I

I

As Dreeme, racing close at the heels of Walden Slater, circled the Westcott farmhouse, he glanced up curiously at the windows. There was no light. The building gloomed in its cluster of trees just as it had that first night when he had stumbled after the boy Miles along the uneven path and entered through the back door. It was like a house of the dead, a dwelling-place from which the rose-colored actualities of living had long ago vanished. Around it, the tall dark trees kept their somber watch, standing like ghostly sentinels. The spark of Walden Slater’s lantern sent strange beasts of shadows scurrying into the underbrush that lined the hummocky path. At the back door the farmer set down his light and hammered upon the wood with the butt of his revolver. The sound seemed to echo inside the house. It was like the echo that comes from a musty tomb when the iron grille that guards its dead from the living world is shaken. If there was anything in back of the wood against which Walden Slater was hammering so vigorously, that shape or being or spectre was standing mute.

“Of course not,” muttered the farmer. With a fierce kick of his heavy boot he crashed the door open and it smashed against the wall on broken hinges. The intruder entered slowly, holding the lantern before him in one hand and grasping his cocked revolver in the other. Dreeme followed at his heels. The small beam of light darted about the room reflecting the stuffed chairs, the wax flowers under glass, the photographic enlargements on the wall. Dreeme’s mind automatically swept back to that time when he had followed Martha Westcott through this room trembling from the magnetism of her strange personality. Walden Slater circled the sitting room slowly, lifting his lantern to view the pictures and examining the tables and the chairs. He seemed to be looking for something, some hint that might indicate the direction that he desired. “Uriah,” he muttered, pausing before one picture, a particularly large and atrocious piece of workmanship that hung above the wax flowers. Dreeme caught a glimpse of a glittering eye highly touched by the painter’s art.

“What are we searching for?” he inquired. “Shouldn’t we get on?”

Walden Slater said nothing but strode toward the door that led to the library. He kicked it open unceremoniously and entered and Dreeme followed close at his heels. It was just as the young doctor remembered it.

“Light the lamp,” said the farmer. Dreeme fumbled at the chimney and wick, and an instant later the pale yellow glow illuminated the room. The crowded book-stacks leaned forward, and the ancient volumes seemed to watch the intruders speechlessly. The young doctor walked impatiently about the table where he had once seen Jeffrey Westcott seated. He felt that they were wasting time, that Deborah was confined somewhere in some secret place from which she should be rescued as speedily as possible. He wanted to say this to the farmer, to get him started on the way to the place called Dagon, and yet he refrained from speech, for Walden Slater was obviously looking for something. He, too, circled the room, inspecting the backs of the books with a swift and keen eye. Dreeme paused near one case and read a few faded titles. Certainty of Worlds of Spirits by Richard Baxter. De la Démonomanie des Sorciers par Jean Bodin. Sadducismus Triumphatus by Joseph Glanvil. Daemonolatria by Nicholas Remigius. Discourse of the Subtill Practises of Devilles by George Giffard. He turned abruptly to the farmer.

“What are we looking for?” he asked.

“The goat’s head,” replied the farmer. He had ruffled through the papers on Westcott’s table.

“Do you know what that means?” exclaimed Dreeme.

Walden Slater nodded.

“Be patient,” he said. “It’s the signal for the Esbat.”

He continued to rummage about the room.

Suddenly he snorted in triumph, and started for the door. Dreeme followed close at his heels. The farmer, still holding his lantern, turned a corner and they began to climb a narrow flight of stairs. Behind them in the deserted library the oil-lamp perched precariously on the corner of the table and quivered at each gust of rainy air that swept through the window.

They wandered through two bedrooms, the feeble flare of the lantern illuminating neatly-made beds, and came to a closed door that apparently opened into a room on the rear of the house. Walden Slater, employing his usual tactics, kicked it open and they entered into a small chamber that was entirely unfurnished except for a raised stone slab on three perpendicular pillars of granite in the corner. The farmer made his way immediately toward this strange bit of furniture and held his lantern over it, inspecting the corrugated surface of the stone. Dreeme, standing beside him, saw dark stains on the slab and a small keen-bladed knife that appeared more like a lancet than anything else. The knife glittered in the ray of the lantern and the young doctor was overwhelmed by a sudden fear. He stared wide-eyed at the farmer, and Walden Slater’s long upper lip quivered in the dim light. Dreeme struggled between an absorbed excitement in their discoveries and his intense concern for Deborah’s safety. She was somewhere not far from them, her mind a riot of fear, waiting frantically for him. He was sure of that. But what had happened to her in the meantime, during those hours (and he was not sure how many they had been, for the taciturn farmer had vouchsafed no specific information on this point) she had passed since Burroughs enticed or kidnapped her from the Slater house, he could not even guess. If any harm had come to her (and his heart nearly ceased beating at the thought) he would not leave the valley until he had killed Jeffrey Westcott and George Burroughs. A cold determination seemed to freeze the emotions in him as he came to this decision. His thin lips tightened and his eyes became like blue steel.

“I shall go mad in a minute,” he said calmly to the farmer.

Walden Slater opened his mouth to speak and then, with a grunt that expressed both surprise and relief, he pointed to the corner in back of the stone slab. The dejected carcass of a chicken lay there in its dishevelled feathers, its crop slit open and its blood dabbled upon the floor.

