



I

Mirror of Fashion,
Admiral of Finance,
Don’t, in a passion,
Denounce this poor Romance;
For, while I dare not hope it might
Enthuse you,
Perhaps it will, some rainy night,
Amuse you.

II

So, your attention,
In poetry polite,
To my invention
I bashfully invite.
Don’t hurl the book at Eddie’s head
Deep laden,
Or Messmore’s; you might hit instead
Will Braden.

III

Kahn among Canners,
And Grand Vizier of style,
Emir of Manners,
Accept—and place on file—
This tribute, which I proffer while
I grovel,
And honor with thy matchless Smile
My novel.

R. W. C.


CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. THE YEZIDEE
CHAPTER II. THE YELLOW SNAKE
CHAPTER III. GREY MAGIC
CHAPTER IV. BODY AND SOUL
CHAPTER V. THE ASSASSINS
CHAPTER VI. IN BATTLE
CHAPTER VII. THE BRIDAL
CHAPTER VIII. THE MAN IN WHITE
CHAPTER IX. THE WEST WIND
CHAPTER X. AT THE RITZ
CHAPTER XI. YULUN THE BELOVED
CHAPTER XII. HIS EXCELLENCY
CHAPTER XIII. SA-N’SA
CHAPTER XIV. A DEATH-TRAIL
CHAPTER XV. IN THE FIRELIGHT
CHAPTER XVI. THE PLACE OF PRAYER
CHAPTER XVII. THE SLAYER OF SOULS


THE SLAYER OF SOULS




CHAPTER I
THE YEZIDEE


Only when the _Nan-yang Maru_ sailed from Yuen-San did her terrible
sense of foreboding begin to subside.

For four years, waking or sleeping, the awful subconsciousness of
supreme evil had never left her.

But now, as the Korean shore, receding into darkness, grew dimmer and
dimmer, fear subsided and grew vague as the half-forgotten memory of
horror in a dream.

She stood near the steamer’s stern apart from other passengers, a
slender, lonely figure in her silver-fox furs, her ulster and smart
little hat, watching the lights of Yuen-San grow paler and smaller
along the horizon until they looked like a level row of stars.

Under her haunted eyes Asia was slowly dissolving to a streak of vapour
in the misty lustre of the moon.

Suddenly the ancient continent disappeared, washed out by a wave
against the sky; and with it vanished the last shreds of that accursed
nightmare which had possessed her for four endless years. But whether
during those unreal years her soul had only been held in bondage, or
whether, as she had been taught, it had been irrevocably destroyed, she
still remained uncertain, knowing nothing about the death of souls or
how it was accomplished.

As she stood there, her sad eyes fixed on the misty East, a passenger
passing—an Englishwoman—paused to say something kind to the young
American; and added, “if there is anything my husband and I can do it
would give us much pleasure.” The girl had turned her head as though
not comprehending. The other woman hesitated.

“This is Doctor Norne’s daughter, is it not?” she inquired in a
pleasant voice.

“Yes, I am Tressa Norne.... I ask your pardon.... Thank you, madam:—I
am—I seem to be—a trifle dazed——”

“What wonder, you poor child! Come to us if you feel need of
companionship.”

“You are very kind.... I seem to wish to be alone, somehow.”

“I understand.... Good-night, my dear.”

Late the next morning Tressa Norne awoke, conscious for the first time
in four years that it was at last her own familiar self stretched out
there on the pillows where sunshine streamed through the porthole. All
that day she lay in her bamboo steamer chair on deck. Sun and wind
conspired to dry every tear that wet her closed lashes. Her dark,
glossy hair blew about her face; scarlet tinted her full lips again;
the tense hands relaxed. Peace came at sundown.

That evening she took her Yu-kin from her cabin and found a chair on
the deserted hurricane deck.

And here, in the brilliant moonlight of the China Sea, she curled up
cross-legged on the deck, all alone, and sounded the four futile
strings of her moon-lute, and hummed to herself, in a still voice, old
songs she had sung in Yian before the tragedy. She sang the tent-song
called _Tchinguiz_. She sang _Camel Bells_ and _The Blue
Bazaar_,—children’s songs of the Yiort. She sang the ancient Khiounnou
song called “The Saghalien”:

_I_

_In the month of Saffar_
_Among the river-reeds_
_I saw two horsemen_
_Sitting on their steeds._
_Tulugum!_
_Heitulum!_
_By the river-reeds_


_II_

_In the month of Saffar_
_A demon guards the ford._
_Tokhta, my Lover!_
_Draw your shining sword!_
_Tulugum!_
_Heitulum!_
_Slay him with your sword!_


_III_

_In the month of Saffar_
_Among the water-weeds_
_I saw two horsemen_
_Fighting on their steeds._
_Tulugum!_
_Heitulum!_
_How my lover bleeds!_


_IV_

_In the month of Saffar,_
_The Year I should have wed—_
_The Year of The Panther—_
_My lover lay dead,—_
_Tulugum!_
_Heitulum!_
_Dead without a head._

And songs like these—the one called “Keuke Mongol,” and an ancient air
of the Tchortchas called “The Thirty Thousand Calamities,” and some
Chinese boatmen’s songs which she had heard in Yian before the tragedy;
these she hummed to herself there in the moonlight playing on her
round-faced, short-necked lute of four strings.

Terror indeed seemed ended for her, and in her heart a great
overwhelming joy was welling up which seemed to overflow across the
entire moonlit world.


She had no longer any fear; no premonition of further evil. Among the
few Americans and English aboard, something of her story was already
known. People were kind; and they were also considerate enough to
subdue their sympathetic curiosity when they discovered that this young
American girl shrank from any mention of what had happened to her
during the last four years of the Great World War.

It was evident, also, that she preferred to remain aloof; and this
inclination, when finally understood, was respected by her fellow
passengers. The clever, efficient and polite Japanese officers and crew
of the _Nan-yang Maru_ were invariably considerate and courteous to
her, and they remained nicely reticent, although they also knew the
main outline of her story and very much desired to know more. And so,
surrounded now by the friendly security of civilised humanity, Tressa
Norne, reborn to light out of hell’s own shadows, awoke from four years
of nightmare which, after all, perhaps, never had seemed entirely
actual.

And now God’s real sun warmed her by day; His real moon bathed her in
creamy coolness by night; sky and wind and wave thrilled her with their
blessed assurance that this was once more the real world which
stretched illimitably on every side from horizon to horizon; and the
fair faces and pleasant voices of her own countrymen made the past seem
only a ghastly dream that never again could enmesh her soul with its
web of sorcery.


And now the days at sea fled very swiftly; and when at last the Golden
Gate was not far away she had finally managed to persuade herself that
nothing really can harm the human soul; that the monstrous devil-years
were ended, never again to return; that in this vast, clean Western
Continent there could be no occult threat to dread, no gigantic menace
to destroy her body, no secret power that could consign her soul to the
dreadful abysm of spiritual annihilation.


Very early that morning she came on deck. The November day was
delightfully warm, the air clear save for a belt of mist low on the
water to the southward.

She had been told that land would not be sighted for twenty-four hours,
but she went forward and stood beside the starboard rail, searching the
horizon with the enchanted eyes of hope.

As she stood there a Japanese ship’s officer crossing the deck,
forward, halted abruptly and stood staring at something to the
southward.

At the same moment, above the belt of mist on the water, and perfectly
clear against the blue sky above, the girl saw a fountain of gold fire
rise from the fog, drift upward in the daylight, slowly assume the
incandescent outline of a serpentine creature which leisurely uncoiled
and hung there floating, its lizard-tail undulating, its feet with
their five stumpy claws closing, relaxing, like those of a living
reptile. For a full minute this amazing shape of fire floated there in
the sky, brilliant in the morning light, then the reptilian form faded,
died out, and the last spark vanished in the sunshine.

When the Japanese officer at last turned to resume his promenade, he
noticed a white-faced girl gripping a stanchion behind him as though
she were on the point of swooning. He crossed the deck quickly. Tressa
Norne’s eyes opened.

“Are you ill, Miss Norne?” he asked.

“The—the Dragon,” she whispered.

The officer laughed. “Why, that was nothing but Chinese day-fireworks,”
he explained. “The crew of some fishing boat yonder in the fog is
amusing itself.” He looked at her narrowly, then with a nice little bow
and smile he offered his arm: “If you are indisposed, perhaps you might
wish to go below to your stateroom, Miss Norne?”

She thanked him, managed to pull herself together and force a ghost of
a smile.

He lingered a moment, said something cheerful about being nearly home,
then made her a punctilious salute and went his way.

Tressa Norne leaned back against the stanchion and closed her eyes. Her
pallor became deathly. She bent over and laid her white face in her
folded arms.

After a while she lifted her head, and, turning very slowly, stared at
the fog-belt out of frightened eyes.

And saw, rising out of the fog, a pearl-tinted sphere which gradually
mounted into the clear daylight above like the full moon’s phantom in
the sky.

Higher, higher rose the spectral moon until at last it swam in the very
zenith. Then it slowly evaporated in the blue vault above.

A great wave of despair swept her; she clung to the stanchion, staring
with half-blinded eyes at the flat fog-bank in the south.

But no more “Chinese day-fireworks” rose out of it. And at length she
summoned sufficient strength to go below to her cabin and lie there,
half senseless, huddled on her bed.


When land was sighted, the following morning, Tressa Norne had lived a
century in twenty-four hours. And in that space of time her agonised
soul had touched all depths.

But now as the Golden Gate loomed up in the morning light, rage,
terror, despair had burned themselves out. From their ashes within her
mind arose the cool wrath of desperation armed for anything, wary,
alert, passionately determined to survive at whatever cost, recklessly
ready to fight for bodily existence.

That was her sole instinct now, to go on living, to survive, no matter
at what price. And if it were indeed true that her soul had been slain,
she defied its murderers to slay her body also.


That night, at her hotel in San Francisco, she double-locked her door
and lay down without undressing, leaving all lights burning and an
automatic pistol underneath her pillow.

Toward morning she fell asleep, slept for an hour, started up in awful
fear. And saw the double-locked door opposite the foot of her bed
slowly opening of its own accord.

Into the brightly illuminated room stepped a graceful young man in full
evening dress carrying over his left arm an overcoat, and in his other
hand a top hat and silver tipped walking-stick.

With one bound the girl swung herself from the bed to the carpet and
clutched at the pistol under her pillow.

“Sanang!” she cried in a terrible voice.

“Keuke Mongol!” he said, smilingly.

For a moment they confronted each other in the brightly lighted
bedroom, then, partly turning, he cast a calm glance at the open door
behind him; and, as though moved by a wind, the door slowly closed. And
she heard the key turn of itself in the lock, and saw the bolt slide
smoothly into place again.

Her power of speech came back to her presently—only a broken whisper at
first: “Do you think I am afraid of your accursed magic?” she managed
to gasp. “Do you think I am afraid of you, Sanang?”

“You are afraid,” he said serenely.

“You lie!”

“No, I do not lie. To one another the Yezidees never lie.”

“You lie again, assassin! I am no Yezidee!”

He smiled gently. His features were pleasing, smooth, and regular; his
cheek-bones high, his skin fine and of a pale and delicate ivory
colour. Once his black, beautifully shaped eyes wandered to the
levelled pistol which she now held clutched desperately close to her
right hip, and a slightly ironical expression veiled his gaze for an
instant.

“Bullets?” he murmured. “But you and I are of the Hassanis.”

“The third lie, Sanang!” Her voice had regained its strength. Tense,
alert, blue eyes ablaze, every faculty concentrated on the terrible
business before her, the girl now seemed like some supple leopardess
poised on the swift verge of murder.

“Tokhta!”[1] She spat the word. “Any movement toward a hidden weapon,
any gesture suggesting recourse to magic—and I kill you, Sanang,
exactly where you stand!”

“With a pistol?” He laughed. Then his smooth features altered subtly.
He said: “Keuke Mongol, who call yourself Tressa Norne,—Keuke—heavenly
azure-blue,—named so in the temple because of the colour of your
eyes—listen attentively, for this is the Yarlig which I bring to you by
word of mouth from Yian, as from Yezidee to Yezidee:

“Here, in this land called the United States of America, the Temple
girl, Keuke Mongol, who has witnessed the mysteries of Erlik and who
understands the magic of the Sheiks-el-Djebel, and who has seen Mount
Alamout and the eight castles and the fifty thousand Hassanis in white
turbans and in robes of white;—_you_—Azure-blue eyes—heed the
Yarlig!—or may thirty thousand calamities overtake you!”

There was a dead silence; then he went on seriously: “It is decreed:
You shall cease to remember that you are a Yezidee, that you are of the
Hassanis, that you ever have laid eyes on Yian the Beautiful, that you
ever set naked foot upon Mount Alamout. It is decreed that you remember
nothing of what you have seen and heard, of what has been told and
taught during the last four years reckoned as the Christians reckon
from our Year of the Bull. Otherwise—my Master sends you this for
your—_convenience_.”

Leisurely, from under his folded overcoat, the young man produced a
roll of white cloth and dropped it at her feet and the girl shrank
aside, shuddering, knowing that the roll of white cloth was meant for
her winding-sheet.

Then the colour came back to lip and cheek; and, glancing up from the
soft white shroud, she smiled at the young man: “Have you ended your
Oriental mummery?” she asked calmly. “Listen very seriously in your
turn, Sanang, Sheik-el-Djebel, Prince of the Hassanis who, God knows
when and how, have come out into the sunshine of this clean and decent
country, out of a filthy darkness where devils and sorcerers make earth
a hell.

“If you, or yours, threaten me, annoy me, interfere with me, I shall go
to our civilised police and tell all I know concerning the Yezidees. I
mean to live. Do you understand? You know what you have done to me and
mine. I come back to my own country alone, without any living kin,
poor, homeless, friendless,—and, perhaps, damned. I intend,
nevertheless, to survive. I shall not relax my clutch on bodily
existence whatever the Yezidees may pretend to have done to my soul. I
am determined to live in the body, anyway.”

He nodded gravely.

She said: “Out at sea, over the fog, I saw the sign of Yu-lao in fire
floating in the day-sky. I saw his spectral moon rise and vanish in
mid-heaven. I understood. But——” And here she suddenly showed an edge
of teeth under the full scarlet upper lip: “Keep your signs and your
shrouds to yourself, dog of a Yezidee!—toad!—tortoise-egg!—he-goat with
three legs! Keep your threats and your messages to yourself! Keep your
accursed magic to yourself! Do you think to frighten me with your
sorcery by showing me the Moons of Yu-lao?—by opening a bolted door? I
know more of such magic than do you, Sanang—Death Adder of Alamout!”

Suddenly she laughed aloud at him—laughed insultingly in his
expressionless face:

“I saw you and Gutchlug Khan and your cowardly Tchortchas in
red-lacquered jackets slink out of the Temple of Erlik where the bronze
gong thundered and a cloud settled down raining little yellow snakes
all over the marble steps—all over you, Prince Sanang! You were
_afraid_, my Tougtchi!—you and Gutchlug and your red Tchortchas with
their halberds all dripping with human entrails! And I saw you mount
and gallop off into the woods while in the depths of the magic cloud
which rained little yellow snakes all around you, we temple girls
laughed and mocked at you—at you and your cowardly Tchortcha horsemen.”

A slight tinge of pink came into the young man’s pale face. Tressa
Norne stepped nearer, her levelled pistol resting on her hip.

“Why did you not complain of us to your Master, the Old Man of the
Mountain?” she asked jeeringly. “And where, also, was your Yezidee
magic when it rained little snakes?—What frightened you away—who had
boldly come to seize a temple girl—you who had screwed up your courage
sufficiently to defy Erlik in his very shrine and snatch from his
temple a young thing whose naked body wrapped in gold was worth the
chance of death to you?”

The young man’s top-hat dropped to the floor. He bent over to pick it
up. His face was quite expressionless, quite colourless, now.

“I went on no such errand,” he said with an effort. “I went with a
thousand prayers on scarlet paper made in——”

“A lie, Yezidee! You came to seize _me_!”

He turned still paler. “By Abu, Omar, Otman, and Ali, it is not true!”

“You lie!—by the Lion of God, Hassini!”

She stepped closer. “And I’ll tell you another thing you fear—you
Yezidee of Alamout—you robber of Yian—you sorcerer of Sabbah Khan, and
chief of his sect of Assassins! You fear this native land of mine,
America; and its laws and customs, and its clear, clean sunshine; and
its cities and people; and its police! Take that message back. We
Americans fear nobody save the true God!—nobody—neither Yezidee nor
Hassani nor Russ nor German nor that sexless monster born of hell and
called the Bolshevik!”

“Tokhta!” he cried sharply.

“Damn you!” retorted the girl; “get out of my room! Get out of my
sight! Get out of my path! Get out of my life! Take that to your Master
of Mount Alamout! I do what I please; I go where I please; I live as I
please. And if I please, _I turn against him_!”

“In that event,” he said hoarsely, “there lies your winding-sheet on
the floor at your feet! Take up your shroud; and make Erlik seize you!”

“Sanang,” she said very seriously.

“I hear you, Keuke-Mongol.”

“Listen attentively. I wish to live. I have had enough of death in
life. I desire to remain a living, breathing thing—even if it be
true—as you Yezidees tell me, that you have caught my soul in a net and
that your sorcerers really control its destiny.

“But damned or not, I passionately desire to live. And I am coward
enough to hold my peace for the sake of living. So—I remain silent. I
have no stomach to defy the Yezidees; because, if I do, sooner or later
I shall be killed. I know it. I have no desire to die for others—to
perish for the sake of the common good. I am young. I have suffered too
much; I am determined to live—and let my soul take its chances between
God and Erlik.”

She came close to him, looked curiously into his pale face.

“I laughed at you out of the temple cloud,” she said. “I know how to
open bolted doors as well as you do. And I know _other things_. And if
you ever again come to me in this life I shall first torture you, then
slay you. Then I shall tell all!... and unroll my shroud.”

“I keep your word of promise until you break it,” he interrupted
hastily. “Yarlig! It is decreed!” And then he slowly turned as though
to glance over his shoulder at the locked and bolted door.

“Permit me to open it for you, Prince Sanang,” said the girl
scornfully. And she gazed steadily at the door.

Presently, all by itself, the key turned in the lock, the bolt slid
back, the door gently opened.

Toward it, white as a corpse, his overcoat on his left arm, his stick
and top-hat in the other hand, crept the young man in his faultless
evening garb.

Then, as he reached the threshold, he suddenly sprang aside. A small
yellow snake lay coiled there on the door sill. For a full throbbing
minute the young man stared at the yellow reptile in unfeigned horror.
Then, very cautiously, he moved his fascinated eyes sideways and gazed
in silence at Tressa Norne.

The girl laughed.

“Sorceress!” he burst out hoarsely. “Take that accursed thing from my
path!”

“What thing, Sanang?” At that his dark, frightened eyes stole toward
the threshold again, seeking the little snake. But there was no snake
there. And when he was certain of this he went, twitching and trembling
all over.

Behind him the door closed softly, locking and bolting itself.

And behind the bolted door in the brightly lighted bedroom Tressa Norne
fell on both knees, her pistol still clutched in her right hand,
calling passionately upon Christ to forgive her for the dreadful
ability she had dared to use, and begging Him to save her body from
death and her soul from the snare of the Yezidee.




CHAPTER II
THE YELLOW SNAKE


When the young man named Sanang left the bed-chamber of Tressa Norne he
turned to the right in the carpeted corridor outside and hurried toward
the hotel elevator. But he did not ring for the lift; instead he took
the spiral iron stairway which circled it, and mounted hastily to the
floor above.

Here was his own apartment and he entered it with a key bearing the
hotel tag. A dusky-skinned powerful old man wearing a grizzled beard
and a greasy broadcloth coat of old-fashioned cut known to provincials
as a “Prince Albert” looked up from where he was seated cross-legged
upon the sofa, sharpening a curved knife on a whetstone.

“Gutchlug,” stammered Sanang, “I am afraid of her! What happened two
years ago at the temple happened again a moment since, there in her
very bedroom! She made a yellow death-adder out of nothing and placed
it upon the threshold, and mocked me with laughter. May Thirty Thousand
Calamities overtake her! May Erlik seize her! May her eyes rot out and
her limbs fester! May the seven score and three principal devils——”

“You chatter like a temple ape,” said Gutchlug tranquilly. “Does Keuke
Mongol die or live? That alone interests me.”

“Gutchlug,” faltered the young man, “thou knowest that m-my heart is
inclined to mercy toward this young Yezidee——”

“I know that it is inclined to lust,” said the other bluntly.

Sanang’s pale face flamed.

“Listen,” he said. “If I had not loved her better than life had I dared
go that day to the temple to take her for my own?”

“You loved life better,” said Gutchlug. “You fled when it rained snakes
on the temple steps—you and your Tchortcha horsemen! Kai! I also ran.
But I gave every soldier thirty blows with a stick before I slept that
night. And you should have had your thirty, also, conforming to the
Yarlig, my Tougtchi.”

Sanang, still holding his hat and cane and carrying his overcoat over
his left arm, looked down at the heavy, brutal features of Gutchlug
Khan—at the cruel mouth with its crooked smile under the grizzled
beard; at the huge hands—the powerful hands of a murderer—now deftly
honing to a razor-edge the Kalmuck knife held so firmly yet lightly in
his great blunt fingers.

“Listen attentively, Prince Sanang,” growled Gutchlug, pausing in his
monotonous task to test the blade’s edge on his thumb—“Does the Yezidee
Keuke Mongol live? Yes or no?”

Sanang hesitated, moistened his pallid lips. “She dares not betray us.”

“By what pledge?”

“Fear.”

“That is no pledge. You also were afraid, yet you went to the temple!”

“She has listened to the Yarlig. She has looked upon her shroud. She
has admitted that she desires to live. Therein lies her pledge to us.”

“And she placed a yellow snake at your feet!” sneered Gutchlug. “Prince
Sanang, tell me, what man or what devil in all the chronicles of the
past has ever tamed a Snow-Leopard?” And he continued to hone his
yataghan.

“Gutchlug——”

“No, she dies,” said the other tranquilly.

“Not yet!”

“When, then?”

“Gutchlug, thou knowest me. Hear my pledge! At her first gesture toward
treachery—her first thought of betrayal—I myself will end it all.”

“You promise to slay this young snow-leopardess?”

“By the four companions, I swear to kill her with my own hands!”

