The Slayer of Souls

"Oh, my God!" he whispered, "such things are! It isn't my mind that has gone wrong. There are such things!"

The conviction swept him like a tide till his senses swam. As though peering through a mist of gold he saw his wife enter and come to him; – felt her arm about him, sustaining him where he swayed slightly with one hand on the table among the mulberry leaves.

"Ah," murmured Tressa, noticing the green leaves, "she oughtn't to have done that. That was thoughtless of her, to show herself to you."

Cleves looked at her in a dazed way. "The body is nothing," he muttered. "The rest only is real. That is the truth, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"I seem to be beginning to believe it… Sansa said things – I shall try to tell you – some day – dear… I'm so glad to hear your voice."

"Are you?" she murmured.

"And so glad to feel your touch… I found a shroud on my threshold. And a knife."

"The Yezidees are becoming mountebanks… Where is the knife?" she asked scornfully.

"Sansa said it was poisoned. She took it. She – she said that a poisoned heart is more dangerous still."

Then Tressa threw up her head and called softly into space: "Sansa! Little Silk-Moth! What are these mischievous things you have told to my lord?"

She stood silent, listening. And, in the answer which he could not hear, there seemed to be something that set his young wife's cheeks aflame.

"Sansa! Little devil!" she cried, exasperated. "May Erlik send his imps to pinch you if you have said to my lord these shameful things. It was impudent! It was mischievous! You cover me with shame and confusion, and I am humbled in the dust of my lord's feet!"

Cleves looked at her, but she could not sustain his gaze.

"Did Sansa say to you what she said to me?" he demanded unsteadily.

"Yes… I ask your pardon… And I had already told her you did not – did not – were not – in – love – with me… I ask your pardon."

"Ask more… Ask your heart whether it would care to hear that I am in love. And with whom. Ask your heart if it could ever care to listen to what my heart could say to it."

"Y-yes – I'll ask – my heart," she faltered… "I think I had better finish dressing – " She lifted her eyes, gave him a breathless smile as he caught her hand and kissed it.

"It – it would be very wonderful," she stammered, " – if our necessity should be-become our choice."

But that speech seemed to scare her and she fled, leaving her husband standing tense and upright in the middle of the room.

Their train on the New York Central Railroad left the Grand Central Terminal at one in the afternoon.

Cleves had made his arrangements by wire. They travelled lightly, carrying, except for the clothing they wore, only camping equipment for two.

It was raining in the Hudson valley; they rushed through the outlying towns and Po'keepsie in a summer downpour.

At Hudson the rain slackened. A golden mist enveloped Albany, through which the beautiful tower and façades along the river loomed, masking the huge and clumsy Capitol and the spires beyond.

At Schenectady, rifts overhead revealed glimpses of blue. At Amsterdam, where they descended from the train, the flag on the arsenal across the Mohawk flickered brilliantly in the sunny wind.

By telegraphic arrangement, behind the station waited a touring car driven by a trooper of State Constabulary, who, with his comrade, saluted smartly as Cleves and Tressa came up.

There was a brief, low-voiced conversation. Their camping outfit was stowed aboard, Tressa sprang into the tonneau followed by Cleves, and the car started swiftly up the inclined roadway, turned to the right across the railroad bridge, across the trolley tracks, and straight on up the steep hill paved with blocks of granite.

On the level road which traversed the ridge at last they speeded up, whizzed past the great hedged farm where racing horses are bred, rushing through the afternoon sunshine through the old-time Scotch settlements which once were outposts of the old New York frontier.

Nine miles out the macadam road ended. They veered to the left over a dirt road, through two hamlets; then turned to the right.

The landscape became rougher. To their left lay the long, low Maxon hills; behind them the Mayfield range stretched northward into the open jaws of the Adirondacks.

All around them were woods, now. Once a Gate House appeared ahead; and beyond it they crossed four bridges over a foaming, tumbling creek where Cleves caught glimpses of shadowy forms in amber-tinted pools – big yellow trout that sank unhurriedly out of sight among huge submerged boulders wet with spray.

The State trooper beside the chauffeur turned to Cleves, his purple tie whipping in the wind.

"Yonder is Glenwild, sir," he said.

It was a single house on the flank of a heavily forested hill. Deep below to the left the creek leaped two cataracts and went flashing out through a belt of cleared territory ablaze with late sunshine.

The car swung into the farm-yard, past the barn on the right, and continued on up a very rough trail.

"This is the road to the Ireland Vlaie," said the trooper. "It is possible for cars for another mile only."

Splendid spruce, pine, oak, maple, and hemlock fringed the swampy, uneven trail which was no more than a wide, rough vista cut through the forest.

And, as the trooper had said, a little more than a mile farther the trail became a tangle of bushes and swale; the car slowed down and stopped; and a man rose from where he was seated on a mossy log and came forward, his rifle balanced across the hollow of his left arm.

The man was Alek Selden.

It was long after dark and they were still travelling through pathless woods by the aid of their electric torches.

There was little underbrush; the forest of spruce and hemlock was first growth.

Cleves shined the trees but could discover no blazing, no trodden path.

In explanation, Selden said briefly that he had hunted the territory for years.

"But I don't begin to know it," he added. "There are vast and ugly regions of bog and swale where a sea of alders stretches to the horizon. There are desolate wastes of cat-briers and witch-hopple under leprous tangles of grey birches, where stealthy little brooks darkle deep under matted débris. Only wild things can travel such country.

"Then there are strange, slow-flowing creeks in the perpetual shadows of tamarack woods, where many a man has gone in never to come out."

"Why?" asked Tressa.

"Under the tender carpet of green cresses are shining black bogs set with tussock; and under the bog stretches quicksand, – and death."

"Do you know these places?" asked Cleves.

"No."

Cleves stepped forward to Tressa's side.