“He’s been divining,” he said. Then he looked closely at the young doctor.

“You perk up, Doctor Dreeme,” he added. “I know what I’m doing. There’s no harm done to anybody⁠ ⁠… yet.”

He bent over and fumbled about the limp carcass of the chicken and then straightened his body with a grunt of satisfaction. In his hand he held a small blood-smeared square of paper. Silently he turned and strode downstairs, Dreeme close at his heels. He did not speak until they had regained the comparative light of the library and then he sank into Jeffrey Westcott’s chair by the table. The curtain from the window fluttered inward, narrowly missing the chimney of the sputtering lamp. Dreeme stood before the farmer, his eyes staring and his hands trembling.

“I reckon I’ll have to explain a few things,” he remarked slowly, “or you’ll be fainting on me, Doctor.”

“I’m not going to faint, Walden,” replied the young doctor, “but I am mad to get on. I know Deborah’s in grave danger and I should be with her.”

Walden Slater nodded gravely.

“Westcott is playing his last card to dominate the valley,” he said. “He’s called an Esbat, a meeting, and he intends a sacrifice. I knew it was coming ever since I saw that goat-head in Wagner’s fist. The goat-head is used as an announcement for a coming event. Wagner was on his way to somebody with the sign when he was smashed in the head and killed. That’s when I started thinking. There hasn’t been an Esbat in this valley since old Captain Uriah Carrier died, and my dad told me all about him.”

He cleared his throat after this unexpectedly long speech. Then he renewed his distasteful task of narration.

“We don’t want none of this stuff, Doctor,” he declared. “The farmers want to forget what their granddads were. Westcott won’t let us forget. He’s got Uriah’s black book and we’re all in it. He’s got some of us fooled by stirring up feelings in us that we thought had died out of us. It has died out of me. I don’t take any stock in this stuff though my dad was befuddled by old Uriah and went to his Esbat.”

He cleared his throat again and held up the bit of paper. In the lamp-glow Dreeme saw the tiny goat’s head carefully drawn in blue ink and when Walden Slater slowly turned the paper he saw “Dagon⁠—two⁠—nigger” written in small letters. He recalled now that he had never turned over the bit of paper he had given to the coroner. He recalled, too, the antagonism of the farmers who had stood so short a distance from him when he had extracted the paper from Wagner’s stiff hand.

“It seems that they meet at Dagon at two o’clock, and that Dagon is somewhere in Nigger Swamp,” he said mechanically.

Walden Slater nodded his head in assent.

“That’s it,” he said. “Westcott sacrificed a chicken to see if the signs were propitious. Apparently he decided they were, although what a chicken’s crop has to do with it is beyond me.”

He stopped abruptly and turned his face toward the open window. Dreeme listened, too, and he could hear the distinct sound of footsteps going by the house. They apparently died away in the soft grass of the field that stretched from the dwelling to Briony Wood.

“They’re gathering,” remarked the farmer simply. He stood up and regained his lantern.

“We can’t know where they’ve hidden Deborah,” he said, “but we do know that they’ll bring her to the place called Dagon. She’s to be the sacrifice, Doctor.”

“They wouldn’t dare to kill her!” exploded Dreeme.

“There’s some things worse than death,” answered Walden Slater.

He moved toward the door and Dreeme followed him. Behind them the forgotten lamp perched on the edge of the table, and as the wind increased the curtain flapped ever nearer the yellow flame, a flame that sputtered but, being shielded from the worst of the gust by a protector, never went out. The two men passed through the sitting room and out through the broken door into the storm which had now settled down into a gusty drizzle.

“And, besides,” said Walden Slater slowly, “Wagner was killed, wasn’t he?”

“Do you know who killed him?” asked Dreeme. “Was it Jeffrey Westcott?”

“I know that the pegs driven into his eye-sockets were whittled by a mighty dull knife,” returned the farmer grimly.

They plodded on in silence after that, their heads bowed against the driving wind and rain. Occasionally they stumbled over hammocks of wet grass and once Walden Slater sprawled upon the ground, his lantern rolling from his hand and blinking out. With a grumbled curse he scrambled to his feet and picked up the extinguished lantern and examined it.

“It’s busted!” he said vehemently, flinging it from him with an angry gesture. They heard it clatter against a stone wall to the side of them. After that they struggled on in the darkness across the field, the black shadow of Briony Wood in its slight elevation looming nearer and nearer against the faint glow of the stormy sky.

“If you meet anybody,” said the farmer suddenly, “don’t you say a damn word. Keep your head down and trudge along.”

Dreeme muttered something in his throat. Mingled rain and perspiration was streaming down his face and his naked feet were cut by the sharp stones and twigs. He heard his heart beating violently in his bosom and wondered if the farmer was as tired as he. They had crossed the greater part of the field now and the ground was sloping upward before them, sloping upward to tall spectral trees that stood with intermingled branches and waited menacingly for their coming. It would be dark in those trees and there would probably be no pathway. But they would have to go on, for somewhere beyond the trees was the place called Dagon, and it was at Dagon that he would next meet Deborah. Sobbingly he climbed the slope at the heels of Walden Slater.