Gutchlug sneered. “Kill her—yes—with the kiss that has burned thy lips
to ashes for all these months. I know thee, Sanang. Leave her to me.
Dead she will no longer trouble thee.”

“Gutchlug!”

“I hear, Prince Sanang.”

“Strike when I nod. Not until then.”

“I hear, Tougtchi. I understand thee, my Banneret. I whet my knife.
Kai!”

Sanang looked at him, put on his top-hat and overcoat, pulled on a pair
of white evening gloves.

“I go forth,” he said more pleasantly.

“I remain here to talk to my seven ancestors and sharpen my knife,”
remarked Gutchlug.

“When the white world and the yellow world and the brown world and the
black world finally fall before the Hassanis,” said Sanang with a quick
smile, “I shall bring thee to her. Gutchlug—once—before she is veiled,
thou shalt behold what is lovelier than Eve.”

The other stolidly whetted his knife.

Sanang pulled out a gold cigarette case, lighted a cigarette with an
air.

“I go among Germans,” he volunteered amiably. “The huns swam across two
oceans, but, like the unclean swine, it is their own throats they cut
when they swim! Well, there is only one God. And not very many angels.
Erlik is greater. And there are many million devils to do his bidding.
Adieu. There is rice and there is koumiss in the frozen closet. When I
return you shall have been asleep for hours.”

When Sanang left the hotel one of two young men seated in the hotel
lobby got up and strolled out after him.

A few minutes later the other man went to the elevator, ascended to the
fourth floor, and entered an apartment next to the one occupied by
Sanang.

There was another man there, lying on the lounge and smoking a cigar.
Without a word, they both went leisurely about the matter of disrobing
for the night.

When the shorter man who had been in the apartment when the other
entered, and who was dark and curly-headed, had attired himself in
pyjamas, he sat down on one of the twin beds to enjoy his cigar to the
bitter end.

“Has Sanang gone out?” he inquired in a low voice.

“Yes. Benton went after him.”

The other man nodded. “Cleves,” he said, “I guess it looks as though
this Norne girl is in it, too.”

“What happened?”

“As soon as she arrived, Sanang made straight for her apartment. He
remained inside for half an hour. Then he came out in a hurry and went
to his own rooms, where that surly servant of his squats all day,
shining up his arsenal, and drinking koumiss.”

“Did you get their conversation?”

“I’ve got a record of the gibberish. It requires an interpreter, of
course.”

“I suppose so. I’ll take the records east with me to-morrow, and by the
same token I’d better notify New York that I’m leaving.”

He went, half-undressed, to the telephone, got the telegraph office,
and sent the following message:

“Recklow, _New York_:

“Leaving to-morrow for N. Y. with samples. Retain expert in Oriental
fabrics.

“Victor Cleves.”

“Report for me, too,” said the dark young man, who was still enjoying
his cigar on his pillows.

So Cleves sent another telegram, directed also to

“Recklow, _New York_:

“Benton and I are watching the market. Chinese importations fluctuate.
Recent consignment per _Nan-yang Maru_ will be carefully inspected and
details forwarded.

“Alek Selden.”

In the next room Gutchlug could hear the voice of Cleves at the
telephone, but he merely shrugged his heavy shoulders in contempt. For
he had other things to do beside eavesdropping.

Also, for the last hour—in fact, ever since Sanang’s
departure—something had been happening to him—something that happens to
a Hassani only once in a lifetime. And now this unique thing had
happened to him—to him, Gutchlug Khan—to him before whose Khiounnou
ancestors eighty-one thousand nations had bowed the knee.

It had come to him at last, this dread thing, unheralded, totally
unexpected, a few minutes after Sanang had departed.

And he suddenly knew he was going to die.

And, when, presently, he comprehended it, he bent his grizzled head and
listened seriously. And, after a little silence, he heard his soul
bidding him farewell.

So the chatter of white men at a telephone in the next apartment had no
longer any significance for him. Whether or not they had been spying on
him; whether they were plotting, made no difference to him now.

He tested his knife’s edge with his thumb and listened gravely to his
soul bidding him farewell.

But, for a Yezidee, there was still a little detail to attend to before
his soul departed;—two matters to regulate. One was to select his
shroud. The other was to cut the white throat of this young
snow-leopardess called Keuke Mongol, the Yezidee temple girl.

And he could steal down to her bedroom and finish that matter in five
minutes.

But first he must choose his shroud, as is the custom of the Yezidee.

That office, however, was quickly accomplished in a country where fine
white sheets of linen are to be found on every hotel bed.

So, on his way to the door, his naked knife in his right hand, he
paused to fumble under the bed-covers and draw out a white linen sheet.

Something hurt his hand like a needle. He moved it, felt the thing
squirm under his fingers and pierce his palm again and again. With a
shriek, he tore the bedclothes from the bed.

A little yellow snake lay coiled there.

He got as far as the telephone, but could not use it. And there he fell
heavily, shaking the room and dragging the instrument down with him.


There was some excitement. Cleves and Selden in their bathrobes went in
to look at the body. The hotel physician diagnosed it as heart-trouble.
Or, possibly, poison. Some gazed significantly at the naked knife still
clutched in the dead man’s hands.

Around the wrist of the other hand was twisted a pliable gold bracelet
representing a little snake. It had real emeralds for eyes.

It had not been there when Gutchlug died.

But nobody except Sanang could know that. And later when Sanang came
back and found Gutchlug very dead on the bed and a policeman sitting
outside, he offered no information concerning the new bracelet shaped
like a snake with real emeralds for eyes, which adorned the dead man’s
left wrist.

Toward evening, however, after an autopsy had confirmed the house
physician’s diagnosis that heart-disease had finished Gutchlug, Sanang
mustered enough courage to go to the desk in the lobby and send up his
card to Miss Norne.


It appeared, however, that Miss Norne had left for Chicago about noon.




CHAPTER III
GREY MAGIC


To Victor Cleves came the following telegram in code:

“_Washington_
“April 14th, 1919.”

“_Investigation ordered by the State Department as the result of
frequent mention in despatches of Chinese troops operating with the
Russian Bolsheviki forces has disclosed that the Bolsheviki are
actually raising a Chinese division of 30,000 men recruited in Central
Asia. This division has been guilty of the greatest cruelties. A
strange rumour prevails among the Allied forces at Archangel that this
Chinese division is led by Yezidee and Hassani officers belonging to
the sect of devil-worshipers and that they employ black arts and magic
in battle._

“_From information so far gathered by the several branches of the
United States Secret Service operating throughout the world, it appears
possible that the various revolutionary forces of disorder, in Europe
and Asia, which now are violently threatening the peace and security,
of all established civilisation on earth, may have had a common origin.
This origin, it is now suspected, may date back to a very remote epoch;
the wide-spread forces of violence and merciless destruction may have
had their beginning among some ancient and predatory race whose
existence was maintained solely by robbery and murder._

“_Anarchists, terrorists, Bolshevists, Reds of all shades and degrees,
are now believed to represent in modern times what perhaps once was a
tribe of Assassins—a sect whose religion was founded upon a common
predilection for crimes of violence._

“_On this theory then, for the present, the United States Government
will proceed with this investigation of Bolshevism; and the Secret
Service will continue to pay particular attention to all Orientals in
the United States and other countries. You personally are formally
instructed to keep in touch with XLY-371 (Alek Selden) and ZB-303
(James Benton), and to employ every possible means to become friendly
with the girl Tressa Norne, win her confidence, and, if possible,
enlist her actively in the Government Service as your particular aid
and comrade._

“_It is equally important that the movements of the Oriental, called
Sanang, be carefully observed in order to discover the identity and
whereabouts of his companions. However, until further instructions he
is not to be taken into custody. M. H. 2479._

“_(Signed)_
“(John Recklow.)”

The long despatch from John Recklow made Cleves’s duty plain enough.

For months, now, Selden and Benton had been watching Tressa Norne. And
they had learned practically nothing about her.

And now the girl had come within Cleves’s sphere of operation. She had
been in New York for two weeks. Telegrams from Benton in Chicago, and
from Selden in Buffalo, had prepared him for her arrival.

He had his men watching her boarding-house on West Twenty-eighth
Street, men to follow her, men to keep their eyes on her at the
theatre, where every evening, at 10:45, her _entr’ acte_ was staged. He
knew where to get her. But he, himself, had been on the watch for the
man Sanang; and had failed to find the slightest trace of him in New
York, although warned that he had arrived.

So, for that evening, he left the hunt for Sanang to others, put on his
evening clothes, and dined with fashionable friends at the Patroons’
Club, who never for an instant suspected that young Victor Cleves was
in the Service of the United States Government. About half-past nine he
strolled around to the theatre, desiring to miss as much as possible of
the popular show without being too late to see the curious little
_entr’ acte_ in which this girl, Tressa Norne, appeared alone.

He had secured an aisle seat near the stage at an outrageous price; the
main show was still thundering and fizzing and glittering as he entered
the theatre; so he stood in the rear behind the orchestra until the
descending curtain extinguished the outrageous glare and din.

Then he went down the aisle, and as he seated himself Tressa Norne
stepped from the wings and stood before the lowered curtain facing an
expectant but oddly undemonstrative audience.

The girl worked rapidly, seriously, and in silence. She seemed a mere
child there behind the footlights, not more than sixteen anyway—her
winsome eyes and wistful lips unspoiled by the world’s wisdom.

Yet once or twice the mouth drooped for a second and the winning eyes
darkened to a remoter blue—the brooding iris hue of far horizons.

She wore the characteristic tabard of stiff golden tissue and the gold
pagoda-shaped headpiece of a Yezidee temple girl. Her flat,
slipper-shaped foot-gear was of stiff gold, too, and curled upward at
the toes.

All this accentuated her apparent youth. For in face and throat no
firmer contours had as yet modified the soft fullness of immaturity;
her limbs were boyish and frail, and her bosom more undecided still, so
that the embroidered breadth of gold fell flat and straight from her
chest to a few inches above the ankles.

She seemed to have no stock of paraphernalia with which to aid the
performance; no assistant, no orchestral diversion, nor did she serve
herself with any magician’s patter. She did her work close to the
footlights.

Behind her loomed a black curtain; the strip of stage in front was bare
even of carpet; the orchestra remained mute.

But when she needed anything—a little table, for example—well, it was
suddenly there where she required it—a tripod, for instance, evidently
fitted to hold the big iridescent bubble of glass in which swarmed
little tropical fishes—and which arrived neatly from nowhere. She
merely placed her hands before her as though ready to support something
weighty which she expected and—suddenly, the huge crystal bubble was
visible, resting between her hands. And when she tired of holding it,
she set it upon the empty air and let go of it; and instead of crashing
to the stage with its finny rainbow swarm of swimmers, out of thin air
appeared a tripod to support it.

Applause followed, not very enthusiastic, for the sort of audience
which sustains the shows of which her performance was merely an _entr’
acte_ is an audience responsive only to the obvious.

Nobody ever before had seen that sort of magic in America. People
scarcely knew whether or not they quite liked it. The lightning of
innovation stupefies the dull; ignorance is always suspicious of
innovation—always afraid to put itself on record until its mind is made
up by somebody else.

So in this typical New York audience approbation was cautious, but
every fascinated eye remained focused on this young girl who continued
to do incredible things, which seemed to resemble “putting something
over” on them; a thing which no uneducated American conglomeration ever
quite forgives.

The girl’s silence, too, perplexed them; they were accustomed to
gabble, to noise, to jazz, vocal and instrumental, to that incessant
metropolitan clamour which fills every second with sound in a city
whose only distinction is its din. Stage, press, art, letters, social
existence unless noisy mean nothing in Gotham; reticence, leisure,
repose are the three lost arts. The megaphone is the city’s symbol; its
chiefest crime, silence.

The girl having finished with the big glass bubble full of tiny fish,
picked it up and tossed it aside. For a moment it apparently floated
there in space like a soap-bubble. Changing rainbow tints waxed and
waned on the surface, growing deeper and more gorgeous until the
floating globe glowed scarlet, then suddenly burst into flame and
vanished. And only a strange, sweet perfume lingered in the air.

But she gave her perplexed audience no time to wonder; she had seated
herself on the stage and was already swiftly busy unfolding a white
veil with which she presently covered herself, draping it over her like
a tent.

The veil seemed to be translucent; she was apparently visible seated
beneath it. But the veil turned into smoke, rising into the air in a
thin white cloud; and there, where she had been seated, was a statue of
white stone the image of herself!—in all the frail springtide of early
adolescence—a white statue, cold, opaque, exquisite in its sculptured
immobility.

There came, the next moment, a sound of distant thunder; flashes
lighted the blank curtain; and suddenly a vein of lightning and a
sharper peal shattered the statue to fragments.

There they lay, broken bits of her own sculptured body, glistening in a
heap behind the footlights. Then each fragment began to shimmer with a
rosy internal light of its own, until the pile of broken marble glowed
like living coals under thickening and reddening vapours. And,
presently, dimly perceptible, there she was in the flesh again, seated
in the fiery centre of the conflagration, stretching her arms
luxuriously, yawning, seemingly awakening from refreshing slumber, her
eyes unclosing to rest with a sort of confused apology upon her
astounded audience.

As she rose to her feet nothing except herself remained on the stage—no
débris, not a shred of smoke, not a spark.

She came down, then, across an inclined plank into the orchestra among
the audience.

In the aisle seat nearest her sat Victor Cleves. His business was to be
there that evening. But she didn’t know that, knew nothing about
him—had never before set eyes on him.

At her gesture of invitation he made a cup of both his hands. Into
these she poured a double handful of unset diamonds—or what appeared to
be diamonds—pressed her own hands above his for a second—and the
diamonds in his palms had become pearls.

These were passed around to people in the vicinity, and finally
returned to Mr. Cleves, who, at her request, covered the heap of pearls
with both his hands, hiding them entirely from view.

At her nod he uncovered them. The pearls had become emeralds. Again,
while he held them, and without even touching him, she changed them
into rubies. Then she turned away from him, apparently forgetting that
he still held the gems, and he sat very still, one cupped hand over the
other, while she poured silver coins into a woman’s gloved hands,
turned them into gold coins, then flung each coin into the air, where
it changed to a living, fragrant rose and fell among the audience.

Presently she seemed to remember Cleve, came back down the aisle, and
under his close and intent gaze drew from his cupped hands, one by one,
a score of brilliant little living birds, which continually flew about
her and finally perched, twittering, on her golden headdress—a
rainbow-crest of living jewels.

As she drew the last warm, breathing little feathered miracle from
Cleves’s hands and released it, he said rapidly under his breath: “I
want a word with you later. Where?”

She let her clear eyes rest on him for a moment, then with a shrug so
slight that it was perceptible, perhaps, only to him, she moved on
along the inclined way, stepped daintily over the footlights, caught
fire, apparently, nodded to a badly rattled audience, and sauntered
off, burning from head to foot.

What applause there was became merged in a dissonant instrumental
outburst from the orchestra; the great god Jazz resumed direction, the
mindless audience breathed freely again as the curtain rose upon a
familiar, yelling turbulence, including all that Gotham really
understands and cares for—legs and noise.

Victor Cleves glanced up at the stage, then continued to study the name
of the girl on the programme. It was featured in rather pathetic
solitude under “_Entr’ acte_.” And he read further: “During the _entr’
acte_ Miss Tressa Norne will entertain you with several phases of Black
Magic. This strange knowledge was acquired by Miss Norne from the
Yezidees, among which almost unknown people still remain descendants of
that notorious and formidable historic personage known in the twelfth
century as The Old Man of the Mountain—or The Old Man of Mount Alamout.

“The pleasant profession of this historic individual was assassination;
and some historians now believe that genuine occult power played a part
in his dreadful record—a record which terminated only when the infantry
of Genghis Khan took Mount Alamout by storm and hanged the Old Man of
the Mountain and burned his body under a boulder of You-Stone.

“For Miss Norne’s performance there appears to be no plausible,
practical or scientific explanation.

“During her performance the curtain will remain lowered for fifteen
minutes and will then rise on the last act of ‘You Betcha Life.’”

The noisy show continued while Cleves, paying it scant attention,
brooded over the programme. And ever his keen, grey eyes reverted to
her name, Tressa Norne.

Then, for a little while, he settled back and let his absent gaze
wander over the galloping battalions of painted girls and the slapstick
principals whose perpetual motion evoked screams of approbation from
the audience amid the din of the great god Jazz.

He had an aisle seat; he disturbed nobody when he went out and around
to the stage door.

The aged man on duty took his card, called a boy and sent it off. The
boy returned with the card, saying that Miss Norne had already dressed
and departed.

Cleves tipped him and then tipped the doorman heavily.

“Where does she live?” he asked.

“Say,” said the old man, “I dunno, and that’s straight. But them ladies
mostly goes up to the roof for a look in at the ‘Moonlight Masque’ and
a dance afterward. Was you ever up there?”

“Yes.”

“Seen the new show?”

“No.”

“Well, g’wan up while you can get a table. And I bet the little girl
will be somewheres around.”

“The little girl” _was_ “somewheres around.” He secured a table, turned
and looked about at the vast cabaret into which only a few people had
yet filtered, and saw her at a distance in the carpeted corridor buying
violets from one of the flower-girls.

A waiter placed a reserve card on his table; he continued on around the
outer edge of the auditorium.

Miss Norne had already seated herself at a small table in the rear, and
a waiter was serving her with iced orange juice and little French
cakes.

When the waiter returned Cleves went up and took off his hat.

“May I talk with you for a moment, Miss Norne?” he said.

The girl looked up, the wheat-straw still between her scarlet lips.
Then, apparently recognising in him the young man in the audience who
had spoken to her, she resumed her business of imbibing orange juice.

The girl seemed even frailer and younger in her hat and street gown. A
silver-fox stole hung from her shoulders; a gold bag lay on the table
under the bunch of violets.

She paid no attention whatever to him. Presently her wheat-straw
buckled, and she selected a better one.

He said: “There’s something rather serious I’d like to speak to you
about if you’ll let me. I’m not the sort you evidently suppose. I’m not
trying to annoy you.”

At that she looked around and upward once more.

Very, very young, but already spoiled, he thought, for the dark-blue
eyes were coolly appraising him, and the droop of the mouth had become
almost sullen. Besides, traces of paint still remained to incarnadine
lip and cheek and there was a hint of hardness in the youthful
plumpness of the features.

“Are you a professional?” she asked without curiosity.

“A theatrical man? No.”

“Then if you haven’t anything to offer me, what is it you wish?”

“I have a job to offer if you care for it and if you are up to it,” he
said.

Her eyes became slightly hostile:

“What kind of job do you mean?”

“I want to learn something about you first. Will you come over to my
table and talk it over?”

“No.”

“What sort do you suppose me to be?” he inquired, amused.

“The usual sort, I suppose.”

“You mean a Johnny?”

“Yes—of sorts.”

She let her insolent eyes sweep him once more, from head to foot.

He was a well-built young man and in his evening dress he had that
something about him which placed him very definitely where he really
belonged.

“Would you mind looking at my card?” he asked.

He drew it out and laid it beside her, and without stirring she scanned
it sideways.

“That’s my name and address,” he continued. “I’m not contemplating
mischief. I’ve enough excitement in life without seeking adventure.
Besides, I’m not the sort who goes about annoying women.”

She glanced up at him again:

“You are annoying me!”

“I’m sorry. I was quite honest. Good-night.”

He took his _congé_ with unhurried amiability; had already turned away
when she said:

“Please ... what do you desire to say to me?” He came back to her
table:

“I couldn’t tell you until I know a little more about you.”

“What—do you wish to know?”

“Several things. I could scarcely ask you—go over such matters with
you—standing here.”

There was a pause; the girl juggled with the straw on the table for a
few moments, then, partly turning, she summoned a waiter, paid him,
adjusted her stole, picked up her gold bag and her violets and stood
up. Then she turned to Cleves and gave him a direct look, which had in
it the impersonal and searching gaze of a child.

When they were seated at the table reserved for him the place already
was filling rapidly—backwash from the theatres slopped through every
aisle—people not yet surfeited with noise, not yet sufficiently sodden
by their worship of the great god Jazz.

“Jazz,” said Cleves, glancing across his dinner-card at Tressa
Norne—“what’s the meaning of the word? Do you happen to know?”

“Doesn’t it come from the French ‘_jaser_’?”

He smiled. “Possibly. I’m rather hungry. Are you?”

“Yes.”

“Will you indicate your preferences?”

She studied her card, and presently he gave the order.

“I’d like some champagne,” she said, “unless you think it’s too
expensive.”

He smiled at that, too, and gave the order.

“I didn’t suggest any wine because you seem so young,” he said.

“How old do I seem?”

“Sixteen perhaps.”

“I am twenty-one.”

“Then you’ve had no troubles.”

“I don’t know what you call trouble,” she remarked, indifferently,
watching the arriving throngs.

The orchestra, too, had taken its place.

“Well,” she said, “now that you’ve picked me up, what do you really
want of me?” There was no mitigating smile to soften what she said. She
dropped her elbows on the table, rested her chin between her palms and
looked at him with the same searching, undisturbed expression that is
so disconcerting in children. As he made no reply: “May I have a
cocktail?” she inquired.

He gave the order. And his mind registered pessimism. “There is nothing
doing with this girl,” he thought. “She’s already on the toboggan.” But
he said aloud: “That was beautiful work you did down in the theatre,
Miss Norne.”

“Did you think so?”

“Of course. It was astounding work.”

“Thank you. But managers and audiences differ with you.”

“Then they are very stupid,” he said.

“Possibly. But that does not help me pay my board.”

“Do you mean you have trouble in securing theatrical engagements?”

“Yes, I am through here to-night, and there’s nothing else in view, so
far.”

“That’s incredible!” he exclaimed.

She lifted her glass, slowly drained it.

For a few moments she caressed the stem of the empty glass, her gaze
remote.

“Yes, it’s that way,” she said. “From the beginning I felt that my
audiences were not in sympathy with me. Sometimes it even amounts to
hostility. Americans do not like what I do, even if it holds their
attention. I don’t quite understand why they don’t like it, but I’m
always conscious they don’t. And of course that settles it—to-night has
settled the whole thing, once and for all.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What others do, I presume.”

“What do others do?” he inquired, watching the lovely sullen eyes.

“Oh, they do what I’m doing now, don’t they?—let some man pick them up
and feed them.” She lifted her indifferent eyes. “I’m not criticising
you. I meant to do it some day—when I had courage. That’s why I just
asked you if I might have some champagne—finding myself a little scared
at my first step.... But you _did_ say you might have a job for me.
Didn’t you?”

“Suppose I haven’t. What are you going to do?”

The curtain was rising. She nodded toward the bespangled chorus.
“Probably that sort of thing. They’ve asked me.”

Supper was served. They both were hungry and thirsty; the music made
conversation difficult, so they supped in silence and watched the
imbecile show conceived by vulgarians, produced by vulgarians and
served up to mental degenerates of the same species—the average
metropolitan audience.

For ten minutes a pair of comedians fell up and down a flight of steps,
and the audience shrieked approval.

“Miss Norne?”

The girl who had been watching the show turned in her chair and looked
back at him.

“Your magic is by far the most wonderful I have ever seen or heard of.
Even in India such things are not done.”

“No, not in India,” she said, indifferently.

“Where then?”

“In China.”

“You learned to do such things there?”

“Yes.”

“Where, in China, did you learn such amazing magic?”

“In Yian.”

“I never heard of it. Is it a province?”

“A city.”

“And you lived there?”

“Fourteen years.”

“When?”

“From 1904 to 1918.”

“During the great war,” he remarked, “you were in China?”

“Yes.”

“Then you arrived here very recently.”

“In November, from the Coast.”

“I see. You played the theatres from the Coast eastward.”

“And went to pieces in New York,” she added calmly, finishing her glass
of champagne.

“Have you any family?” he asked.

“No.”

“Do you care to say anything further?” he inquired, pleasantly.

“About my family? Yes, if you wish. My father was in the spice trade in
Yian. The Yezidees took Yian in 1910, threw him into a well in his own
compound and filled it up with dead imperial troops. I was thirteen
years old.... The Hassani did that. They held Yian nearly eight years,
and I lived with my mother, in a garden pagoda, until 1914. In January
of that year Germans got through from Kiaou-Chou. They had been six
months on the way. I think they were Hassanis. Anyway, they persuaded
the Hassanis to massacre every English-speaking prisoner. And so—my
mother died in the garden pagoda of Yian.... I was not told for four
years.”

“Why did they spare you?” he asked, astonished at her story so quietly
told, so utterly destitute of emotion.

“I was seventeen. A certain person had placed me among the temple girls
in the temple of Erlik. It pleased this person to make of me a Mongol
temple girl as a mockery at Christ. They gave me the name Keuke Mongol.
I asked to serve the shrine of Kwann-an—she being like to our Madonna.
But this person gave me the choice between the halberds of the
Tchortchas and the sorcery of Erlik.”

She lifted her sombre eyes. “So I learned how to do the things you saw.
But—what I did there on the stage is not—respectable.”

An odd shiver passed over him. For a second he took her literally,
suddenly convinced that her magic was not white but black as the demon
at whose shrine she had learned it. Then he smiled and asked her
pleasantly, whether indeed she employed hypnosis in her miraculous
exhibitions.

But her eyes became more sombre still, and, “I don’t care to talk about
it,” she said. “I have already said too much.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry into professional secrets——”

“I can’t talk about it,” she repeated. “... Please—my glass is quite
empty.”

When he had refilled it:

“How did you get away from Yian?” he asked.

“The Japanese.”

“What luck!”

“Yes. One battle was fought at Buldak. The Hassanis and Blue Flags were
terribly cut up. Then, outside the walls of Yian, Prince Sanang’s
Tchortcha infantry made a stand. He was there with his Yezidee
horsemen, all in leather and silk armour with casques and corselets of
black Indian steel.

“I could see them from the temple—saw the Japanese gunners open fire.
The Tchortchas were blown to shreds in the blast of the Japanese
guns.... Sanang got away with some of his Yezidee horsemen.”

“Where was that battle?”

“I told you, outside the walls of Yian.”

“The newspapers never mentioned any such trouble in China,” he said,
suspiciously.

“Nobody knows about it except the Germans and the Japanese.”

“Who is this Sanang?” he demanded.

“A Yezidee-Mongol. He is one of the Sheiks-el-Djebel—a servant of The
Old Man of Mount Alamout.”

“What is _he_?”

“A sorcerer—assassin.”

“What!” exclaimed Cleves incredulously.

“Why, yes,” she said, calmly. “Have you never heard of The Old Man of
Mount Alamout?”

“Well, yes——”

“The succession has been unbroken since 1090 B.C.A Hassan Sabbah is
still the present Old Man of the Mountain. His Yezidees worship Erlik.
They are sorcerers. But you would not believe that.”

Cleves said with a smile, “Who is Erlik?”

“The Mongols’ Satan.”

“Oh! So these Yezidees are devil-worshipers!”

“They are more. They _are_ actually devils.”

“You don’t really believe that even in unexplored China there exists
such a creature as a real sorcerer, do you?” he inquired, smilingly.

“I don’t wish to talk of it.”

To his surprise her face had flushed, and he thought her sensitive
mouth quivered a little.

He watched her in silence for a moment; then, leaning a little way
across the table:

“Where are you going when the show here closes?”

“To my boarding-house.”

“And then?”

“To bed,” she said, sullenly.

“And to-morrow what do you mean to do?”

“Go out to the agencies and ask for work.”

“And if there is none?”

“The chorus,” she said, indifferently.

“What salary have you been getting?”

She told him.

“Will you take three times that amount and work with me?”




CHAPTER IV
BODY AND SOUL


The girl’s direct gaze met his with that merciless searching intentness
he already knew.

“What do you wish me to do?”

“Enter the service of the United States.”

“Wh-what?”

“Work for the Government.”

She was too taken aback to answer.

“Where were you born?” he demanded abruptly.

“In Albany, New York,” she replied in a dazed way.

“You are loyal to your country?”

“Yes—certainly.”

“You would not betray her?”

“No.”

“I don’t mean for money; I mean from fear.”

After a moment, and, avoiding his gaze: “I am afraid of death,” she
said very simply.

He waited.

“I—I don’t know what I might do—being afraid,” she added in a troubled
voice. “I desire to—live.”

He still waited.

She lifted her eyes: “I’d try not to betray my country,” she murmured.

“Try to face death for your country’s honour?”

“Yes.”

“And for your own?”

“Yes; and for my own.”

He leaned nearer: “Yet you’re taking a chance on your own honour
to-night.”

She blushed brightly: “I didn’t think I was taking a very great chance
with you.”

He said: “You have found life too hard. And when you faced failure in
New York you began to let go of life—real life, I mean. And you came up
here to-night wondering whether you had courage to let yourself go.
When I spoke to you it scared you. You found you hadn’t the courage.
But perhaps to-morrow you might find it—or next week—if sufficiently
scared by hunger—you might venture to take the first step along the
path that you say others usually take sooner or later.”

The girl flushed scarlet, sat looking at him out of eyes grown dark
with anger.

He said: “You told me an untruth. You _have_ been tempted to betray
your country. You have resisted. You _have_ been threatened with death.
You _have_ had courage to defy threats and temptations where your
country’s honour was concerned!”

“How do you know?” she demanded.

He continued, ignoring the question: “From the time you landed in San
Francisco you have been threatened. You tried to earn a living by your
magician’s tricks, but in city after city, as you came East, your
uneasiness grew into fear, and your fear into terror, because every day
more terribly confirmed your belief that people were following you
determined either to use you to their own purposes or to murder you——”

The girl turned quite white and half rose in her chair, then sank back,
staring at him out of dilated eyes. Then Cleves smiled: “So you’ve got
the nerve to do Government work,” he said, “and you’ve got the
intelligence, and the knowledge, and something else—I don’t know
exactly what to call it—Skill? Dexterity? Sorcery?” he smiled—“I mean
your professional ability. That’s what I want—that bewildering
dexterity of yours, to help your own country in the fight of its life.
Will you enlist for service?”

“W-what fight?” she asked faintly.

“The fight with the Red Spectre.”

“Anarchy?”

“Yes.... Are you ready to leave this place? I want to talk to you.”

“Where?”

“In my own rooms.”

After a moment she rose.

“I’ll go to your rooms with you,” she said. She added very calmly that
she was glad it was to be his rooms and not some other man’s.

Out of countenance, he demanded what she meant, and she said quite
candidly that she’d made up her mind to live at any cost, and that if
she couldn’t make an honest living she’d make a living anyway.

He offered no reply to this until they had reached the street and he
had called a taxi.

On their way to his apartment he re-opened the subject rather bluntly,
remarking that life was not worth living at the price she had
mentioned.

“That is the accepted Christian theory,” she replied coolly, “but
circumstances alter things.”

“Not such things.”

“Oh, yes, they do. If one is already damned, what difference does
anything else make?”

He asked, sarcastically, whether she considered herself already damned.

She did not reply for a few moments, then she said, in a quick,
breathless way, that souls have been entrapped through ignorance of
evil. And asked him if he did not believe it.

“No,” he said, “I don’t.”

She shook her head. “You couldn’t understand,” she said. “But I’ve made
up my mind to one thing; even if my soul has perished, my body shall
not die for a long, long time. I mean to live,” she added. “I shall not
let my body be slain! They shall not steal life from me, whatever they
have done to my soul——”

“What in heaven’s name are you talking about?” he exclaimed. “Do you
actually believe in soul-snatchers and life-stealers?”

She seemed sullen, her profile turned to him, her eyes on the
brilliantly lighted avenue up which they were speeding. After a while:
“I’d rather live decently and respectably if I can,” she said. “That is
the natural desire of any girl, I suppose. But if I can’t, nevertheless
I shall beat off death at any cost. And whatever the price of life is,
I shall pay it. Because I am absolutely determined to go on living. And
if I can’t provide the means I’ll have to let some man do it, I
suppose.”

“It’s a good thing it was I who found you when you were out of a job,”
he remarked coldly.

“I hope so,” she said. “Even in the beginning I didn’t really believe
you meant to be impertinent”—a tragic smile touched her lips—“and I was
almost sorry——”

“Are you quite crazy?” he demanded.

“No, my mind is untouched. It’s my soul that’s gone.... Do you know I
was very hungry when you spoke to me? The management wouldn’t advance
anything, and my last money went for my room.... Last Monday I had
three dollars to face the future—and no job. I spent the last of it
to-night on violets, orange juice and cakes. My furs and my gold bag
remain. I can go two months more on them. Then it’s a job or——.” She
shrugged and buried her nose in her violets.

“Suppose I advance you a month’s salary?” he said.

“What am I to do for it?”

The taxi stopped at a florist’s on the corner of Madison Avenue and
58th Street. Overhead were apartments. There was no elevator—merely the
street door to unlock and four dim flights of stairs rising steeply to
the top.

He lived on the top floor. As they paused before his door in the dim
corridor:

“Are you afraid?” he asked.

She came nearer, laid a hand on his arm:

“Are _you_ afraid?”

He stood silent, the latch-key in his hand.

“I’m not afraid of myself—if that is what you mean,” he said.

“That is partly what I mean ... you’ll have to mount guard over your
soul.”

“I’ll look out for my soul,” he retorted dryly.

“Do so. I lost mine. I—I would not wish any harm to yours through our
companionship.”

“Don’t you worry about my soul,” he remarked, fitting the key to the
lock. But again her hand fell on his wrist:

“Wait. I can’t—can’t help warning you. Neither your soul nor your body
are safe if—if you ever do make of me a companion. I’ve _got_ to tell
you this!”

“What are you talking about?” he demanded bluntly.

“Because you have been courteous—considerate—and you _don’t_ know—oh,
you don’t realise what spiritual peril is!—What your soul and body have
to fear if you—if you win me over—if you ever manage to make of me a
friend!”

He said: “People follow and threaten you. We know that. I understand
also that association with you involves me, and that I shall no doubt
be menaced with bodily harm.”

He laid his hand on hers where it still rested on his sleeves:

“But that’s my business, Miss Norne,” he added with a smile. “So,
otherwise, it being merely a plain business affair between you and me,
I think I may also venture my immortal soul alone with you in my room.”

The girl flushed darkly.

“You have misunderstood,” she said.

He looked at her coolly, intently; and arrived at no conclusion. Young,
very lovely, confessedly without moral principle, he still could not
believe her actually depraved. “What did you mean?” he said bluntly.

“In companionship with the lost, one might lose one’s way—unawares....
Do you know that there is an Evil loose in the world which is bent upon
conquest by _obtaining control of men’s minds_?”

“No,” he replied, amused.

“And that, through the capture of men’s minds and souls the destruction
of civilisation is being planned?”

“Is that what you learned in your captivity, Miss Norne?”

“You do not believe me.”

“I believe your terrible experiences in China have shaken you to your
tragic little soul. Horror and grief and loneliness have left scars on
tender, impressionable youth. They would have slain maturity—broken it,
crushed it. But youth is flexible, pliable, and bends—gives way under
pressure. Scars become slowly effaced. It shall be so with you. You
will learn to understand that nothing really can harm the soul.”

For a few moments’ silence they stood facing each other on the dim
landing outside his locked door.

“Nothing can slay our souls,” he repeated in a grave voice. “I do not
believe you really ever have done anything to wound even your
self-respect. I do not believe you are capable of it, or ever have
been, or ever will be. But somebody has deeply wounded you,
spiritually, and has wounded your mind to persuade you that your soul
is no longer in God’s keeping. For that is a lie!”

He saw her features working with poignant emotions as though struggling
to believe him.

“Souls are never lost,” he said. “Ungoverned passions of every sort
merely cripple them for a space. God always heals them in the end.”

He laid his hand on the door-knob once more and lifted the latch-key.

“Don’t!” she whispered, catching his hand again, “if there should be
somebody in there waiting for us!”

“There is not a soul in my rooms. My servant sleeps out.”

“There _is_ somebody there!” she said, trembling.

“Nobody, Miss Norne. Will you come in with me?”

“I don’t dare——”

“Why?”

“You and I alone together—no! oh, please—please! I am afraid!”

“Of what?”

“Of—giving you—my c-confidence—and trust—and—and f-friendship.”

“I want you to.”

“I must not! It would destroy us both, soul and body!”

“I tell you,” he said, impatiently, “that there is no destruction of
the soul—and it’s a clean comradeship anyway—a fighting friendship I
ask of you—_all_ I ask; all I offer! Wherein, then, lies this peril in
being alone together?”

“Because I am finding it in my heart to believe in you, trust you, hold
fast to your strength and protection. And if I give way—yield—and if I
make you a promise—and _if there is anybody in that room to see us and
hear us—then_ we shall be destroyed, both of us, soul and body——”

He took her hands, held them until their trembling ceased.

“I’ll answer for our bodies. Let God look after the rest. Will you
trust Him?”

She nodded.

“And me?”

“Yes.”

But her face blanched as he turned the latch-key, switched on the
electric light, and preceded her into the room beyond.

The place was one of those accentless, typical bachelor apartments made
comfortable for anything masculine, but quite unlivable otherwise.

Live coals still glowed in the hob grate; he placed a lump of cannel
coal on the embers, used a bellows vigorously and the flame caught with
a greasy crackle.

The girl stood motionless until he pulled up an easy chair for her,
then he found another for himself. She let slip her furs, folded her
hands around the bunch of violets and waited.

“Now,” he said, “I’ll come to the point. In 1916 I was at Plattsburg,
expecting a commission. The Department of Justice sent for me. I went
to Washington where I was made to understand that I had been selected
to serve my country in what is vaguely known as the Secret Service—and
which includes government agents attached to several departments.

“The great war is over; but I am still retained in the service. Because
something more sinister than a hun victory over civilisation threatens
this Republic. And threatens the civilised world.”

“Anarchy,” she said.

“Bolshevism.”

She did not stir in her chair.

She had become very white. She said nothing. He looked at her with his
quiet, reassuring smile.

“That’s what I want of you,” he repeated.

“I want your help,” he went on, “I want your valuable knowledge of the
Orient. I want whatever secret information you possess. I want your
rather amazing gifts, your unprecedented experience among almost
unknown people, your familiarity with occult things, your astounding
powers—whatever they are—hypnotic, psychic, material.

“Because, to-day, civilisation is engaged in a secret battle for
existence against gathering powers of violence, the force and limit of
which are still unguessed.

“It is a battle between righteousness and evil, between sanity and
insanity, light and darkness, God and Satan! And if civilisation does
not win, then the world perishes.”

She raised her still eyes to his, but made no other movement.

“Miss Norne,” he said, “we in the International Service know enough
about you to desire to know more.

“We already knew the story you have told to me. Agents in the
International Secret Service kept in touch with you from the time that
the Japanese escorted you out of China.

“From the day you landed, and all across the Continent to New York, you
have been kept in view by agents of this government.

“Here, in New York, my men have kept in touch with you. And now,
to-night, the moment has come for a personal understanding between you
and me.”

The girl’s pale lips moved—became stiffly articulate: “I—I wish to
live,” she stammered, “I fear death.”

“I know it. I know what I ask when I ask your help.”

She said in the ghost of a voice: “If I turn against _them_—they will
kill me.”

“They’ll try,” he said quietly.

“They will not fail, Mr. Cleves.”

“That is in God’s hands.”

She became deathly white at that.

“No,” she burst out in an agonised voice, “it is not in God’s hands! If
it were, I should not be afraid! It is in the hands of those who stole
my soul!”

She covered her face with both arms, fairly writhing on her chair.

“If the Yezidees have actually made you believe any such nonsense”—he
began; but she dropped her arms and stared at him out of terrible blue
eyes:

“I don’t want to die, I tell you! I am afraid!—_afraid_! If I reveal to
you what I know they’ll kill me. If I turn against them and aid you,
they’ll slay my body, and send it after my soul!”

She was trembling so violently that he sprang up and went to her. After
a moment he passed one arm around her shoulders and held her firmly,
close to him.

“Come,” he said, “do your duty. Those who enlist under the banner of
Christ have nothing to dread in this world or the next.”

“If—if I could believe I were safe there.”

“I tell you that you are. So is every human soul! What mad nonsense
have the Yezidees made you believe? Is there any surer salvation for
the soul than to die in Christ’s service?”

He slipped his arm from her quivering shoulders and grasped both her
hands, crushing them as though to steady every fibre in her tortured
body.

“I want you to live. I want to live, too. But I tell you it’s in God’s
hands, and we soldiers of civilisation have nothing to fear except
failure to do our duty. Now, then, are we comrades under the United
States Government?”

“O God—I—dare not!”

“_Are_ we?”

Perhaps she felt the physical pain of his crushing grip for she turned
and looked him in the eyes.

“I don’t want to die,” she whispered. “Don’t make me!”

“Will you help your country?”

The terrible directness of her child’s gaze became almost unendurable
to him.

“Will you offer your country your soul and body?” he insisted in a low,
tense voice.

Her stiff lips formed a word.

“Yes!” he exclaimed.

“Yes.”

For a moment she rested against his shoulder, deathly white, then in a
flash she had straightened, was on her feet in one bound and so swiftly
that he scarcely followed her movement—was unaware that she had risen
until he saw her standing there with a pistol glittering in her hand,
her eyes fixed on the portières that hung across the corridor leading
to his bedroom.

“What on earth,” he began, but she interrupted him, keeping her gaze
focused on the curtains, and the pistol resting level on her hip.

“I’ll answer you if I die for it!” she cried. “I’ll tell you everything
I know! You wish to learn what is this monstrous evil that threatens
the world with destruction—what you call anarchy and Bolshevism? It is
an Evil that was born before Christ came! It is an Evil which not only
destroys cities and empires and men but which is more terrible still
for it obtains control of the human mind, and uses it at will; and it
obtains sovereignty over the soul, and makes it prisoner. Its aim is to
dominate first, then to destroy. It was conceived in the beginning by
Erlik and by Sorcerers and devils.... Always, from the first, there
have been sorcerers and living devils.

“And when human history began to be remembered and chronicled, devils
were living who worshiped Erlik and practised sorcery.

“They have been called by many names. A thousand years before Christ
Hassan Sabbah founded his sect called Hassanis or Assassins. The
Yezidees are of them. Their Chief is still called Sabbah; their creed
is the annihilation of civilisation!”

Cleves had risen. The girl spoke in a clear, accentless monotone, not
looking at him, her eyes and pistol centred on the motionless curtains.

“Look out!” she cried sharply.

“What is the matter?” he demanded. “Do you suppose anybody is hidden
behind that curtain in the passageway?”

“If there is,” she replied in her excited but distinct voice, “here is
a tale to entertain him:

“The Hassanis are a sect of assassins which has spread out of Asia all
over the world, and they are determined upon the annihilation of
everything and everybody in it except themselves!

“In Germany is a branch of the sect. The hun is the lineal descendant
of the ancient Yezidee; the gods of the hun are the old demons under
other names; the desire and object of the hun is the same desire—to
rule the minds and bodies and souls of men and use them to their own
purposes!”

She lifted her pistol a little, came a pace forward:

“Anarchist, Yezidee, Hassani, Boche, Bolshevik—all are the same—all are
secretly swarming in the hidden places for the same purpose!”

The girl’s blue eyes were aflame, now, and the pistol was lifting
slowly in her hand to a deadly level.

“Sanang!” she cried in a terrible voice.

“Sanang!” she cried again in her terrifying young voice—“Toad! Tortoise
egg! Spittle of Erlik! May the Thirty Thousand Calamities overtake you!
Sheik-el-Djebel!—cowardly Khan whom I laughed at from the temple when
it rained yellow snakes on the marble steps when all the gongs in Yian
sounded in your frightened ears!”

She waited.

“What! You won’t step out? _Tokhta!_” she exclaimed in a ringing tone,
and made a swift motion with her left hand. Apparently out of her empty
open palm, like a missile hurled, a thin, blinding beam of light struck
the curtains, making them suddenly transparent.

_A man stood there._

He came out, moving very slowly as though partly stupefied. He wore
evening dress under his overcoat, and had a long knife in his right
hand.

Nobody spoke.

“So—I really was to die then, if I came here,” said the girl in a
wondering way.

Sanang’s stealthy gaze rested on her, stole toward Cleves. He moistened
his lips with his tongue. “You deliver me to this government agent?” he
asked hoarsely.

“I deliver nobody by treachery. You may go, Sanang.”

He hesitated, a graceful, faultless, metropolitan figure in top-hat and
evening attire. Then, as he started to move, Cleves covered him with
his weapon.

“I can’t let that man go free!” cried Cleves angrily.

“Very well!” she retorted in a passionate voice—“then take him if you
are able! _Tokhta!_ Look out for yourself!”

Something swift as lightning struck the pistol from his grasp,—blinded
him, half stunned him, set him reeling in a drenching blaze of light
that blotted out all else.

He heard the door slam; he stumbled, caught at the back of a chair
while his senses and sight were clearing.

“By heavens!” he whispered with ashen lips, “you—you _are_ a
sorceress—or something. What—what, are you doing to me?”

There was no answer. And when his vision cleared a little more he saw
her crouched on the floor, her head against the locked door, listening,
perhaps—or sobbing—he scarcely understood which until the quiver of her
shoulders made it plainer.

When at last Cleves went to her and bent over and touched her she
looked up at him out of wet eyes, and her grief-drawn mouth quivered.

“I—I don’t know,” she sobbed, “if he truly stole away my
soul—there—there in the temple dusk of Yian. But he—he stole my
heart—for all his wickedness—Sanang, Prince of the Yezidees—and I have
been fighting him for it all these years—all these long years—fighting
for what he stole in the temple dusk!... And now—now I have it back—my
heart—all broken to pieces—here on the floor behind your—your bolted
door.”




CHAPTER V
THE ASSASSINS


On the wall hung a map of Mongolia, that indefinite region a million
and a half square miles in area, vast sections of which have never been
explored.

Turkestan and China border it on the south, and Tibet almost touches
it, not quite.

Even in the twelfth century, when the wild Mongols broke loose and
nearly overran the world, the Tibet infantry under Genghis, the
Tchortcha horsemen drafted out of Black China, and a great cloud of
Mongol cavalry under the Prince of the Vanguard commanding half a
hundred Hezars, never penetrated that grisly and unknown waste. The
“Eight Towers of the Assassins” guarded it—still guard it, possibly.

The vice-regent of Erlik, Prince of Darkness, dwelt within this unknown
land. And dwells there still, perhaps.

In front of this wall-map stood Tressa Norne.

Behind her, facing the map, four men were seated—three of them under
thirty.

These three were volunteers in the service of the United States
Government—men of independent means, of position, who had volunteered
for military duty at the outbreak of the great war. However, they had
been assigned by the Government to a very different sort of duty no
less exciting than service on the fighting line, but far less
conspicuous, for they had been drafted into the United States
Department of Justice.

The names of these three were Victor Cleves, a professor of ornithology
at Harvard University before the war; Alexander Selden, junior partner
in the banking firm of Milwyn, Selden, and Co., and James Benton, a New
York architect.

The fourth man’s name was John Recklow. He might have been over fifty,
or under. He was well-built, in a square, athletic way, clear-skinned
and ruddy, grey-eyed, quiet in voice and manner. His hair and moustache
had turned silvery. He had been employed by the Government for many
years. He seemed to be enormously interested in what Miss Norne was
saying.

Also he was the only man who interrupted her narrative to ask
questions. And his questions revealed a knowledge which was making the
girl more sensitive and uneasy every moment.

Finally, when she spoke of the Scarlet Desert, he asked if the Scarlet
Lake were there and if the Xin was still supposed to inhabit its
vermilion depths. And at that she turned and looked at him, her
forefinger still resting on the map.

“Where have you ever heard of the Scarlet Lake and the Xin?” she asked
as though frightened.

Recklow said quietly that as a boy he had served under Gordon and Sir
Robert.

“If, as a boy, you served under Chinese Gordon, you already know much
of what I have told you, Mr. Recklow. Is it not true?” she demanded
nervously.

“That makes no difference,” he replied with a smile. “It is all very
new to these three young gentlemen. And as for myself, I am checking up
what you say and comparing it with what I heard many, many years ago
when my comrade Barres and I were in Yian.”

“Did you really know Sir Robert Hart?”

“Yes.”

“Then why do you not explain to these gentlemen?”

“Dear child,” he interrupted gently, “what did Chinese Gordon or Sir
Robert Hart, or even my comrade Barres, or I myself know about occult
Asia in comparison to what you know?—a girl who has actually served the
mysteries of Erlik for four amazing years!”

She paled a trifle, came slowly across the room to where Recklow was
seated, laid a timid hand on his sleeve.

“Do you believe there are sorcerers in Asia?” she asked with that
child-like directness which her wonderful blue eyes corroborated.

Recklow remained silent.

“Because,” she went on, “if, in your heart, you do not believe this to
be an accursed fact, then what I have to say will mean nothing to any
of you.”

Recklow touched his short, silvery moustache, hesitating. Then:

“The worship of Erlik is devil worship,” he said. “Also I am entirely
prepared to believe that there are, among the Yezidees, adepts who
employ scientific weapons against civilisation—who have probably
obtained a rather terrifying knowledge of psychic laws which they use
scientifically, and which to ordinary, God-fearing folk appear to be
the black magic of sorcerers.”

Cleves said: “The employment by the huns of poison gases and long-range
cannon is a parallel case. Before the war we could not believe in the
possibility of a cannon that threw shells a distance of seventy miles.”

The girl still addressed herself to Recklow: “Then you do not believe
there are real sorcerers in Asia, Mr. Recklow?”

“Not sorcerers with supernatural powers for evil. Only degenerate human
beings who, somehow, have managed to tap invisible psychic currents,
and have learned how to use terrific forces about which, so far, we
know practically nothing.”

She spoke again in the same uneasy voice: “Then you do not believe that
either God or Satan is involved?”

“No,” he replied smilingly, “and you must not so believe.”

“Nor the—the destruction of human souls,” she persisted; “you do not
believe it is being accomplished to-day?”

“Not in the slightest, dear young lady,” he said cheerfully.

“Do you not believe that to have been instructed in such unlawful
knowledge is damning? Do you not believe that ability to employ unknown
forces is forbidden of God, and that to disobey His law means death to
the soul?”

“No!”

“That it is the price one pays to Satan for occult power over people’s
minds?” she insisted.

“Hypnotic suggestion is not one of the cardinal sins,” explained
Recklow, still smiling—“unless wickedly employed. The Yezidee
priesthood is a band of so-called sorcerers only because of their
wicked employment of whatever hypnotic and psychic knowledge they may
have obtained.

“There was nothing intrinsically wicked in the huns’ discovery of
phosgene. But the use they made of it made devils out of them. My
ability to manufacture phosgene gas is no crime. But if I manufacture
it and use it to poison innocent human beings, then, in that sense, I
am, perhaps, a sort of modern sorcerer.”

Tressa Norne turned paler:

“I had better tell you that I _have_ used—forbidden knowledge—which the
Yezidees taught me in the temple of Erlik.”

“Used it how?” demanded Cleves.

“To—to earn a living.... And once or twice to defend myself.”

There was the slightest scepticism in Recklow’s bland smile. “You did
quite right, Miss Norne.”

She had become very white now. She stood beside Recklow, her back
toward the suspended map, and looked in a scared sort of way from one
to the other of the men seated before her, turning finally to Cleves,
and coming toward him.

“I—I once killed a man,” she said with a catch in her breath.

Cleves reddened with astonishment. “Why did you do that?” he asked.

“He was already on his way to kill me in bed.”

“You were perfectly right,” remarked Recklow coolly.

“I don’t know ... I was in bed.... And then, on the edge of sleep, I
felt his mind groping to get hold of mine—feeling about in the darkness
to get hold of my brain and seize it and paralyse it.”

All colour had left her face. Cleves gripped the arm of his chair and
watched her intently.

“I—I had only a moment’s mental freedom,” she went on in a ghost of a
voice. “I was just able to rouse myself, fight off those murderous
brain-fingers—let loose a clear mental ray.... And then, O God! I saw
him in his room with his Kalmuck knife—saw him already on his way to
murder me—Gutchlug Khan, the Yezidee—looking about in his bedroom for a
shroud.... And when—when he reached for the bed to draw forth a fine,
white sheet for the shroud without which no Yezidee dares journey
deathward—then—_then_ I became frightened.... And I killed him—I slew
him there in his hotel bedroom on the floor above mine!”

Selden moistened his lips: “That Oriental, Gutchlug, died from
heart-failure in a San Francisco hotel,” he said. “I was there at the
time.”

“He died by the fangs of a little yellow snake,” whispered the girl.

“There was no snake in his room,” retorted Cleves.

“And no wound on his body,” added Selden. “I attended the autopsy.”

She said, faintly: “There was no snake, and no wound, as you say....
Yet Gutchlug died of both there in his bedroom.... And before he died
he heard his soul bidding him farewell; and he saw the death-adder
coiled in the sheet he clutched—saw the thing strike him again and
again—saw and felt the tiny wounds on his left hand; felt the fangs
pricking deep, deep into the veins; died of it there within the
minute—died of the swiftest poison known. And yet——”

She turned her dead-white face to Cleves—“And yet _there was no snake
there_!... And never had been.... And so I—I ask you, gentlemen, if
souls do not die when minds learn to fight death with death—and deal it
so swiftly, so silently, while one’s body lies, unstirring on a bed—in
a locked room on the floor below——”

She swayed a little, put out one hand rather blindly.

Recklow rose and passed a muscular arm around her; Cleves, beside her,
held her left hand, crushing it, without intention, until she opened
her eyes with a cry of pain.

“Are you all right?” asked Recklow bluntly.

“Yes.” She turned and looked at Cleves and he caressed her bruised hand
as though dazed.

“Tell me,” she said to Cleves—“you who know—know more about my mind
than anybody living——” a painful colour surged into her face—but she
went on steadily, forcing herself to meet his gaze: “tell me, Mr.
Cleves—do you still believe that nothing can really destroy my soul?
And that it shall yet win through to safety?”

He said: “Your soul is in God’s keeping, and always shall be.... And if
the Yezidees have made you believe otherwise, they lie.”

Recklow added in a slow, perplexed way: “I have no personal knowledge
of psychic power. I am not psychic, not susceptible. But if you
actually possess such ability, Miss Norne, and if you have employed
such knowledge to defend your life, then you have done absolutely
right.”

“No guilt touches you,” added Selden with an involuntary shiver, “if by
hypnosis or psychic ability you really did put an end to that would-be
murderer, Gutchlug.”

Selden said: “If Gutchlug died by the fangs of a yellow death-adder
which existed only in his own mind, and if you actually had anything to
do with it you acted purely in self-defence.”

“You did your full duty,” added Benton—“but—good God!—it seems
incredible to me, that such power can actually be available in the
world!”

Recklow spoke again in his pleasant, undisturbed voice: “Go back to the
map, Miss Norne, and tell us a little more about this rather terrifying
thing which you believe menaces the civilised world with destruction.”

Tressa Norne laid a slim finger on the map. Her voice had become
steady. She said:

“The devil-worship, of which one of the modern developments is
Bolshevism, and another the terrorism of the hun, began in Asia long
before Christ’s advent: At least so it was taught us in the temple of
Erlik.

“It has always existed, its aim always has been the annihilation of
good and the elevation of evil; the subjection of right by might, and
the worldwide triumph of wrong.

“Perhaps it is as old as the first battle between God and Satan. I have
wondered about it, sometimes. There in the dusk of the temple when the
Eight Assassins came—the eight Sheiks-el-Djebel, all in white—chanting
the Yakase of Sabbah—always that dirge when they came and spread their
eight white shrouds on the temple steps——”

Her voice caught; she waited to recover her composure. Then went on:

“The ambition of Genghis was to conquer the world by force of arms. It
was merely of physical subjection that he dreamed. But the Slayer of
Souls——”

“Who?” asked Recklow sharply.

“The Slayer of Souls—Erlik’s vice-regent on earth—Hassan Sabbah. The
Old Man of the Mountain. It is of him I am speaking,” exclaimed Tressa
Norne—with quiet resolution. “Genghis sought only physical conquest of
man; the Yezidee’s ambition is more awful, _for he is attempting to
surprise and seize the very minds of men_!”

There was a dead silence. Tressa looked palely upon the four.

“The Yezidees—who you tell me are not sorcerers—are using power—which
you tell me is not magic accursed by God—to waylay, capture, enslave,
and destroy _the minds and souls of mankind_.

“It may be that what they employ is hypnotic ability and psychic power
and can be, some day, explained on a scientific basis when we learn
more about the occult laws which govern these phenomena.

“But could anything render the threat less awful? For there have
existed for centuries—perhaps always—a sect of Satanists determined
upon the destruction of everything that is pure and holy and good on
earth; and they are resolved to substitute for righteousness the
dreadful reign of hell.

“In the beginning there were comparatively few of these human demons.
Gradually, through the eras, they have increased. In the twelfth
century there were fifty thousand of the Sect of Assassins.

“Beside the castle of the Slayer of Souls on Mount Alamout——” she laid
her finger on the map—“eight other towers were erected for the Eight
Chief Assassins, called Sheiks-el-Djebel.

“In the temple we were taught where these eight towers stood.” She
picked up a pencil, and on eight blank spaces of unexplored and
unmapped Mongolia she made eight crosses. Then she turned to the men
behind her.

“It was taught to us in the temple that from these eight _foci_ of
infection the disease of evil has been spreading throughout the world;
from these eight towers have gone forth every year the emissaries of
evil—perverted missionaries—to spread the poisonous propaganda, to
teach it, to tamper stealthily with the minds of men, dominate them,
pervert them, instruct them in the creed of the Assassin of Souls.

“All over the world are people, already contaminated, whose minds are
already enslaved and poisoned, and who are infecting the still healthy
brains of others—stealthily possessing themselves of the minds of
mankind—teaching them evil, inviting them to mock the precepts of
Christ.

“Of such lost minds are the degraded brains of the Germans—the pastors
and philosophers who teach that might is right.

“Of such crippled minds are the Bolsheviki, poisoned long, long ago by
close contact with Asia which, before that, had infected and enslaved
the minds of the ruling classes with ferocious philosophy.

“Of such minds are all anarchists of every shade and stripe—all
terrorists, all disciples of violence,—the murderously envious, the
slothful slinking brotherhood which prowls through the world taking
every opportunity to set it afire; those mentally dulled by reason of
excesses; those weak intellects become unsound through futile
gabble,—parlour socialists, amateur revolutionists, theoretical
incapables excited by discussion fit only for healthy minds.”

She left the map and came over to where the four men were seated
terribly intent upon her every word.

“In the temple of Erlik, where my girlhood was passed after the murder
of my parents, I learned what I am repeating to you,” she said.

“I learned this, also, that the Eight Towers still exist—still stand
to-day,—at least theoretically—and that from the Eight Towers pours
forth across the world a stream of poison.

“I was told that, to every country, eight Yezidees were allotted—eight
sorcerers—or adepts in scientific psychology if you prefer it—whose
mission is to teach the gospel of hell and gradually but surely to win
the minds of men to the service of the Slayer of Souls.

“That is what was taught us in the temple. We were educated in the
development of occult powers—for it seems all human beings possess this
psychic power latent within them—only few, even when instructed,
acquire any ability to control and use this force....

“I—I learned—rapidly. I even thought, sometimes, that the Yezidees were
beginning to be a little afraid of me,—even the Hassani priests.... And
the Sheiks-el-Djebel, spreading their shrouds on the temple steps,
looked at me with unquiet eyes, where I stood like a corpse amid the
incense clouds——”

She passed her fingers over her eyelids, then framed her face between
both hands for a moment’s thought lost in tragic retrospection.

“Kai!” she whispered dreamily as though to herself—“what Erlik awoke
within my body that was asleep, God knows, but it was as though a twin
comrade arose within me and looked out through my eyes upon a world
which never before had been visible.”

Utter silence reigned in the room: Cleves’s breathing seemed almost
painful to him so intently was he listening and watching this girl;
Benton’s hands whitened with his grip on the chair-arms; Selden, tense,
absorbed, kept his keen gaze of a business man fastened on her face.
Recklow slowly caressed the cold bowl of his pipe with both thumbs.

Tressa Norne’s strange and remote eyes subtly altered, and she lifted
her head and looked calmly at the men before her.

“I think that there is nothing more for me to add,” she said. “The Red
Spectre of Anarchy, called Bolshevism at present, threatens our
country. Our Government is now awake to this menace and the Secret
Service is moving everywhere.

“Great damage already has been done to the minds of many people in this
Republic; poison has spread; is spreading. The Eight Towers still
stand. The Eight Assassins are in America.

“But these eight Assassins know me to be their enemy.... They will
surely attempt to kill me.... I don’t believe I can avoid—death—very
long.... But I want to serve my country and—and mankind.”

“They’ll have to get me first,” said Cleves, bluntly. “I shall not
permit you out of my sight.”

Recklow said in a musing voice: “And these eight gentlemen, who are
very likely to hurt us, also, are the first people we ought to hunt.”

“To get them,” added Selden, “we ought to choke the stream at its
source.”

“To find out who they are is what is going to worry us,” added Benton.
Cleves had stood holding a chair for Tressa Norne. Finally she noticed
it and seated herself as though tired.

“Is Sanang one of these eight?” he asked her. The girl turned and
looked up at him, and he saw the flush mounting in her face.

“Sometimes,” she said steadily, “I have almost believed he was Erlik’s
own vice-regent on earth—the Slayer of Souls himself.”


Benton and Selden had gone. Recklow left a little later. Cleves
accompanied him out to the landing.

“Are you going to keep Miss Norne here with you for the present?”
inquired the older man.

“Yes. I dare not let her out of my sight, Recklow. What else can I do?”

“I don’t know. Is she prepared for the consequences?”

“Gossip? Slander?”

“Of course.”

“I can get a housekeeper.”

“That only makes it look worse.”

Cleves reddened. “Well, do you want to find her in some hotel or
apartment with her throat cut?”

“No,” replied Recklow, gently, “I do not.”

“Then what else is there to do but keep her here in my own apartment
and never let her out of my sight until we can find and lock up the
eight gentlemen who are undoubtedly bent on murdering her?”

“Isn’t there some woman in the Service who could help out? I could
mention several.”

“I tell you I can’t trust Tressa Norne to anybody except myself,”
insisted Cleves. “I got her into this; I am responsible if she is
murdered; I dare not entrust her safety to anybody else. And, Recklow,
it’s a ghastly responsibility for a man to induce a young girl to face
death, even in the service of her country.”

“If she remains here alone with you she’ll face social destruction,”
remarked Recklow.

Cleves was silent for a moment, then he burst out: “Well, what am I to
do? What is there left for me to do except to watch over her and see
her through this devilish business? What other way have I to protect
her, Recklow?”

“You could offer her the protection of your name,” suggested the other,
carelessly.

“What? You mean—marry her?”

“Well, nobody else would be inclined to, Cleves, if it ever becomes
known she has lived here quite alone with you.”

Cleves stared at the elder man.

“This is nonsense,” he said in a harsh voice. “That young girl doesn’t
want to marry anybody. Neither do I. She doesn’t wish to have her
throat cut, that’s all. And I’m determined she shan’t.”

“There are stealthier assassins, Cleves,—the slayers of reputations. It
goes badly with their victim. It does indeed.”

“Well, hang it, what do you think I ought to do?”

“I think you ought to marry her if you’re going to keep her here.”

“Suppose she doesn’t mind the unconventionality of it?”

“All women mind. No woman, at heart, is unconventional, Cleves.”

“She—she seems to agree with me that she ought to stay here....
Besides, she has no money, no relatives, no friends in America——”

“All the more tragic. If you really believe it to be your duty to keep
her here where you can look after her bodily safety, then the other
obligation is still heavier. And there may come a day when Miss Norne
will wish that you had been less conscientious concerning the safety of
her pretty throat.... For the knife of the Yezidee is swifter and less
cruel than the tongue that slays with a smile.... And this young girl
has many years to live, after this business of Bolshevism is dead and
forgotten in our Republic.”

“Recklow!”

“Yes?”

“You think I might dare try to find a room somewhere else for her and
let her take her chances? _Do_ you?”

“It’s your affair.”

“I know—hang it! I know it’s my affair. I’ve unintentionally made it
so. But can’t you tell me what I ought to do?”

“I can’t.”

“What would _you_ do?”

“Don’t ask me,” returned Recklow, sharply. “If you’re not man enough to
come to a decision you may turn her over to me.”

Cleves flushed brightly. “Do you think _you_ are old enough to take my
job and avoid scandal?”

Recklow’s cold eyes rested on him: “If you like,” he said, “I’ll assume
your various kinds of personal responsibility toward Miss Norne.”

Cleve’s visage burned. “I’ll shoulder my own burdens,” he retorted.

“Sure. I knew you would.” And Recklow smiled and held out his hand.
Cleves took it without cordiality. Standing so, Recklow, still smiling,
said: “What a rotten deal that child has had—is having. Her father and
mother were fine people. Did you ever hear of Dr. Norne?”

“She mentioned him once.”

“They were up-State people of most excellent antecedents and no money.

“Dr. Norne was our Vice-Consul at Yarkand in the province of Sin Kiang.
All he had was his salary, and he lost that and his post when the
administration changed. Then he went into the spice trade.

“Some Jew syndicate here sent him up the Yarkand River to see what
could be done about jade and gold concessions. He was on that business
when the tragedy happened. The Kalmuks and Khirghiz were responsible,
under Yezidee instigation. And there you are:—and here is his child,
Cleves—back, by some miracle, from that flowering hell called Yian,
believing in her heart that she really lost her soul there in the
temple. And now, here in her own native land, she is exposed to actual
and hourly danger of assassination.... Poor kid!... Did you ever hear
of a rottener deal, Cleves?”

Their hands had remained clasped while Recklow was speaking. He spoke
again, clearly, amiably:

“To lay down one’s life for a friend is fine. I’m not sure that it’s
finer to offer one’s honour in behalf of a girl whose honour is at
stake.”

After a moment Cleves’s grip tightened.

“All right,” he said.

Recklow went downstairs.




CHAPTER VI
IN BATTLE


Cleves went back into the apartment; he noticed that Miss Norne’s door
was ajar.

To get to his own room he had to pass that way; and he saw her, seated
before the mirror, partly undressed, her dark, lustrous hair being
combed out and twisted up for the night.

Whether this carelessness was born of innocence or of indifference
mattered little; he suddenly realised that these conditions wouldn’t
do. And his first feeling was of anger.

“If you’ll put on your robe and slippers,” he said in an unpleasant
voice, “I’d like to talk to you for a few moments.”

She turned her head on its charming neck and looked around and up at
him over one naked shoulder.

“Shall I come into your room?” she inquired.

“No!... when you’ve got some clothes on, call me.”

“I’m quite ready now,” she said calmly, and drew the Chinese slippers
over her bare feet and passed a silken loop over the silver bell
buttons on her right shoulder. Then, undisturbed, she continued to
twist up her hair, following his movements in the mirror with
unconcerned blue eyes.

He entered and seated himself, the impatient expression still creasing
his forehead and altering his rather agreeable features.

“Miss Norne,” he said, “you’re absolutely convinced that these people
mean to do you harm. Isn’t that true?”

“Of course,” she said simply.

“Then, until we get them, you’re running a serious risk. In fact, you
live in hourly peril. That is your belief, isn’t it?”

She put the last peg into her thick, curly hair, lowered her arms,
turned, dropped one knee over the other, and let her candid gaze rest
on him in silence.

“What I mean to explain,” he said coldly, “is that as long as I induced
you to go into this affair I’m responsible for you. If I let you out of
my sight here in New York and if anything happens to you, I’ll be as
guilty as the dirty beast who takes your life. What is your opinion?
It’s up to me to stand by you now, isn’t it?”

“I had rather be near you—for a while,” she said timidly.

“Certainly. But, Miss Norne, our living here together, in my
apartment—or living together anywhere else—is never going to be
understood by other people. You know that, don’t you?”

After a silence, still looking at him out of clear unembarrassed eyes:

“I know.... But ... I don’t want to die.”

“I told you,” he said sharply, “they’ll have to kill me first. So
that’s all right. But how about what I am doing to your reputation?”

“I understand.”

“I suppose you do. You’re very young. Once out of this blooming mess,
you will have all your life before you. But if I kill your reputation
for you while saving your body from death, you’ll find no happiness in
living. Do you realise that?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then? Have you any solution for this problem that confronts
you?”

“No.”

“Haven’t you any idea to suggest?”

“I don’t—don’t want to die,” she repeated in an unsteady voice.

He bit his lip; and after a moment’s scowling silence under the
merciless scrutiny of her eyes: “Then you had better marry me,” he
said.

It was some time before she spoke. For a second or two he sustained the
searching quality of her gaze, but it became unendurable.

Presently she said: “I don’t ask it of you. I can shoulder my own
burdens.” And he remembered what he had just said to Recklow.

“You’ve shouldered more than your share,” he blurted out. “You are
deliberately risking death to serve your country. I enlisted you. The
least I can do is to say my affections are not engaged; so naturally
the idea of—of marrying anybody never entered my head.”

“Then you do not care for anybody else?”

Her candour amazed and disconcerted him.

“No.” He looked at her, curiously. “Do you care for anybody in that
way?”

A light blush tinted her face. She said gravely: “If we really are
going to marry each other I had better tell you that I did care for
Prince Sanang.”

“What!” he cried, astounded.

“It seems incredible, doesn’t it? Yet it is quite true. I fought him; I
fought myself; I stood guard over my mind and senses there in the
temple; I knew what he was and I detested him and I mocked him there in
the temple.... And I loved him.”

“Sanang!” he repeated, not only amazed but also oddly incensed at the
naïve confession.

“Yes, Sanang.... If we are to marry, I thought I ought to tell you.
Don’t you think so?”

“Certainly,” he replied in an absent-minded way, his mind still
grasping at the thing. Then, looking up: “Do you still care for this
fellow?”

She shook her head.

“Are you perfectly sure, Miss Norne?”

“As sure as that I am alive when I awake from a nightmare. My hatred
for Sanang is very bitter,” she added frankly, “and yet somehow it is
not my wish to see him harmed.”

“You still care for him a little?”

“Oh, no. But—can’t you understand that it is not in me to wish him
harm?... No girl feels that way—once having cared. To become
indifferent to a familiar thing is perhaps natural; but to desire to
harm it is not in my character.”

“You have plenty of character,” he said, staring; at her.

“You don’t think so. Do you?”

“Why not?”

“Because of what I said to you on the roof-garden that night. It was
shameful, wasn’t it?”

“You behaved like many a thoroughbred,” he returned bluntly; “you were
scared, bewildered, ready to bolt to any shelter offered.”

“It’s quite true I didn’t know what to do to keep alive. And that was
all that interested me—to keep on living—having lost my soul and being
afraid to die and find myself in hell with Erlik.”

He said: “Isn’t that absurd notion out of your head yet?”

“I don’t know ... I can’t suddenly believe myself safe after all those
years. It is not easy to root out what was planted in childhood and
what grew to be part of one during the tender and formative period....
You can’t understand, Mr. Cleves—you can’t ever feel or visualise what
became my daily life in a region which was half paradise and half
hell——”

She bent her head and took her face between her fingers, and sat so,
brooding.

After a little while: “Well,” he said, “there’s only one way to manage
this affair—if you are willing, Miss Norne.”

She merely lifted her eyes.

“I think,” he said, “there’s only that one way out of it. But you
understand”—he turned pink—“it will be quite all right—your
liberty—privacy—I shan’t bother you—annoy——”

She merely looked at him.

“After this Bolshevistic flurry is settled—in a year or two—or
three—then you can very easily get your freedom; and you’ll have all
life before you” ... he rose: “—and a jolly good friend in me—a good
comrade, Miss Norne. And that means you can count on me when you go
into business—or whatever you decide to do.”

She also had risen, standing slim and calm in her exquisite Chinese
robe, the sleeves of which covered her finger tips.

“Are you going to marry me?” she asked.

“If you’ll let me.”

“Yes—I will ... it’s so generous and considerate of you. I—I don’t ask
it; I really don’t——”

“But _I_ do.”

“—And I never dreamed of such a thing.”

He forced a smile. “Nor I. It’s rather a crazy thing to do. But I know
of no saner alternative.... So we had better get our license
to-morrow.... And that settles it.”

He turned to go; and, on her threshold, his feet caught in something on
the floor and he stumbled, trying to free his feet from a roll of soft
white cloth lying there on the carpet. And when he picked it up, it
unrolled, and a knife fell out of the folds of cloth and struck his
foot.

Still perplexed, not comprehending, he stooped to recover the knife.
Then, straightening up, he found himself looking into the colourless
face of Tressa Norne.

“What’s all this?” he asked—“this sheet and knife here on the floor
outside your door?”

She answered with difficulty: “They have sent you your shroud, I
think.”

“Are not those things yours? Were they not already here in your
baggage?” he demanded incredulously. Then, realising that they had not
been there on the door-sill when he entered her room a few moments
since, a rough chill passed over him—the icy caress of fear.

“Where did that thing come from?” he said hoarsely. “How could it get
here when my door is locked and bolted? Unless there’s somebody hidden
here!”

Hot anger suddenly flooded him; he drew his pistol and sprang into the
passageway.

“What the devil is all this!” he repeated furiously, flinging open his
bedroom door and switching on the light.

He searched his room in a rage, went on and searched the dining-room,
smoking-room, and kitchen, and every clothes-press and closet, always
aware of Tressa’s presence close behind him. And when there remained no
tiniest nook or cranny in the place unsearched, he stood in the centre
of the carpet glaring at the locked and bolted door.

He heard her say under her breath: “This is going to be a sleepless
night. And a dangerous one.” And, turning to stare at her, saw no fear
in her face, only excitement.

He still held clutched in his left hand the sheet and the knife. Now he
thrust these toward her.

“What’s this damned foolery, anyway?” he demanded harshly. She took the
knife with a slight shudder. “There is something engraved on the silver
hilt,” she said.

He bent over her shoulder.

“Eighur,” she added calmly, “not Arabic. The Mongols had no written
characters of their own.”

She bent closer, studying the inscription. After a moment, still
studying the Eighur characters, she rested her left hand on his
shoulder—an impulsive, unstudied movement that might have meant either
confidence or protection.

“Look,” she said, “it is not addressed to you after all, but to a
symbol—a series of numbers, 53-6-26.”

“That is my designation in the Federal Service,” he said, sharply.

“Oh!” she nodded slowly. “Then this is what is written in the
Mongol-Yezidee dialect, traced out in Eighur characters: ‘To 53-6-26!
By one of the Eight Assassins the Slayer of Souls sends this shroud and
this knife from Mount Alamout. Such a blade shall divide your heart.
This sheet is for your corpse.’”

After a grim silence he flung the soft white cloth on the floor.

“There’s no use my pretending I’m not surprised and worried,” he said;
“I don’t know how that cloth got here. Do you?”

“It was sent.”

“How?”

She shook her head and gave him a grave, confused look.

“There are ways. You could not understand.... This is going to be a
sleepless night for us.”

“You can go to bed, Tressa. I’ll sit up and read and keep an eye on
that door.”

“I can’t let you remain alone here. I’m afraid to do that.”

He gave a laugh, not quite pleasant, as he suddenly comprehended that
the girl now considered their _rôles_ to be reversed.

“Are _you_ planning to sit up in order to protect _me_?” he asked,
grimly amused.

“Do you mind?”

“Why, you blessed little thing, I can take care of myself. How funny of
you, when I am trying to plan how best to look out for _you_!”

But her face remained pale and concerned, and she rested her left hand
more firmly on his shoulder.

“I wish to remain awake with you,” she said. “Because I myself don’t
fully understand this”—she looked at the knife in her palm, then down
at the shroud. “It is going to be a strange night for us,” she sighed.
“Let us sit together here on the lounge where I can face _that bolted
door_. And if you are willing, I am going to turn out the lights——” She
suddenly bent forward and switched them off—“because I must keep my
mind on guard.”

“Why do you do that?” he asked, “you can’t see the door, now.”

“Let me help you in my own way,” she whispered. “I—I am very deeply
disturbed, and very, very angry. I do not understand this new menace.
Yezidee that I am, I do not understand what kind of danger threatens
you through your loyalty to me.”

She drew him forward, and he opened his mouth to remonstrate, to laugh;
but as he turned, his foot touched the shroud, and an uncontrollable
shiver passed over him.

They went close together, across the dim room to the lounge, and seated
themselves. Enough light from Madison Avenue made objects in the room
barely discernible.


Sounds from the street below became rarer as the hours wore away. The
iron jar of trams, the rattle of vehicles, the harsh warning of
taxicabs broke the stillness at longer and longer intervals, until,
save only for that immense and ceaseless vibration of the monstrous
iron city under the foggy stars, scarcely a sound stirred the silence.

The half-hour had struck long ago on the bell of the little clock. Now
the clear bell sounded three times.

Cleves stirred on the lounge beside Tressa. Again and again he had
thought that she was asleep for her head had fallen back against the
cushions, and she lay very still. But always, when he leaned nearer to
peer down at her, he saw her eyes open, and fixed intently upon the
bolted door.

His pistol, which still rested on his knee, was pointed across the
room, toward the door. Once he reminded her in a whisper that she was
unarmed and that it might be as well for her to go and get her pistol.
But she murmured that she was sufficiently equipped; and, in spite of
himself, he shivered as he glanced down at her frail and empty hands.

It was some time between three and half-past, he judged, when a sudden
movement of the girl brought him upright on his seat, quivering with
excitement.

“Mr. Cleves!”

“Yes?”

“The Sorcerers!”

“Where? Outside the door?”

“Oh, my God,” she murmured, “_they are after my mind again_! Their
fingers are groping to seize my brain and get possession of it!”

“What!” he stammered, horrified.

“Here—in the dark,” she whispered—“and I feel their fingers caressing
me—searching—moving stealthily to surprise and grasp my thoughts.... I
know what they are doing.... I am resisting.... I am
fighting—fighting!”

She sat bolt upright with clenched hands at her breast, her face palely
aglow in the dimness as though illumined by some vivid inward light—or,
as he thought—from the azure blaze in her wide-open eyes.

“Is—is this what you call—what you believe to be magic?” he asked
unsteadily. “Is there some hostile psychic influence threatening you?”

“Yes. I’m resisting. I’m fighting—fighting. They shall not trap me.
They shall not harm you!... I know how to defend myself and you!... And
_you_!”

Suddenly she flung her left arm around his neck and the delicate
clenched hand brushed his cheek.

“They shall not have you,” she breathed. “I am fighting. I am holding
my own. There are eight of them—eight Assassins! My mind is in battle
with theirs—fiercely in battle.... I hold my own! I am armed and
waiting!”

With a convulsive movement she drew his head closer to her shoulder.
“Eight of them!” she whispered,—“trying to entrap and seize my brain.
But my thoughts are free! My mind is defending you—you, here in my
arms!”

After a breathless silence: “Look out!” she whispered with terrible
energy; “they are after _your_ mind at last. Fix your thoughts on me!
Keep your mind clear of their net! Don’t let their ghostly fingers
touch it. Look at me!” She drew him closer. “Look at _me_! Believe in
_me_! I can resist. I can defend you. Does your head feel confused?”

“Yes—numb.”

“_Don’t sleep!_ Don’t close your eyes! Keep them open and look at me!”

“I can scarcely see you——”

“You _must_ see me!”

“My eyes are heavy,” he said drowsily. “I can’t see you, Tressa——”

“Wake! Look at me! Keep your mind clear. Oh, I beg you—I beg you!
They’re after our minds and souls, I tell you! Oh, believe in me,” she
beseeched him in an agonised whisper—“Can’t you believe in me for a
moment,—as if you loved me!”

His heavy lids lifted and he tried to look at her.

“Can you see me? _Can_ you?”

He muttered something in a confused voice.

“Victor!”

At the sound of his own name, he opened his eyes again and tried to
straighten up, but his pistol fell to the carpet.

“Victor!” she gasped, “clear your mind in the name of God!”

“I can not——”

“I tell you hell is opening beyond that door!—outside your bolted door,
there! Can’t you believe me! Can’t you hear me! Oh, what will hold you
if the love of God can not!” she burst out. “I’d crucify myself for you
if you’d look at me—if you’d only fight hard enough to believe in me—as
though you loved me!”

His eyes unclosed but he sank back against her shoulder.

“Victor!” she cried in a terrible voice.

There was no answer.

“If the love of God could only hold you for a moment more!”—she
stammered with her mouth against his ear, “just for a moment, Victor!
Can’t you hear me?”

“Yes—very far away.”

“Fight for me! Try to care for me! Don’t let Sanang have me!”

He shuddered in her arms, reached out and resting heavily on her
shoulder, staggered to his feet and stood swaying like a drunken man.

“No, by God,” he said thickly, “Sanang shall not touch you.”

The girl was on her feet now, holding him upright with an arm around
his shoulders.

“They can’t—can’t harm us together,” she stammered. “Hark! Listen! Can
you hear? Oh, can you hear?”

“Give me my pistol,” he tried to say, but his tongue seemed twisted.
“No—by God—Sanang shall not touch you.”

She stooped lithely and recovered the weapon. “Hush,” she said close to
his burning face. “Listen. Our minds are safe! I can hear somebody’s
soul bidding its body farewell!”

White-lipped she burst out laughing, kicked the shroud out of the way,
thrust the pistol into his right hand, went forward, forcing him along
beside her, and drew the bolts from the door.

Suddenly he spoke distinctly:

“Is there anything outside that door on the landing?”

“Yes.... I don’t know what. Are you ready?” She laid her hand on lock
and knob.

He nodded. At the same instant she jerked open the door; and a
hunchback who had been picking at the lock fell headlong into the room,
his pistol exploding on the carpet in a streak of fire.

It was a horrible struggle to secure the powerful misshapen creature,
for he clawed and squealed and bounced about on the floor, striking
blindly with ape-like arms. But at last Cleves held him down, throttled
and twitching, and Tressa ripped strips from the shroud to truss up the
writhing thing.

Then Cleves switched on the light.

“Why—why—you rat!” he exclaimed in hysterical relief at seeing a living
man whom he recognised there at his feet. “What are you doing here?”

The hunchback’s red eyes blazed up at him from the floor.

“Who—who is he?” faltered the girl.

“He’s a German tailor named Albert Feke—one of the Chicago
Bolsheviki—the most dangerous sort we harbour—one of their vile leaders
who preaches that might is right and tells his disciples to go ahead
and take what they want.”

He looked down at the malignant cripple.

“You’re wanted for the I. W. W. bomb murder, Albert. Did you know it?”

The hunchback licked his bloody lips. Then he kicked himself to a
sitting position, squatted there like a toad and looked steadily at
Tressa Norne out of small red-rimmed eyes. Blood dripped on his beard;
his huge hairy fists, tied and crossed behind his back, made odd,
spasmodic movements.

Cleves went to the telephone. Presently Tressa heard his voice, calm
and distinct as usual:

“We’ve caught Albert Feke. He’s here at my rooms. I’d like to have you
come over, Recklow.... Oh, yes, he kicked and scuffled and scratched
like a cat.... What?... No, I hadn’t heard that he’d been in China....
Who?... Albert Feke? You say he was one of the Germans who escaped from
Shantung four years ago?... You think he’s a Yezidee! You mean one of
the Eight Assassins?”

The hunchback, staring at Tressa out of red-rimmed eyes, suddenly
snarled and lurched his misshapen body at her.

“Teufelstuck!” he screamed, “ain’t I tell efferybody in Yian already it
iss safer if we cut your throat! Devil-slut of
Erlik—snow-leopardess!—cat of the Yezidees who has made of Sanang a
fool!—it iss I who haf said always, always, that you know too damn
much!... Kai!... I hear my soul bidding me farewell. Gif me my shroud!”

Cleves came back from the telephone. With the toe of his left foot he
lifted the shroud and kicked it across the hunchback’s knees.

“So you were one of the huns who instigated the massacre in Yian,” he
said, curiously. At that Tressa turned very white and a cry escaped
her.

But the hunchback’s features were all twisted into ferocious laughter,
and he beat on the carpet with the heels of his great splay feet.

“Ja! Ja!” he shrieked, “in Yian it vas a goot hunting! English and
Yankee men und vimmens ve haff dropped into dose deep wells down. Py
Gott in Himmel, how dey schream up out of dose deep wells in Yian!” He
began to cackle and shriek in his frenzy. “Ach Gott ja! It iss not you
either—you there, Keuke Mongol, who shall escape from the
Sheiks-el-Djebel! It iss dot Old Man of the Mountain who shall tell
your soul it iss time to say farewell! Ja! Ja! Ach Gott!—it iss my only
regret that I shall not see the world when it is all afire! Ja! Ja!—all
on fire like hell! But you shall see it, slut-leopard of the snows! You
shall see it und you shall burn! Kai! Kai! My soul it iss bidding my
body farewell. Kai! May Erlik curse you, Keuke Mongol—Heavenly
Azure—Sorceress of the temple!—”

He spat at her and rolled over in his shroud.

The girl looking down on him closed her eyes for a moment, and Cleves
saw her bloodless lips move, and bent nearer, listening. And he heard
her whispering to herself:

“Preserve us all, O God, from the wrath of Satan who was stoned.”




CHAPTER VII
THE BRIDAL


Over the United States stretched an unseen network of secret intrigue
woven tirelessly night and day by the busy enemies of
civilisation—Reds, parlour-socialists, enemy-aliens, terrorists,
Bolsheviki, pseudo-intellectuals, I. W. W.’s, social faddists, and
amateur meddlers of every nuance—all the various varieties of the
vicious, witless, and mentally unhinged—brought together through the
“cohesive power of plunder” and the degeneration of cranial tissue.

All over the United States the various departmental divisions of the
Secret Service were busily following up these threads of intrigue
leading everywhere through the obscurity of this vast and secret maze.

To meet the constantly increasing danger of physical violence and to
uncover secret plots threatening sabotage and revolution, there were
capable agents in every branch of the Secret Service, both Federal and
State.

But in the first months of 1919 something more terrifying than physical
violence suddenly threatened civilised America,—a wild, grotesque,
incredible threat of a _war on human minds_!

And, little by little, the United States Government became convinced
that this ghastly menace was no dream of a disordered imagination, but
that it was real: that among the enemies of civilisation there actually
existed a few powerful but perverted minds capable of wielding psychic
forces as terrific weapons: that by the sinister use of psychic
knowledge controlling these mighty forces the very minds of mankind
could be stealthily approached, seized, controlled and turned upon
civilisation to aid in the world’s destruction.

In terrible alarm the Government turned to England for advice. But Sir
William Crookes was dead.

However, in England, Sir Conan Doyle immediately took up the matter,
and in America Professor Hyslop was called into consultation.

And then, when the Government was beginning to realise what this awful
menace meant, and that there were actually in the United States
possibly half a dozen people who already had begun to carry on a
diabolical warfare by means of psychic power, for the purpose of
enslaving and controlling the very minds of men,—then, in the terrible
moment of discovery, a young girl landed in America after fourteen
years’ absence in Asia.

And this was the amazing girl that Victor Cleves had just married, at
Recklow’s suggestion, and in the line of professional duty,—and moral
duty, perhaps.

It had been a brief, matter-of-fact ceremony. John Recklow, of the
Secret Service, was there; also Benton and Selden of the same service.

The bride’s lips were unresponsive; cold as the touch of the groom’s
unsteady hand.

She looked down at her new ring in a blank sort of way, gave her hand
listlessly to Recklow and to the others in turn, whispered a timidly
comprehensive “Thank you,” and walked away beside Cleves as though
dazed.

There was a taxicab waiting. Tressa entered. Recklow came out and spoke
to Cleves in a low voice.

“Don’t worry,” replied Cleves dryly. “That’s why I married her.”

“Where are you going now?” inquired Recklow.

“Back to my apartment.”

“Why don’t you take her away for a month?”

Cleves flushed with annoyance: “This is no occasion for a wedding trip.
You understand that, Recklow.”

“I understand. But we ought to give her a breathing space. She’s had
nothing but trouble. She’s worn out.”

Cleves hesitated: “I can guard her better in the apartment. Isn’t it
safer to go back there, where your people are always watching the
street and house day and night?”

“In a way it might be safer, perhaps. But that girl is nearly
exhausted. And her value to us is unlimited. She may be the vital
factor in this fight with anarchy. Her weapon is her mind. And it’s got
to have a chance to rest.”

Cleves, with one hand on the cab door, looked around impatiently.

“Do _you_, also, conclude that the psychic factor is actually part of
this damned problem of Bolshevism?”

Recklow’s cool eyes measured him: “Do _you_?”

“My God, Recklow, I don’t know—after what my own eyes have seen.”

“I don’t know either,” said the other calmly, “but I am taking no
chances. I don’t attempt to explain certain things that have occurred.
But if it be true that a misuse of psychic ability by
foreigners—Asiatics—among the anarchists is responsible for some of the
devilish things being done in the United States, then your wife’s
unparalleled knowledge of the occult East is absolutely vital to us.
And so I say, better take her away somewhere and give her mind a chance
to recover from the incessant strain of these tragic years.”

The two men stood silent for a moment, then Recklow went to the window
of the taxicab.

“I have been suggesting a trip into the country, Mrs. Cleves,” he said
pleasantly, “—into the real country, somewhere,—a month’s quiet in the
woods, perhaps. Wouldn’t it appeal to you?”

Cleves turned to catch her low-voiced answer.

“I should like it very much,” she said in that odd, hushed way of
speaking, which seemed to have altered her own voice and manner since
the ceremony a little while before.

Driving back to his apartment beside her, he strove to realise that
this girl was his wife.

One of her gloves lay across her lap, and on it rested a slender hand.
And on one finger was his ring.

But Victor Cleves could not bring himself to believe that this
brand-new ring really signified anything to him,—that it had altered
his own life in any way. But always his incredulous eyes returned to
that slim finger resting there, unstirring, banded with a narrow
circlet of virgin gold.

In the apartment they did not seem to know exactly what to do or
say—what attitude to assume—what effort to make.

Tressa went into her own room, removed her hat and furs, and came
slowly back into the living-room, where Cleves still stood gazing
absently out of the window.

A fine rain was falling.

They seated themselves. There seemed nothing better to do.

He said, politely: “In regard to going away for a rest, you wouldn’t
care for the North Woods, I fancy, unless you like winter sports. Do
you?”

“I like sunlight and green leaves,” she said in that odd, still voice.

“Then, if it would please you to go South for a few weeks’ rest——”

“Would it inconvenience you?”

Her manner touched him.

“My dear Miss Norne,” he began, and checked himself, flushing
painfully. The girl blushed, too; then, when he began to laugh, her
lovely, bashful smile glimmered for the first time.

“I really can’t bring myself to realise that you and I are married,” he
explained, still embarrassed, though smiling.

Her smile became an endeavour. “I can’t believe it either, Mr. Cleves,”
she said. “I feel rather stunned.”

“Hadn’t you better call me Victor—under the circumstances?” he
suggested, striving to speak lightly.

“Yes.... It will not be very easy to say it—not for some time, I
think.”

“Tressa?”

“Yes.”

“Yes—_what_?”

“Yes—Victor.”

“That’s the idea,” he insisted with forced gaiety.

“The thing to do is to face this rather funny situation and take it
amiably and with good humour. You’ll have your freedom some day, you
know.”

“Yes—I—know.”

“And we’re already on very good terms. We find each other interesting,
don’t we?”

“Yes.”

“It even seems to me,” he ventured, “it certainly seems to me, at
times, as though we are approaching a common basis of—of
mutual—er—esteem.”

“Yes. I—I do esteem you, Mr. Cleves.”

“In point of fact,” he concluded, surprised, “we _are_ friends—in a
way. Wouldn’t you call it—friendship?”

“I think so, I think I’d call it that,” she admitted.

“I think so, too. And that is lucky for us. That makes this crazy
situation more comfortable—less—well, perhaps less ponderous.”

The girl assented with a vague smile, but her eyes remained lowered.

“You see,” he went on, “when two people are as oddly situated as we
are, they’re likely to be afraid of being in each other’s way. But they
ought to get on without being unhappy as long as they are quite
confident of each other’s friendly consideration. Don’t you think so,
Tressa?”

Her lowered eyes rested steadily on her ring-finger. “Yes,” she said.
“And I am not—unhappy, or—afraid.”

She lifted her blue gaze to his; and, somehow, he thought of her
barbaric name, Keuke,—and its Yezidee significance, “heavenly—azure.”

“Are we really going away together?” she asked timidly.

“Certainly, if you wish.”

“If you, also, wish it, Mr. Cleves.”

He found himself saying with emphasis that he always wished to do what
she desired. And he added, more gently:

“You _are_ tired, Tressa—tired and lonely and unhappy.”

“Tired, but not the—others.”

“Not unhappy?”

“No.”

“Aren’t you lonely?”

“Not with you.”

The answer came so naturally, so calmly, that the slight sensation of
pleasure it gave him arrived only as an agreeable afterglow.

“We’ll go South,” he said.... “I’m so glad that you don’t feel lonely
with me.”

“Will it be warmer where we are going, Mr. Cleves?”

“Yes—you poor child! You need warmth and sunshine, don’t you? Was it
warm in Yian, where you lived so many years?”

“It was always June in Yian,” she said under her breath.

She seemed to have fallen into a revery; he watched the sensitive face.
Almost imperceptibly it changed; became altered, younger, strangely
lovely.

Presently she looked up—and it seemed to him that it was not Tressa
Norne at all he saw, but little Keuke—Heavenly Azure—of the Yezidee
temple, as she dropped one slim knee over the other and crossed her
hands above it.

“It was very beautiful in Yian,” she said, “—Yian of the thousand
bridges and scented gardens so full of lilies. Even after they took me
to the temple, and I thought the world was ending, God’s skies still
remained soft overhead, and His weather fair and golden.... And when,
in the month of the Snake, the Eight Sheiks-el-Djebel came to the
temple to spread their shrouds on the rose-marble steps, then, after
they had departed, chanting the Prayers for the Dead, each to his Tower
of Silence, we temple girls were free for a week.... And once I went
with Tchagane—a girl—and with Yulun—another girl—and we took our
keutch, which is our luggage, and we went to the yaïlak, or summer
pavilion on the Lake of the Ghost. Oh, wonderful,—a silvery world of
pale-gilt suns and of moons so frail that the cloud-fleece at high-noon
has more substance!”

Her voice died out; she sat gazing down at her spread fingers, on one
of which gleamed her wedding-ring.

After a little, she went on dreamily:

“On that week, each three months, we were free.... If a young man
should please us....”

“Free?” he repeated.

“To love,” she explained coolly.

“Oh.” He nodded, but his face became rather grim.

“There came to me at the yaïlak,” she went on carelessly, “one Khassar
Noïane—Noïane means Prince—all in a surcoat of gold tissue with green
vines embroidered, and wearing a green cap trimmed with dormouse, and
green boots inlaid with stiff gold....

“He was so young ... a boy. I laughed. I said: ‘Is this a Yaçaoul? An
Urdu-envoy of Prince Erlik?’—mocking him as young and thoughtless girls
mock—not in unfriendly manner—though I would not endure the touch of
any man at all.

“And when I laughed at him, this Eighur boy flew into such a rage! Kai!
I was amazed.

“‘Sou-sou! Squirrel!’ he cried angrily at me. ‘Learn the Yacaz, little
chatterer! Little mocker of men, it is ten blows with a stick you
require, not kisses!’

“At that I whistled my two dogs, Bars and Alaga, for I did not think
what he said was funny.

“I said to him: ‘You had better go home, Khassar Noïane, for if no man
has ever pleased me where I am at liberty to please myself, here on the
Lake of the Ghost, then be very certain that no boy can please
Keuke-Mongol here or anywhere!’

“And at that—kai! What did he say—that monkey?” She looked at her
husband, her splendid eyes ablaze with wrathful laughter, and made a
gesture full of angry grace:

“‘Squirrel!’ he cries—‘little malignant sorceress of Yian! May
everything high about you become a sandstorm, and everything long a
serpent, and everything broad a toad, and everything——’

“But I had had enough, Victor,” she added excitedly, “and I made a wild
bee bite him on the lip! What do you think of such a courtship?” she
cried, laughing. But Cleves’s face was a study in emotions.

And then, suddenly, the laughing mask seemed to slip from the
bewitching features of Keuke Mongol; and there was Tressa Norne—Tressa
Cleves—disconcerted, paling a little as the memory of her impulsive
confidence in this man beside her began to dawn on her more clearly.

“I—I’m sorry——” she faltered.... “You’ll think me silly—think evil of
me, perhaps——”

She looked into his troubled eyes, then suddenly she took her face into
both hands and covered it, sitting very still.

“We’ll go South together,” he said in an uncertain voice.... “I hope
you will try to think of me as a friend.... I’m just troubled because I
am so anxious to understand you. That is all.... I’m—I’m troubled, too,
because I am anxious that you should think well of me. Will you try,
always?”

She nodded.

“I want to be your friend, always,” he said.

“Thank you, Mr. Cleves.”


It was a strange spot he chose for Tressa—strange but lovely in its own
unreal and rather spectral fashion—where a pearl-tinted mist veiled the
St. Johns, and made exquisite ghosts of the palmettos, and softened the
sun to a silver-gilt wafer pasted on a nacre sky.

It was a still country, where giant water-oaks towered, fantastic under
their misty camouflage of moss, and swarming with small birds.

Among the trees the wood-ibis stole; without on the placid glass of the
stream the eared grebe floated. There was no wind, no stirring of
leaves, no sound save the muffled splash of silver mullet, the
breathless whirr of a humming-bird, or the hushed rustle of lizards in
the woods.

For Tressa this was the blessed balm that heals,—the balm of silence.
And, for the first week, she slept most of the time, or lay in her
hammock watching the swarms of small birds creeping and flitting amid
the moss-draped labyrinths of the live-oaks at her very door.

It had been a little club house before the war, this bungalow on the
St. Johns at Orchid Hammock. Its members had been few and wealthy; but
some were dead in France and Flanders, and some still remained
overseas, and others continued busy in the North.

And these two young people were quite alone there, save for a negro
cook and a maid, and an aged negro kennel-master who wore a scarlet
waistcoat and cords too large for his shrunken body, and who pottered,
pottered through the fields all day, with his whip clasped behind his
bent back and the pointers ranging wide, or plodding in at heel with
red tongues lolling.

Twice Cleves went a little way for quail, using Benton’s dogs; but even
here in this remote spot he dared not move out of view of the little
house where Tressa lay asleep.

So he picked up only a few brace of birds, and confined his sport to
impaling too-familiar scorpions on the blade of his knife.

And all the while life remained unreal for him; his marriage seemed
utterly unbelievable; he could not realise it, could not reconcile
himself to conditions so incomprehensible.

Also, ever latent in his mind, was knowledge that made him restless—the
knowledge that the young girl he had married had been in love with
another man: Sanang.

And there were other thoughts—thoughts which had scarcely even taken
the shape of questions.

One morning he came from his room and found Tressa on the veranda in
her hammock. She had her moon-lute in her lap.

“You feel better—much better!” he said gaily, saluting her extended
hand.

“Yes. Isn’t this heavenly? I begin to believe it is life to me, this
pearl-tinted world, and the scent of orange bloom and the stillness of
paradise itself.”

She gazed out over the ghostly river. Not a wing stirred its glassy
surface.

“Is this dull for you?” she asked in a low voice.

“Not if you are contented, Tressa.”

“You’re so nice about it. Don’t you think you might venture a day’s
real shooting?”

“No, I think I won’t,” he replied.

“On my account?”

“Well—yes.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right as long as you’re getting rested. What is that
instrument?”

“My moon-lute.”

“Oh, is that what it’s called?”

She nodded, touched the strings. He watched her exquisite hands.

“Shall I?” she inquired a little shyly.

“Go ahead. I’d like to hear it!”

“I haven’t touched it in months—not since I was on the steamer.” She
sat up in her hammock and began to swing there; and played and sang
while swinging in the flecked shadow of the orange bloom:

“_Little Isle of Cispangou,_
_Isle of iris, isle of cherry,_
_Tell your tiny maidens merry_
_Clouds are looming over you!_
_La-ē-la!_
_La-ē-la!_
_All your ocean’s but a ferry;_
_Ships are bringing death to you!_
_La-ē-lou!_
_La-ē-lou!_

“_Little Isle of Cispangou,_
_Half a thousand ships are sailing;_
_Captain Death commands each crew;_
_Lo! the ruddy moon is paling!_
_La-ē-la!_
_La-ē-la!_
_Clouds the dying moon are veiling,_
_Every cloud a shroud for you!_
_La-ē-lou!_
_La-ē-lou!_”

“Cispangou,” she explained, “is the very, very ancient name, among the
Mongols, for Japan.”

“It’s not exactly a gay song,” he said. “What’s it about?”

“Oh, it’s a very ancient song about the Mongol invasion of Japan. I
know scores and scores of such songs.”

She sang some other songs. Afterward she descended from the hammock and
came and sat down beside him on the veranda steps.

“I wish I could amuse you,” she said wistfully.

“Why do you think I’m bored, Tressa? I’m not at all.”

But she only sighed, lightly, and gathered her knees in both arms.

“I don’t know how young men in the Western world are entertained,” she
remarked presently.

“You don’t have to entertain me,” he said, smiling.

“I should be happy to, if I knew how.”

“How are young men entertained in the Orient?”

“Oh, they like songs and stories. But I don’t think you do.”

He laughed in spite of himself.

“Do you really wish to entertain me?”

“I do,” she said seriously.

“Then please perform some of those tricks of magic which you can do so
amazingly well.”

Her dawning smile faded a trifle. “I don’t—I haven’t——” She hesitated.

“You haven’t your professional paraphernalia with you,” he suggested.

“Oh—as for that——”

“Don’t you need it?”

“For some things—some kinds of things.... I _could_ do—other things——”

He waited. She seemed disconcerted. “Don’t do anything you don’t wish
to do, Tressa,” he said.

“I was only—only afraid—that if I should do some little things to amuse
you, I might stir—stir up—interfere—encounter some sinister current—and
betray myself—betray my whereabouts——”

“Well, for heaven’s sake don’t venture then!” he said with emphasis.
“Don’t do anything to stir up any other wireless—any Yezidee——”

“I am wondering,” she reflected, “just what I dare venture to do to
amuse you.”

“Don’t bother about me. I wouldn’t have you try any psychic stunt down
here, and run the chance of stirring up some Asiatic devil somewhere!”

She nodded absently, occupied with her own thoughts, sitting there,
chin on hand, her musing eyes intensely blue.

“I think I can amuse you,” she concluded, “without bringing any harm to
myself.”

“Don’t try it, Tressa!—--”

“I’ll be very careful. Now, sit quite still—closer to me, please.”

He edged closer; and became conscious of an indefinable freshness in
the air that enveloped him, like the scent of something young and
growing. But it was no magic odour,—merely the virginal scent of her
hair and skin that even clung to her summer gown.

He heard her singing under her breath to herself:

“La-ē-la!
La-ē-la!”

and murmuring caressingly in an unknown tongue.

Then, suddenly in the pale sunshine, scores of little birds came
hovering around them, alighting all over them. And he saw them swarming
out of the mossy festoons of the water-oaks—scores and scores of tiny
birds—Parula warblers, mostly—all flitting fearlessly down to alight
upon his shoulders and knees, all keeping up their sweet, dreamy little
twittering sound.

“This is wonderful,” he whispered.

The girl laughed, took several birds on her forefinger.

“This is nothing,” she said. “If I only dared—wait a moment!—--” And,
to the Parula warblers:

“Go home, little friends of God!”

The air was filled with the musical whisper of wings. She passed her
right arm around her husband’s neck.

“Look at the river,” she said.

“Good God!” he blurted out. And sat dumb.

For, over the St. John’s misty surface, there was the span of a
bridge—a strange, marble bridge humped up high in the centre.

And over it were passing thousands of people—he could make them out
vaguely—see them passing in two never-ending streams—tinted shapes on
the marble bridge.

And now, on the farther shore of the river, he was aware of a city—a
vast one, with spectral pagoda shapes against the sky——

Her arm tightened around his neck.

He saw boats on the river—like the grotesque shapes that decorate
ancient lacquer.

She rested her face lightly against his cheek.

In his ears was a far confusion of voices—the stir and movement of
multitudes—noises on ships, boatmen’s cries, the creak of oars.

Then, far and sonorous, quavering across the water from the city, the
din of a temple gong.

There were bells, too—very sweet and silvery—camel bells, bells from
the Buddhist temples.

He strained his eyes, and thought, amid the pagodas, that there were
minarets, also.

Suddenly, clear and ringing came the distant muezzin’s cry: “There is
no other god but God!... It is noon. Mussulmans, pray!”

The girl’s arm slipped from his neck and she shuddered and pushed him
from her.

There was nothing, now, on the river or beyond it but the curtain of
hanging mist; no sound except the cry of a gull, sharp and querulous in
the vapours overhead.

“Have—have you been amused?” she asked.

“What did you do to me!” he demanded harshly.

She smiled and drew a light breath like a sigh.

“God knows what we living do to one another,—or to ourselves,” she
said. “I only tried to amuse you—after taking counsel with the birds.”

“What was that bridge I saw!”

“The Bridge of Ten Thousand Felicities.”

“And the city?”

“Yian.”

“You lived there?”

“Yes.”

He moistened his dry lips and stole another glance at this very
commonplace Florida river. Sky and water were blank and still, and the
ghostly trees stood tall, reflected palely in the translucent tide.

“You merely made me visualise what you were thinking about,” he
concluded in a voice which still remained unsteady.

“Did you _hear_ nothing?”

He was silent, remembering the bells and the enormous murmur of a
living multitude.

“And—there were the birds, too.” She added, with an uncertain smile: “I
do not mean to worry you.... And you did ask me to amuse you.”

“I don’t know how you did it,” he said harshly. “And the details—those
thousands and thousands of people on the bridge!... And there was one,
quite near this end of the bridge, who looked back.... A young girl who
turned and laughed at us—”

“That was Yulun.”

“Who?”

“Yulun. I taught her English.”

“A temple girl?”

“Yes. From Black China.”

“How could you make _me_ see _her_!” he demanded.

“Why do you ask such things? I do not know how to tell you how I do
it.”

“It’s a dangerous, uncanny knowledge!” he blurted out; and suddenly
checked himself, for the girl’s face went white.

“I don’t mean uncanny,” he hastened to add. “Because it seems to me
that what you did by juggling with invisible currents to which, when
attuned, our five senses respond, is on the same lines as the wireless
telegraph and telephone.”

She said nothing, but her colour slowly returned.

“You mustn’t be so sensitive,” he added. “I’ve no doubt that it’s all
quite normal—quite explicable on a perfectly scientific basis. Probably
it’s no more mysterious than a man in an airplane over midocean
conversing with people ashore on two continents.”


For the remainder of the day and evening Tressa seemed subdued—not
restless, not nervous, but so quiet that, sometimes, glancing at her
askance, Cleves involuntarily was reminded of some lithe young creature
of the wilds, intensely alert and still, immersed in fixed and
dangerous meditation.

About five in the afternoon they took their golf sticks, went down to
the river, and embarked in the canoe.

The water was glassy and still. There was not a ripple ahead, save when
a sleeping gull awoke and leisurely steered out of their way.

Tressa’s arms and throat were bare and she wore no hat. She sat
forward, wielding the bow paddle and singing to herself in a low voice.

“You feel all right, don’t you?” he asked.

“Oh, I am so well, physically, now! It’s really wonderful, Victor—like
being a child again,” she replied happily.

“You’re not much more,” he muttered.

She heard him: “Not very much more—in years,” she said.... “Does
Scripture tell us how old Our Lord was when He descended into Hell?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, startled.

After a little while Tressa tranquilly resumed her paddling and
singing:

“_—And eight tall towers_
_Guard the route_
_Of human life,_
_Where at all hours_
_Death looks out,_
_Holding a knife_
_Rolled in a shroud._

_For every man,_
_Humble or proud,_
_Mighty or bowed,_
_Death has a shroud;—for every man,—_
_Even for Tchingniz Khan!_
_Behold them pass!—lancer._
_Baroulass,_
_Temple dancer_
_In tissue gold,_
_Khiounnou,_
_Karlik bold,_

_Christian, Jew,—_
_Nations swarm to the great Urdu._
_Yaçaoul, with your kettledrum,_
_Warn your Khan that his hour is come!_
_Shroud and knife at his spurred feet throw,_
_And bid him stretch his neck for the blow!—_”

“You know,” remarked Cleves, “that some of those songs you sing are
devilish creepy.”

Tressa looked around at him over her shoulder, saw he was smiling,
smiled faintly in return.

They were off Orchid Cove now. The hotel and cottages loomed dimly in
the silver mist. Voices came distinctly across the water. There were
people on the golf course paralleling the river; laughter sounded from
the club-house veranda.

They went ashore.




CHAPTER VIII
THE MAN IN WHITE


It was at the sixth hole that they passed the man ahead who was playing
all alone—a courteous young fellow in white flannels, who smiled and
bowed them “through” in silence.

They thanked him, drove from the tee, and left the polite and reticent
young man still apparently hunting for a lost ball.

Like other things which depended upon dexterity and precision, Tressa
had taken most naturally to golf. Her supple muscles helped.

At the ninth hole they looked back but did not see the young man in
white flannels.

Hammock, set with pine and palmetto, and intervals of evil-looking
swamp, flanked the course. Rank wire-grass, bayberry and scrub palmetto
bounded the fairgreen.

On every blossoming bush hung butterflies—Palomedes
swallowtails—drugged with sparkle-berry honey, their gold and black
velvet wings conspicuous in the sunny mist.

“Like the ceremonial vestments of a Yezidee executioner,” murmured the
girl. “The Tchortchas wear red when they robe to do a man to death.”

“I wish you could forget those things,” said Cleves.

“I am trying.... I wonder where that young man in white went.”

Cleves searched the links. “I don’t see him. Perhaps he had to go back
for another ball.”

“I wonder who he was,” she mused.

“I don’t remember seeing him before,” said Cleves.... “Shall we start
back?”

They walked slowly across the course toward the tenth hole.

Tressa teed up, drove low and straight. Cleves sliced, and they walked
together into the scrub and towards the woods, where his ball had
bounded into a bunch of palm trees.

Far in among the trees something white moved and vanished.

“Probably a white egret,” he remarked, knocking about in the scrub with
his midiron.

“It was that young man in white flannels,” said Tressa in a low voice.

“What would he be doing in there?” he asked incredulously. “That’s
merely a jungle, Tressa—swamp and cypress, thorn and creeper,—and no
man would go into that mess if he could. There is no bottom to those
swamps.”

“But I saw him in there,” she said in a troubled voice.

“But when I tell you that only a wild animal or a snake or a bird could
move in that jungle! The bog is one vast black quicksand. There’s death
in those depths.”

“Victor.”

“Yes?” He looked around at her. She was pale. He came up and took her
hand inquiringly.

“I don’t feel—well,” she murmured. “I’m not ill, you understand——”

“What’s the matter, Tressa?”

She shook her head drearily: “I don’t know.... I wonder whether I
should have tried to amuse you this morning——”

“You don’t think you’ve stirred up any of those Yezidee beasts, do
you?” he asked sharply.

And as she did not answer, he asked again whether she was afraid that
what she had done that morning might have had any occult consequences.
And he reminded her that she had hesitated to venture anything on that
account.

His voice, in spite of him, betrayed great nervousness now, and he saw
apprehension in her eyes, also.

“Why should that man in white have followed us, keeping out of sight in
the woods?” he went on. “Did you notice about him anything to disturb
you, Tressa?”

“Not at the time. But—it’s odd—I can’t put him out of my mind. Since we
passed him and left him apparently hunting a lost ball, I have not been
able to put him out of my mind.”

“He seemed civil and well bred. He was perfectly good-humoured—all
courtesy and smiles.”

“I think—perhaps—it was the way he smiled at us,” murmured the girl.
“Everybody in the East smiles when they draw a knife....”

He placed his arm through hers. “Aren’t you a trifle morbid?” he said
pleasantly.

She stooped for her golf ball, retaining a hold on his arm. He picked
up his ball, too, put away her clubs and his, and they started back
together in silence, evidently with no desire to make it eighteen
holes.

“It’s a confounded shame,” he muttered, “just as you were becoming so
rested and so delightfully well, to have anything—any unpleasant flash
of memory cut in to upset you——”

“I brought it on myself. I should not have risked stirring up the
sinister minds that were asleep.”

“Hang it all!—and I asked you to amuse me.”

“It was not wise in me,” she said under her breath. “It is easy to
disturb the unknown currents which enmesh the globe. I ought not to
have shown you Yian. I ought not to have shown you Yulun. It was my
fault for doing that. I was a little lonely, and I wanted to see
Yulun.”

They came down the river back to the canoe, threw in their golf bags,
and embarked on the glassy stream.

Over the calm flood, stained deep with crimson, the canoe glided in the
sanguine evening light. But Tressa sang no more and her head was bent
sideways as though listening—always listening—to something inaudible to
Cleves—something very, very far away which she seemed to hear through
the still drip of the paddles.

They were not yet in sight of their landing when she spoke to him,
partly turning:

“I think some of your men have arrived.”

“Where?” he asked, astonished.

“At the house.”

“Why do you think so?”

“I think so.”

They paddled a little faster. In a few minutes their dock came into
view.

“It’s funny,” he said, “that you should think some of our men have
arrived from the North. I don’t see anybody on the dock.”

“It’s Mr. Recklow,” she said in a low voice. “He is seated on our
veranda.”

As it was impossible to see the house, let alone the veranda, Cleves
made no reply. He beached the canoe; Tressa stepped out; he followed,
carrying the golf bags.

A mousy light lingered in the shrubbery; bats were flying against a
salmon-tinted sky as they took the path homeward.

With an impulse quite involuntary, Cleves encircled his young wife’s
shoulders with his left arm.

“Girl-comrade,” he said lightly, “I’d kill any man who even looked as
though he’d harm you.”

He smiled, but she had not missed the ugly undertone in his words.

They walked slowly, his arm around her shoulders. Suddenly he felt her
start. They halted.

“What was it?” he whispered.

“I thought there was something white in the woods.”

“Where, dear?” he asked coolly.

“Over there beyond the lawn.”

What she called the “lawn” was only a vast sheet of pink and white
phlox, now all misty with the whirring wings of sphinx-moths and
Noctuidæ.

The oak grove beyond was dusky. Cleves could see nothing among the
trees.

After a moment they went forward. His arm had fallen away from her
shoulders.

There were no lights except in the kitchen when they came in sight of
the house. At first nobody was visible on the screened veranda under
the orange trees. But when he opened the swing door for her a shadowy
figure arose from a chair.

It was John Recklow. He came forward, bent his strong white head, and
kissed Tressa’s hand.

“Is all well with you, Mrs. Cleves?”

“Yes. I am glad you came.”

Cleves clasped the elder man’s firm hand.

“I’m glad too, Recklow. You’ll stop with us, of course.”

“Do you really want me?”

“Of course,” said Cleves.

“All right. I’ve a coon and a surrey behind your house.”

So Cleves went around in the dusk and sent the outfit back to the
hotel, and he himself carried in Recklow’s suitcase.

Then Tressa went away to give instructions, and the two men were left
together on the dusky veranda.

“Well?” said Recklow quietly.

Cleves went to him and rested both hands on his shoulders:

“I’m playing absolutely square. She’s a perfectly fine girl and she’ll
have her chance some day, God willing.”

“Her chance?” repeated Recklow.

“To marry whatever man she will some day care for.”

“I see,” said Recklow drily.

There was a silence, then:

“She’s simply a splendid specimen of womanhood,” said Cleves earnestly.
“And intensely interesting to me. Why, Recklow, I haven’t known a dull
moment—though I fear she has known many——”

“Why?”

“Why? Well, being married to a—a sort of temporary figurehead—shut up
here all day alone with a man of no particular interest to her——”

“Don’t you interest her?”

“Well, how could I? She didn’t choose me because she liked me
particularly.”

“Didn’t she?” asked Recklow, still more drily. “Well, that does make it
a trifle dull for you both.”

“Not for me,” said the younger man naïvely. “She is one of the most
interesting women I ever met. And good heavens!—what psychic knowledge
that child possesses! She did a thing to-day—merely to amuse me——” He
checked himself and looked at Recklow out of sombre eyes.

“What did she do?” inquired the older man.

“I think I’ll let her tell you—if she wishes.... And that reminds me.
Why did you come down here, Recklow?”

“I want to show you something, Cleves. May we step into the house?”

They went into a little lamplit living-room. Recklow handed a newspaper
clipping to Cleves: the latter read it, standing:

“Had Deadliest Gas Ready for Germans

“_‘Lewisite’ Might Have Killed Millions_

“Washington, April 24.—Guarded night and day and far out of human reach
on a pedestal at the Interior Department Exposition here is a tiny
vial. It contains a specimen of the deadliest poison ever known,
‘Lewisite,’ the product of an American scientist.

“Germany escaped this poison by signing the armistice before all the
resources of the United States were turned upon her.

“Ten airplanes carrying ‘Lewisite’ would have wiped out, it is said,
every vestige of life—animal and vegetable—in Berlin. A single day’s
output would snuff out the millions of lives on Manhattan Island. A
drop poured in the palm of the hand would penetrate to the blood, reach
the heart and kill the victim in agony.

“What was coming to Germany may be imagined by the fact that when the
armistice was signed ‘Lewisite’ was being manufactured at the rate of
ten tons a day. Three thousand tons of this most terrible instrument
ever conceived for killing would have been ready for business on the
American front in France on November 1.

“‘Lewisite’ is another of the big secrets of the war just leaking out.
It was developed in the Bureau of Mines by Professor W. Lee Lewis, of
Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., who took a commission as a
captain in the army.

“The poison was manufactured in a specially built plant near Cleveland,
called the ‘Mouse Trap,’ because every workman who entered the stockade
went under an agreement not to leave the eleven-acre space until the
war was won. The object of this, of course, was to protect the secret.

“Work on the plant was started eighteen days after the Bureau of Mines
had completed its experiments.

“Experts are certain that no one will want to steal the sample.
Everybody at the Exposition, which shows what Secretary Lane’s
department is doing, keeps as far away from it as possible.”

When Cleves had finished reading, he raised his eyes in silence.

“That vial was stolen a week ago,” said Recklow gravely, “by a young
man who killed one guard and fatally wounded the other.”

“Was there any ante-mortem statement?”

“Yes. I’ve followed the man. I lost all trace of him at Palm Beach, but
I picked it up again at Ormond. _And now I’m here_, Cleves.”

“You don’t mean you’ve traced him here!” exclaimed Cleves under his
breath.

“He’s here on the St. Johns River, somewhere. He came up in a
motor-boat, but left it east of Orchard Cove. Benton knows this
country. He’s covering the motor-boat. And I—came here to see how you
are getting on.”

“And to warn us,” added Cleves quietly.

“Well—yes. He’s got that stuff. It’s deadlier than the newspaper
suspects. And I guess—I guess, Cleves, he’s one of those damned Yezidee
witch-doctors—or sorcerers, as they call them;—one of that sect of
Assassins sent over here to work havoc on feeble minds and do murder on
the side.”

“Why do you think so?”

“Because the dirty beast lugs his shroud around with him—a bed-sheet
stolen from the New Willard in Washington.

“We were so close to him in Jacksonville that we got it, and his
luggage. But we didn’t get him, the rat! God knows how he knew we were
waiting for him in his room. He never came back to get his luggage.

“But he stole a bed-sheet from his hotel in St. Augustine, and that is
how we picked him up again. Then, at Palm Beach, we lost the beggar,
but somehow or other I felt it in my bones that he was after you—you
and your wife. So I sent Benton to Ormond and I went to Palatka. Benton
picked up his trail. It led toward you—toward the St. Johns. And the
reptile has been here forty-eight hours, trying to nose you out, I
suppose——”

Tressa came into the room. Both men looked at her.

Cleves said in a guarded voice:

“To-day, on the golf links at Orchard Cove, there was a young man in
white flannels—very polite and courteous to us—but—Tressa thought she
saw him slinking through the woods as though following and watching
us.”

“My man, probably,” said Recklow. He turned quietly to Tressa and
sketched for her the substance of what he had just told Cleves.

“The man in white flannels on the golf links,” said Cleves, “was well
built and rather handsome, and not more than twenty-five. I thought he
was a Jew.”

“I thought so too,” said Tressa, calmly, “until I saw him in the woods.
And then—and then—suddenly it came to me that his smile was the smile
of a treacherous Shaman sorcerer.

“... And the idea haunts me—the memory of those smooth-faced, smiling
men in white—men who smile only when they slay—when they slay body and
soul under the iris skies of Yian!—O God, merciful, long suffering,”
she whispered, staring into the East, “deliver our souls from Satan who
was stoned, and our bodies from the snare of the Yezidee!”




CHAPTER IX
THE WEST WIND


The night grew sweet with the scent of orange bloom, and all the
perfumed darkness was vibrant with the feathery whirr of hawk-moths’
wings.

Tressa had taken her moon-lute to the hammock, but her fingers rested
motionless on the strings.

Cleves and Recklow, shoulder to shoulder, paced the moonlit path along
the hedges of oleander and hibiscus which divided garden from jungle.

And they moved cautiously on the white-shell road, not too near the
shadow line. For in the cypress swamp the bloated grey death was awake
and watching under the moon; and in the scrub palmetto the
diamond-dotted death moved lithely.

And somewhere within the dark evil of the jungle a man in white might
be watching.

So Recklow’s pistol swung lightly in his right hand and Cleves’ weapon
lay in his side-pocket, and they strolled leisurely around the drive
and up and down the white-shell walks, passing Tressa at regular
intervals, where she sat in her hammock with the moon-lute across her
knees.

Once Cleves paused to place two pink hibiscus blossoms in her hair
above her ears; and the girl smiled gravely at him in the light.

Again, pausing beside her hammock on one of their tours of the garden,
Recklow said in a low voice: “If the beast would only show himself,
Mrs. Cleves, we’d not miss him. Have you caught a glimpse of anything
white in the woods?”

“Only the night mist rising from the branch and a white ibis stealing
through it.”

Cleves came nearer: “Do you think the Yezidee is in the woods watching
us, Tressa?”

“Yes, he is there,” she said calmly.

“You _know_ it?”

“Yes.”

Recklow stared at the woods. “We can’t go in to hunt for him,” he said.
“That fellow would get us with his Lewisite gas before we could
discover and destroy him.”

“Suppose he waits for a west wind and squirts his gas in this
direction?” whispered Cleves.

“There is no wind,” said Tressa tranquilly. “He has been waiting for
it, I think. The Yezidee is very patient. And he is a Shaman sorcerer.”

“My God!” breathed Recklow. “What sort of hellish things has the Old
World been dumping into America for the last fifty years? An ordinary
anarchist is bad enough, but this new breed of devil—these
Yezidees—this sect of Assassins——”

“Hush!” whispered Tressa.

All three listened to the great cat-owl howling from the jungle. But
Tressa had heard another sound—the vague stir of leaves in the
live-oaks. Was it a passing breeze? Was a night wind rising? She
listened. But heard no brittle clatter from the palm-fronds.

“Victor,” she said.

“Yes, Tressa.”

“If a wind comes, we must hunt him. That will be necessary.”

“Either we hunt him and get him, or he kills us here with his gas,”
said Recklow quietly.

“If the night wind comes,” said Tressa, “we must hunt the darkness for
the Yezidee.” She spoke coolly.

“If he’d only show himself,” muttered Recklow, staring into the
darkness.

The girl picked up her lute, caught Cleves’ worried eyes fixed on her,
suddenly comprehended that his anxiety was on her account, and blushed
brightly in the moonlight. And he saw her teeth catch at her underlip;
saw her look up again at him, confused.

“If I dared leave you,” he said, “I’d go into the hammock and start
that reptile. This won’t do—this standing pat while he comes to some
deadly decision in the woods there.”

“What else is there to do?” growled Recklow.

“Watch,” said the girl. “Out-watch the Yezidee. If there is no
night-wind he may tire of waiting. Then you must shoot fast—very, very
fast and straight. But if the night-wind comes, then we must hunt him
in darkness.”

Recklow, pistol in hand, stood straight and sturdy in the moonlight,
gazing fixedly at the forest. Cleves sat down at his wife’s feet.

She touched her moon-lute tranquilly and sang in her childish voice:

“_Ring, ring, Buddha bells,_
_Gilded gods are listening._
_Swing, swing, lily bells,_
_In my garden glistening._
_Now I hear the Shaman drum;_
_Now the scarlet horsemen come;_
_Ding-dong!_
_Ding-dong!_
_Through the chanting of the throng_
_Thunders now the temple gong._
_Boom-boom!_
_Ding-dong!_

“_Let the gold gods listen!_
_In my garden; what care I_
_Where my lily bells hang mute!_
_Snowy-sweet they glisten_
_Where I’m singing to my lute._
_In my garden; what care I_
_Who is dead and who shall die?_
_Let the gold gods save or slay_
_Scented lilies bloom in May._
_Boom, boom, temple gong!_
_Ding-dong!_
_Ding-dong!_”

“What are you singing?” whispered Cleves.

“‘The Bells of Yian.’”

“Is it old?”

“Of the 13th century. There were few Buddhist bells in Yian then. It is
Lamaism that has destroyed the Mongols and that has permitted the creed
of the Assassins to spread—the devil worship of Erlik.”

He looked at her, not understanding. And she, pale, slim prophetess, in
the moonlight, gazed at him out of lost eyes—eyes which saw, perhaps,
the bloody age of men when mankind took the devil by the throat and all
Mount Alamout went up in smoking ruin; and the Eight Towers were dark
as death and as silent before the blast of the silver clarions of
Ghenghis Khan.

“Something is stirring in the forest,” whispered Tressa, her fingers on
her lips.

“Damnation,” muttered Recklow, “it’s the wind!”

They listened. Far in the forest they heard the clatter of palm-fronds.
They waited. The ominous warning grew faint, then rose again,—a long,
low rattle of palm-fronds which became a steady monotone.

“We hunt,” said Recklow bluntly. “Come on!”

But the girl sprang from the hammock and caught her husband’s arm and
drew Recklow back from the hibiscus hedge.

“Use me,” she said. “You could never find the Yezidee. Let me do the
hunting; and then shoot very, very fast.”

“We’ve got to take her,” said Recklow. “We dare not leave her.”

“I can’t let her lead the way into those black woods,” muttered Cleves.

“The wind is blowing in my face,” insisted Recklow. “We’d better
hurry.”

Tressa laid one hand on her husband’s arm.

“I can find the Yezidee, I think. You never could find him before he
finds you! Victor, let me use my own _knowledge_! Let me find the way.
Please let me lead! Please, Victor. Because, if you don’t, I’m afraid
we’ll all die here in the garden where we stand.”

Cleves cast a haggard glance at Recklow, then looked at his wife.

“All right,” he said.

The girl opened the hedge gate. Both men followed with pistols lifted.

The moon silvered the forest. There was no mist, but a night-wind blew
mournfully through palm and cypress, carrying with it the strange,
disturbing pungency of the jungle—wild, unfamiliar perfumes,—the acrid
aroma of swamp and rotting mould.

“What about snakes?” muttered Recklow, knee deep in wild phlox.

But there was a deadlier snake to find and destroy, somewhere in the
blotched shadows of the forest.

The first sentinel trees were very near, now; and Tressa was running
across a ghostly tangle, where once had been an orange grove, and where
aged and dying citrus stumps rose stark amid the riot of encroaching
jungle.

“She’s circling to get the wind at our backs,” breathed Recklow,
running forward beside Cleves. “That’s our only chance to kill the
dirty rat—catch him with the wind at our backs!”

Once, traversing a dry hammock where streaks of moonlight alternated
with velvet-black shadow a rattlesnake sprang his goblin alarm.

They could not locate the reptile. They shrank together and moved
warily, chilled with fear.

Once, too, clear in the moonlight, the Grey Death reared up from
bloated folds and stood swaying rhythmically in a horrible shadow dance
before them. And Cleves threw one arm around his wife and crept past,
giving death a wide berth there in the checkered moonlight.

Now, under foot, the dry hammock lay everywhere and the night wind blew
on their backs.

Then Tressa turned and halted the two men with a gesture. And went to
her husband where he stood in the palm forest, and laid her hands on
his shoulders, looking him very wistfully in the eyes.

Under her searching gaze he seemed oddly to comprehend her appeal.

“You are going to use—to use your _knowledge_,” he said mechanically.
“You are going to find the man in white.”

“Yes.”

“You are going to find him in a way we don’t understand,” he continued,
dully.

“Yes.... You will not hold me in—in horror—will you?”

Recklow came up, making no sound on the spongy palm litter underfoot.

“Can you find this devil?” he whispered.

“I—think so.”

“Does your super-instinct—finer sense—knowledge—whatever it is—give you
any inkling as to his whereabouts, Mrs. Cleves?”

“I think he is here in this hammock. Only——” she turned again, with
swift impulse, to her husband, “—only if you—if _you_ do not hold me
in—in horror—because of what I do——”

There was a silence; then:

“What are you about to do?” he asked hoarsely.

“Slay this man.”

“We’ll do that,” said Cleves with a shudder. “Only show him to us and
we’ll shoot the dirty reptile to slivers——”

“Suppose we hit the jar of gas,” said Recklow.

After a silence, Tressa said:

“I have got to give him back to Satan. There is no other way. I
understood that from the first. He can not die by your pistols, though
you shoot very fast and straight. No!”

After another silence, Recklow said:

“You had better find him before the wind changes. We hunt down wind
or—we die here together.”

She looked at her husband.

“Show him to us in your own way,” he said, “and deal with him as he
must be dealt with.”

A gleam passed across her pale face and she tried to smile at her
husband.

Then, turning down the hammock to the east, she walked noiselessly
forward over the fibrous litter, the men on either side of her, their
pistols poised.

They had halted on the edge of an open glade, ringed with young pines
in fullest plumage.

Tressa was standing very straight and still in a strange, supple,
agonised attitude, her left forearm across her eyes, her right hand
clenched, her slender body slightly twisted to the left.

The men gazed pallidly at her with tense, set faces, knowing that the
girl was in terrible mental conflict against another mind—a powerful,
sinister mind which was seeking to grasp her thoughts and control them.

Minute after minute sped: the girl never moved, locked in her psychic
duel with this other brutal mind,—beating back its terrible
thought-waves which were attacking her, fighting for mental supremacy,
struggling in silence with an unseen adversary whose mental dominance
meant death.

Suddenly her cry rang out sharply in the moonlight, and then, all at
once, a man in white stood there in the lustre of the moon—a young,
graceful man dressed in white flannels and carrying on his right arm
what seemed to be a long white cloak.

Instantly the girl was transformed from a living statue into a lithe,
supple, lightly moving thing that passed swiftly to the west of the
glade, keeping the young man in white facing the wind, which was
blowing and tossing the plumy young pines.

“So it is _you_, young man, with whom I have been wrestling here under
the moon of the only God!” she said in a strange little voice, all
vibrant and metallic with menacing laughter.

“It is I, Keuke Mongol,” replied the young man in white, tranquilly;
yet his words came as though he were tired and out of breath, and the
hand he raised to touch his small black moustache trembled as if from
physical exhaustion.

“Yarghouz!” she exclaimed. “Why did I not know you there on the golf
links, Assassin of the Seventh Tower? And why do you come here with
your shroud over your arm and hidden under it, in your right hand, a
flask full of death?”

He said, smiling:

“I come because you are to die, Heavenly-Azure Eyes. I bring you your
shroud.” And he moved warily westward around the open circle of young
pines.

Instantly the girl flung her right arm straight upward.

“Yarghouz!”

“I hear thee, Heavenly Azure.”

“Another step to the west and I shatter thy flask of gas.”

“With what?” he demanded; but stood discreetly motionless.

“With what I grasp in an empty palm. Thou knowest, Yarghouz.”

“I have heard,” he said with smiling uncertainty, “but to hear of force
that can be hurled out of an empty palm is one thing, and to see it and
feel it is another. I think you lie, Heavenly Azure.”

“So thought Gutchlug. And died of a yellow snake.”

The young man seemed to reflect. Then he looked up at her in his frank,
smiling way.

“Wilt thou listen, Heavenly Eyes?”

“I hear thee, Yarghouz.”

“Listen then, Keuke Mongol. Take life from us as we offer it. Life is
sweet. Erlik, like a spider, waits in darkness for lost souls that
flutter to his net.”

“You think my soul was lost there in the temple, Yarghouz?”

“Unutterably lost, little temple girl of Yian. Therefore, live. Take
life as a gift!”

“Whose gift?”

“Sanang’s.”

“It is written,” she said gravely, “that we belong to God and we return
to him. Now then, Yezidee, do your duty as I do mine! Kai!”

At the sound of the formula always uttered by the sect of Assassins
when about to do murder, the young man started and shrank back. The
west wind blew fresh in his startled eyes.

“Sorceress,” he said less firmly, “you leave your Yiort to come all
alone into this forest and seek me. Why then have you come, if not to
submit!—if not to take the gift of life—if not to turn away from your
seducers who are hunting me, and who have corrupted you?”

“Yarghouz, I come to slay you,” she said quietly.

Suddenly the man snarled at her, flung the shroud at her feet, and
crept deliberately to the left.

“Be careful!” she cried sharply; “look what you’re about! Stand still,
son of a dog! May your mother bewail your death!”

Yarghouz edged toward the west, clasping in his right hand the flask of
gas.

“Sorceress,” he laughed, “a witch of Thibet prophesied with a drum that
the three purities, the nine perfections, and the nine times nine
felicities shall be lodged in him who slays the treacherous temple
girl, Keuke Mongol! There is more magic in this bottle which I grasp
than in thy mind and body. Heavenly Eyes! I pray God to be merciful to
this soul I send to Erlik!”

All the time he was advancing, edging cautiously around the circle of
little plumy pines; and already the wind struck his left cheek.

“Yarghouz Khan!” cried the girl in her clear voice. “Take up your
shroud and repeat the fatha!”

“Backward!” laughed the young man, “—as do you, Keuke Mongol!”

“Heretic!” she retorted. “Do you also refuse to name the ten Imaums in
your prayers? Dog! Toad! Spittle of Erlik! May all your cattle die and
all your horses take the glanders and all your dogs the mange!”

“Silence, sorceress!” he shouted, pale with fear and fury. “Witch! Mud
worm! May Erlik seize you! May your skin be covered with putrefying
sores! May all the demons torment you! May God remember you in hell!”

“Yarghouz! Stand still!”

“Is your word then the Rampart of Gog and Magog, you young witch of
Yian, that a Khan of the Seventh Tower need fear you!” he sneered,
stealing stealthily westward through the feathery pines.

“I give thee thy last chance, Yarghouz Khan,” she said in an excited
voice that trembled. “Recite thy prayer naming the ten, because with
their holy names upon thy lips thou mayest escape damnation. For I am
here to slay thee, Yarghouz! Take up thy shroud and pray!”

The young man felt the west wind at the back of his left ear. Then he
began to laugh.

“Heavenly Eyes,” he said, “thy end is come—together with the two police
who hide in the pines yonder behind thee! Behold the bottle magic of
Yarghouz Khan!”

And he lifted the glass flask in the moonlight as though he were about
to smash it at her feet.

Then a terrible thing occurred. The entire flask glowed red hot in his
grasp; and the man screamed and strove convulsively to fling the
bottle; but it stuck to his hand, melted into the smoking flesh.

Then he screamed again—or tried to—but his entire lower jaw came off
and he stood there with the awful orifice gaping in the
moonlight—stood, reeled a moment—and then—and _then_—his whole face
slid off, leaving nothing but a bony mask out of which burst shriek
after shriek——

Keuke Mongol had fainted dead away. Cleves took her into his arms.

Recklow, trembling and deathly white, went over to the thing that lay
among the young pines and forced himself to bend over it.

The glass flask still stuck to one charred hand, but it was no longer
hot. And Recklow rolled the unspeakable thing into the white shroud and
pushed it into the swamp.

An evil ooze took it, slowly sucked it under and engulfed it. A few
stinking bubbles broke.

Recklow went back to the little glade among the pines.

A young girl lay sobbing convulsively in her husband’s arms, asking
God’s pardon and his for the justice she had done upon an enemy of all
mankind.




CHAPTER X
AT THE RITZ


When Victor Cleves telegraphed from St. Augustine to Washington that he
and his wife were on their way North, and that they desired to see John
Recklow as soon as they arrived, John Recklow remarked that he knew of
no place as private as a public one. And he came on to New York and
established himself at the Ritz, rather regally.

To dine with him that evening were two volunteer agents of the United
States Secret Service, _ZB-303_, otherwise James Benton, a fashionable
architect; and _XYL-371_, Alexander Selden, sometime junior partner in
the house of Milwin, Selden & Co.

A single lamp was burning in the white-and-rose rococo room. Under its
veiled glow these three men sat conversing in guarded voices over
coffee and cigars, awaiting the advent of _53-6-26_, otherwise Victor
Cleves, recently Professor of Ornithology at Cambridge; and his young
wife, Tressa, known officially as _V-69_.

“Did the trip South do Mrs. Cleves any good?” inquired Benton.

“Some,” said Recklow. “When Selden and I saw her she was getting
better.”

“I suppose that affair of Yarghouz upset her pretty thoroughly.”

“Yes.” Recklow tossed his cigar into the fireplace and produced a pipe.
“Victor Cleves upsets her more,” he remarked.

“Why?” asked Benton, astonished.

“She’s beginning to fall in love with him and doesn’t know what’s the
matter with her,” replied the elder man drily. “Selden noticed it,
too.”

Benton looked immensely surprised. “I supposed,” he said, “that she and
Cleves considered the marriage to be merely a temporary necessity. I
didn’t imagine that they cared for each other.”

“I don’t suppose they did at first,” said Selden. “But I think she’s
interested in Victor. And I don’t see how he can help falling in love
with her, because she’s a very beautiful thing to gaze on, and a most
engaging one to talk to.”

“She’s about the prettiest girl I ever saw,” admitted Benton, “and
about the cleverest. All the same——”

“All the same—_what_?”

“Well, Mrs. Cleves has her drawbacks, you know—as a real wife, I mean.”

Recklow said: “There is a fixed idea in Cleves’s head that Tressa Norne
married him as a last resort, which is true. But he’ll never believe
she’s changed her ideas in regard to him unless she herself enlightens
him. And the girl is too shy to do that. Besides, she believes the same
thing of him. There’s a mess for you!”

Recklow filled his pipe carefully.

“In addition,” he went on, “Mrs. Cleves has another and very terrible
fixed idea in her charming head, and that is that she really did lose
her soul among those damned Yezidees. She believes that Cleves, though
kind to her, considers her merely as something uncanny—something to
endure until this Yezidee campaign is ended and she is safe from
assassination.”

Benton said: “After all, and in spite of all her loveliness, I myself
should not feel entirely comfortable with such a girl for a real wife.”

“Why?” demanded Recklow.

“Well—good heavens, John!—those uncanny things she does—her rather
terrifying psychic knowledge and ability—make a man more or less
uneasy.” He laughed without mirth.

“For example,” he added, “I never was nervous in any physical crisis;
but since I’ve met Tressa Norne—to be frank—I’m not any too comfortable
in my mind when I remember Gutchlug and Sanang and Albert Feke and that
dirty reptile Yarghouz—and when I recollect _how that girl dealt with
them_! Good God, John, I’m not a coward, I hope, but that sort of thing
worries me!”

Recklow lighted his pipe. He said: “In the Government’s campaign
against these eight foreigners who have begun a psychic campaign
against the unsuspicious people of this decent Republic, with the
purpose of surprising, overpowering and enslaving the minds of mankind
by a misuse of psychic power, we agents of the Secret Service are
slowly gaining the upper hand.

“In this battle of minds we are gaining a victory. But we are winning
solely and alone through the psychic ability and the loyalty and
courage of a young girl who, through tragedy of circumstances, spent
the years of her girlhood in the infamous Yezidee temple at Yian, and
who learned from the devil-worshipers themselves not only this
so-called magic of the Mongol sorcerers, but also how to meet its
psychic menace and defeat it.”

He looked at Benton, shrugged:

“If you and if Cleves really feel the slightest repugnance toward the
strange psychic ability of this brave and generous girl, I for one do
not share it.”

Benton reddened: “It isn’t exactly repugnance——” But Recklow
interrupted sharply:

“Do you realise, Benton, what she’s already accomplished for us in our
secret battle against Bolshevism?—against the very powers of hell
itself, led by these Mongol sorcerers?

“Of the Eight Assassins—or Sheiks-el-Djebel—who came to the United
States to wield the dreadful weapon of psychic power against the minds
of our people, and to pervert them and destroy all civilisation,—of the
Eight Chief Assassins of the Eight Towers, this girl already has
discovered and identified four,—Sanang, Gutchlug, Albert Feke, and
Yarghouz; and she has destroyed the last three.”

He sat calmly enjoying his pipe for a few moments’ silence, then:

“Five of this sect of Assassins remain—five sly, murderous, psychic
adepts who call themselves sorcerers. Except for Prince Sanang, I do
not know who these other four men may be. I haven’t a notion. Nor have
you. Nor do I believe that with all the resources of the United States
Secret Service we ever should be able to discover these four
Sheiks-el-Djebel except for the astounding spiritual courage and
psychic experience of the young wife of Victor Cleves.”

After a moment Selden nodded. “That is quite true,” he said simply. “We
are utterly helpless against unknown psychic forces. And I, for one,
feel no repugnance toward what Mrs. Cleves has done for all mankind and
in the name of God.”

“She’s a brave girl,” muttered Benton, “but it’s terrible to possess
such knowledge and horrible to use it.”

Recklow said: “The horror of it nearly killed the girl herself. Have
you any idea how she must suffer by being forced to employ such
terrific knowledge? by being driven to use it to combat this menace of
hell? Can you imagine what this charming, sensitive, tragic young
creature must feel when, with powers natural to her but unfamiliar to
us, she destroys with her own mind and will-power demons in human shape
who are about to destroy her?

“Talk of nerve! Talk of abnegation! Talk of perfect loyalty and
courage! There is more than these in Tressa Cleves. There is that
dauntless bravery which faces worse than physical death. Because the
child still believes that her soul is damned for whatever happened to
her in the Yezidee temple; and that when these Yezidees succeed in
killing her body, Erlik will surely seize the soul that leaves it.”

There was a knocking at the door. Benton got up and opened it. Victor
Cleves came in with his young wife.


Tressa Cleves seemed to have grown since she had been away. Taller, a
trifle paler, yet without even the subtlest hint of that charming
maturity which the young and happily married woman invariably wears,
her virginal allure now verged vaguely on the delicate edges of
austerity.

Cleves, sunburnt and vigorous, looked older, somehow—far less
boyish—and he seemed more silent than when, nearly seven months before,
he had been assigned to the case of Tressa Norne.

Recklow, Selden and Benton greeted them warmly; to each in turn Tressa
gave her narrow, sun-tanned hand. Recklow led her to a seat. A servant
came with iced fruit juice and little cakes and cigarettes.

Conversation, aimless and general, fulfilling formalities, gradually
ceased.

A full June moon stared through the open windows—searching for the
traditional bride, perhaps—and its light silvered a pale and lovely
figure that might possibly have passed for the pretty ghost of a bride,
but not for any girl who had married because she was loved.

Recklow broke the momentary silence, bluntly:

“Have you anything to report, Cleves?”

The young fellow hesitated:

“My wife has, I believe.”

The others turned to her. She seemed, for a moment, to shrink back in
her chair, and, as her eyes involuntarily sought her husband, there was
in them a vague and troubled appeal.

Cleves said in a sombre voice: “I need scarcely remind you how deeply
distasteful this entire and accursed business is to my wife. But she is
going to see it through, whatever the cost. And we four men understand
something of what it has cost her—is costing her—in violence to her
every instinct.”

“We honour her the more,” said Recklow quietly.

“We couldn’t honour her too much,” said Cleves.

A slight colour came into Tressa’s face; she bent her head, but Recklow
saw her eyes steal sideways toward her husband.

Still bowed a little in her chair, she seemed to reflect for a while
concerning what she had to say; then, looking up at John Recklow:

“I saw Sanang.”

“Good heavens! Where?” he demanded.

“I—don’t—know.”

Cleves, flushing with embarrassment, explained: “She saw him
clairvoyantly. She was lying in the hammock. You remember I had a
trained nurse for her after—what happened in Orchid Lodge.”

Tressa looked miserably at Recklow,—dumbly, for a moment. Then her lips
unclosed.

“I saw Prince Sanang,” she repeated. “He was near the sea. There were
rocks—cottages on cliffs—and very brilliant flowers in tiny,
pocket-like gardens.

“Sanang was walking on the cliffs with another man. There were forests,
inland.”

“Do you know who the other man was?” asked Recklow gently.

“Yes. He was one of the Eight. I recognised him. When I was a girl he
came once to the Temple of Yian, all alone, and spread his shroud on
the pink marble steps. And we temple girls mocked him and threw
stemless roses on the shroud, telling him they were human heads with
which to grease his toug.”

She became excited and sat up straighter in her chair, and her strange
little laughter rippled like a rill among pebbles.

“I threw a big rose without a stem upon the shroud,” she exclaimed,
“and I cried out, ‘Niaz!’ which means, ‘Courage,’ and I mocked him,
saying, ‘Djamouk Khagan,’ when he was only a Khan, of course; and I
laughed and rubbed one finger against the other, crying out, ‘Toug ia
glachakho!’ which means, ‘The toug is anointed.’ And which was very
impudent of me, because Djamouk was a Sheik-el-Djebel and Khan of the
Fifth Tower, and entitled to a toug and to eight men and a Toughtchi.
And it is a grave offence to mock at the anointing of a toug.”

She paused, breathless, her splendid azure eyes sparkling with the
memory of that girlish mischief. Then their brilliancy faded; she bit
her lip and stole an uncertain glance at her husband.

And after a pause she explained in a very subdued voice that the “Iagla
michi,” or action of “greasing the toug,” or standard, was done when a
severed human head taken in battle was cast at the foot of the lance
shaft stuck upright in the ground.

“You see,” she said sadly, “we temple girls, being already damned,
cared little what we said, even to such a terrible man as Djamouk Khan.
And even had the ghost of old Tchinguiz Khagan himself come to the
temple and looked at us out of his tawny eyes, I think we might have
done something saucy.”

Tressa’s pretty face was spiritless, now; she leaned back in her
armchair and they heard an unconscious sigh escape her.

“Ai-ya! Ai-ya!” she murmured to herself, “what crazy things we did on
the rose-marble steps, Yulun and I, so long—so long ago.”

Cleves got up and went over to stand beside his wife’s chair.

“What happened is this,” he said heavily. “During my wife’s
convalescence after that Yarghouz affair, she found herself, at a
certain moment, clairvoyant. And she thought she saw—she _did_
see—Sanang, and an Asiatic she recognised as being one of the chiefs of
the Assassins sect, whose name is Djamouk.

“But, except that it was somewhere near the sea—some summer colony
probably on the Atlantic coast—she does not know where this pair of
jailbirds roost. And this is what we have come here to report.”

Benton, politely appalled, tried not to look incredulous. But it was
evident that Selden and Recklow had no doubts.

“Of course,” said Recklow calmly, “the thing to do is for you and your
wife to try to find this place she saw.”

“Make a tour of all such ocean-side resorts until Mrs. Cleves
recognises the place she saw,” added Selden. And to Recklow he added:
“I believe there are several perfectly genuine cases on record where
clairvoyants have aided the police.”

“Several authentic cases,” said Recklow quietly. But Benton’s face was
a study.

Tressa looked up at her husband. He dropped his hand reassuringly on
her shoulder and nodded with a slight smile.

“There—there was something else,” she said with considerable
hesitation—“something not quite in line of duty—perhaps——”

“It seems to concern Benton,” added Cleves, smiling.

“What is it?” inquired Selden, smiling also as Benton’s features froze
to a mask.

“Let me tell you, first,” interrupted Cleves, “that my wife’s psychic
ability and skill can make me visualise and actually see scenes and
people which, God knows, I never before laid eyes upon, but which she
has both seen and known.

“And one morning, in Florida, I asked her to do something
strange—something of that sort to amuse me—and we were sitting on the
steps of our cottage—you know, the old club-house at Orchid!—and the
first I knew I saw, in the mist on the St. Johns, a Chinese bridge
humped up over that very commonplace stream, and thousands of people
passing over it,—and a city beyond—the town of Yian, Tressa tells
me,—and I heard the Buddhist bells and the big temple gong and the
noises in streets and on the water——”

He was becoming considerably excited at the memory, and his lean face
reddened and he gesticulated as he spoke:

“It was astounding, Recklow! There was that bridge, and all those
people moving over it; and the city beyond, and the boats and shipping,
and the vast murmur of multitudes.... And then, there on the bridge
crossing toward Yian, I saw a young girl, who turned and looked back at
my wife and laughed.”

“And I told him it was Yulun,” said Tressa, simply.

“A playfellow of my wife’s in Yian,” explained Cleves. “But if she were
really Chinese she didn’t look like what are my own notions of a
Chinese girl.”

“Yulun came from Black China,” said Mrs. Cleves. “I taught her English.
I loved her dearly. I was her most intimate friend in Yian.”

There ensued a silence, broken presently by Benton; and:

“Where do I appear in this?” he asked stiffly.

Tressa’s smile was odd; she looked at Selden and said:

“When I was convalescent I was lonely.... I made _the effort_ one
evening. And I found Yulun. And again she was on a bridge. But she was
dressed as I am. And the bridge was one of those great, horrible steel
monsters that sprawl across the East River. And I was astonished, and I
said, ‘Yulun, darling, are you really here in America and in New York,
or has a demon tangled the threads of thought to mock my mind in
illness?’

“Then Yulun looked very sorrowfully at me and wrote in Arabic
characters, in the air, the name of our enemy who once came to the Lake
of Ghosts for love of her—Yaddin-ed-Din, Tougtchi to Djamouk the
Fox.... And who went his way again amid our scornful laughter.... He is
a demon. And he was tangling my thread of thought!”

Tressa became exceedingly animated once more. She rose and came swiftly
to where Benton was standing.

“And what do you think!” she said eagerly. “I said to her, ‘Yulun!
Yulun! Will you _make the effort_ and come to me if I _make the
effort_? Will you come to me, beloved?’ And Yulun made ‘Yes,’ with her
lips.”

After a silence: “But—where do I come in?” inquired Benton, stiffly
fearful of such matters.

“You _came_ in.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You came in the door while Yulun and I were talking.”

“When?”

“When you came to see me after I was better, and you and Mr. Selden
were going North with Mr. Recklow. Don’t you remember; I was lying in
the hammock in the moonlight, and Victor told you I was asleep?”

“Yes, of course——”

“I was not asleep. I had _made the effort_ and I was with Yulun.... I
did not know you were standing beside my hammock in the moonlight until
Yulun told me.... And _that_ is what I am to tell you; Yulun saw
you.... And Yulun has written it in Chinese, in Eighur characters and
in Arabic,—tracing them with her forefinger in the air—that Yulun,
loveliest in Yian, flame-slender and very white, has seen her heart,
like a pink pearl afire, burning between your august hands.”

“My hands!” exclaimed Benton, very red.

There fell an odd silence. Nobody laughed.

Tressa came nearer to Benton, wistful, uncertain, shy.

“Would you care to see Yulun?” she asked.

“Well—no,” he said, startled. “I—I shall not deny that such things
worry me a lot, Mrs. Cleves. I’m a—an Episcopalian.”

The tension released, Selden was the first to laugh.

“There’s no use blinking the truth,” he said; “we’re up against
something absolutely new. Of course, it isn’t magic. It can, of course,
be explained by natural laws about which we happen to know nothing at
present.”

Recklow nodded. “What do we know about the human mind? It has been
proven that no thought can originate within that mass of convoluted
physical matter called the brain. It has been proven that _something
outside_ the brain originates thought and uses the brain as a vehicle
to incubate it. What do we know about thought?”

Selden, much interested, sat cogitating and looking at Mrs. Cleves. But
Benton, still flushed and evidently nervous, sat staring out of the
window at the full moon, and twisting an unlighted cigarette to shreds.

“Why didn’t you tell Benton when the thing occurred down there at
Orchid Lodge, the night we called to say good-bye?” asked Selden,
curiously.

Tressa gave him a distressed smile: “I was afraid he wouldn’t believe
me. And I was afraid that you and Mr. Recklow, even if you believed it,
might not like—like me any the better for—for being clairvoyant.”

Recklow came over, bent his handsome grey head, and kissed her hand.

“I never liked any woman better, nor respected any woman as deeply,” he
said. And, lifting his head, he saw tears sparkling in her eyes.

“My dear,” he said in a low voice, and his firm hand closed over the
slim fingers he had kissed.

Benton got up from his chair, went to the window, turned shortly and
came over to Tressa.

“You’re braver than I ever could learn to be,” he said shortly. “I ask
your pardon if I seem sceptical. I’m more worried than incredulous.
There’s something born in me—part of me—that shrinks from anything that
upsets my orthodox belief in the future life. But—if you wish me to see
this—this girl—Yulun—it’s quite all right.”

She said softly, and with gentle wonder: “I know of nothing that could
upset your belief, Mr. Benton. There is only one God. And if Mahomet be
His prophet, or if he be Lord Buddha, or if your Lord Christ be
vice-regent to the Most High, I do not know. All I know is that God is
God, and that He prevailed over Satan who was stoned. And that in
Paradise is eternal life, and in hell demons hide where dwells Erlik,
Prince of Darkness.”

Benton, silent and secretly aghast at her theology, said nothing.
Recklow pleasantly but seriously denied that Satan and his demons were
actual and concrete creatures.

Again Cleves’s hand fell lightly on his wife’s shoulder, in a careless
gesture of reassurance. And, to Benton, “No soul is ever lost,” he
said, calmly. “I don’t exactly know how that agrees with your
orthodoxy, Benton. But it is surely so.”

“I don’t know myself,” said Benton. “I hope it’s so.” He looked at
Tressa a moment and then blurted out: “Anyway, if ever there was a soul
in God’s keeping and guarded by His angels, it’s your wife’s!”

“That also is true,” said Cleves quietly.

“By the way,” remarked Recklow carelessly, “I’ve arranged to have you
stop at the Ritz while you’re in town, Mrs. Cleves. You and your
husband are to occupy the apartment adjoining this. Where is your
luggage, Victor?”

“In our apartment.”

“That won’t do,” said Recklow decisively. “Telephone for it.”

Cleves went to the telephone, but Recklow took the instrument out of
his hand and called the number. The voice of one of his own agents
answered.

Cleves was standing alone by the open window when Recklow hung up the
telephone. Tressa, on the sofa, had been whispering with Benton.
Selden, looking over the evening paper by the rose-shaded lamp, glanced
up as Recklow went over to Cleves.

“Victor,” he said, “your man has been murdered. His throat was cut; his
head was severed completely. Your luggage has been ransacked and so has
your apartment. Three of my men are in possession, and the local police
seem to comprehend the necessity of keeping the matter out of the
newspap

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