THE STRANGE PEOPLE
By Murray Leinster
According to Cunningham’s schedule there was a perfectly feasible route to romance and to high adventure. It began wherever you happened to be and led to Boston. There you took a train to Hatton Junction and changed to an accomodation train of one passenger coach and one baggage car. That led you to Bendale, New Hampshire, and there you hired a team. Both romance and adventure were to be found somewhere around Coulters, which was eight miles from Bendale. Cunningham was sure nobody else knew this secret because he had found it in a highly unlikely place and almost anybody else who happened to look there would find only dry statistics and descriptions.
However, as he boarded the accomodation train he inspected his fellow passengers carefully. One upon a quest like Cunningham’s likes to feel that his secret is his alone.
At first glance the passenger coach was reassuring. There were a dozen or more passengers, but with two exceptions they were plainly people of the countryside. New England farmers. Two women who had been shopping at the Junction and were comparing their bargains. A swarthy French-Canadian mill-hand with his dark-eyed sweetheart. Odds and ends of humanity; the “characters” one finds in any New England village.
But even the two men Cunningham recognized as outsiders like himself were wholly unlikely to be upon the same quest. One had the solid, pleasant expression of a safe-and-sane man of business on his vacation, perhaps in search of a good fishing-stream. The other was a foreigner, immaculately dressed and with waxed mustaches, who was reading something that Cunningham could not see and exhibiting all the signs of mounting rage. Cunningham might have become curious about the foreigner at another time. He might have tried to guess at his race and wonder what reading-matter could fill any man with such evident fury.
But being upon the last stages of the route to romance, Cunningham thought of nothing else. As to whether the girl would be as attractive as her picture, he had no idea. Whether or not she had been married since it was taken, he could not tell. What reception he would receive at the end of his journey was highly problematical. He might be regarded as insane. He might—and he hugged the knowledge to him tightly—he might run a very excellent chance of being killed.
This was folly, of course, but Cunningham had an ample excuse. For ten years he had toiled at a desk. He had worn a green celluloid eye-shade and added up figures in a tall ledger, or made notes in a day-book, or duly pounded out, “Yours of the fifteenth instant received and in reply would state...” at the dictation of his employer. For eight hours out of the twenty-four, for eleven and a half months out of the twelve, he made memos or orders and payments and violations imposed and repairs made, and all connected with the business of a firm which installed and repaired elevators.
And now he was free. An uncle, dimly remembered, had died without any heirs but Cunningham. Cunningham had inherited fifty thousand dollars and within ten minutes after receiving the news had resigned his job and punched his employer’s rather bulbous nose.
Now he was in quest of adventure and romance. He considered that he had earned them both. Ten years of law-abiding citizenship in New York entitled him to all of adventure he could gather, and ten years in a boarding-house earned him at least one authentic romance.
Cunningham had in his pocket the picture of a girl who lived a mile and a half from Coulters, New Hampshire. The picture had been taken four months before and her name was Maria. She was a pretty girl and had smiled at the camera without self-consciousness. That was all that Cunningham knew about her, but he had built up dreams to supply the rest. And he was quite insanely confident that where she was, there would be romance.
But romance alone would not do. There must be adventure as well. And adventure was duly promised. The picture was in the Geographic Magazine which travel- and adventure-hungry folk devour. It was one of the illustrations of an article prosaically entitled Ethnological Studies in New Hampshire, which very soberly outlined the radical traits of New Englanders and the immigrants who are supplanting them. And Maria was a Stranger—one of a group of people who were a mystery and an enigma to all those around them.
They were two hundred people of unknown origin who spoke English far purer than the New Hampshireites around them and avoided contact with their neighbors with a passionate sincerity. They could not be classified even by the expert on races of men who had written the article. They were not Americans or Anglo-Saxons. They were not any known people. But whatever they were, they were splendid specimens, and they were hated by their neighbors, and they kept strictly away from all contact with all other folk. The New Englanders charitably retailed rumors that more than one inquisitive visitor among them had mysteriously disappeared. Strangest of all, they had appeared from nowhere just two years before. They had bought ground and paid for it in new, rough gold. And they refused violently to give any account of themselves.
This was where Cunningham was going. Where the prettiest girl in the world had smiled unconsciously at a camera just four months before. Where a magnificent unknown race was represented in the hodgepodge of New England’s later day. Where inquisitive strangers might mysteriously disappear, where certain hostility awaited too much questioning—and where the prettiest girl in the world might possibly be induced to smile.
Cunningham knew it was foolish, but he considered that he had earned the right to be a fool.
Then he looked up. The solid-looking man just opposite him had unfastened his suit-case and taken out a sheaf of magazine pages, neatly clipped together. He began to go through them as if they were totally familiar. Cunningham caught a glimpse of a picture among them, and started. It was the same article from the same magazine that had sent him here.
Then he heard a snarl, as of one who has contained himself until he can do so no longer. His head jerked around and he found himself staring at the foreigner who had seemed so angry. The man had the Geographic Magazine in his hand. It was open at the page—the very page—on which the girl was pictured. But the foreigner was looking at the type. Otherwise Cunningham as one in quest of romance and adventure would have felt it necessary to interfere an instant later. Because the foreigner glared at the page as if he had read something that infuriated him past all possible control and suddenly ripped the sheet across and across again, and threw the magazine upon the floor and stamped upon it in a frenzy of rage.
He saw eyes fixed upon him, some startled and some slyly amused. He sat down quivering with wrath and pretended to stare out of the window. But Cunningham saw that his hands were clenching and unclenching as if he imagined that he had something in his grasp which he would rend to bits.
2
The accommodation train made innumerable stops. It stopped at “South Upton.” It puffed into motion and paused at “East Upton.” A little later it drew up grandly at “Upton.” Then it passed through “North Upton.”
The comfortable-looking man opposite Cunningham looked across and smiled.
“Now, if we stop at West Upton,” he suggested, “we can go on to a new name.”
Cunningham nodded and on impulse pulled the Geographic Magazine out of his pocket and held it up.
“Same trail?” he asked.
The other man frowned and looked keenly at him. Then his face relaxed.
“I belong to the lodge,” he admitted. “Here’s my copy.”
Cunningham jerked his head at the third man.
“He had one too. He just tore it up. It seemed to make him mad.”
“That so?” The other looked steadily back at the foreign-seeming man, who was staring out of the window with his face pale with fury. “Let’s ask him.”
He caught the foreigner’s eye an instant later and held up the magazine, opened at the article on the Strange People.
“How about it? You going there too?” he asked pleasantly.
The foreigner went purple with fury.
“No!” he gasped, half-strangled with his own wrath. “I do not know what you are talking about!”
He jerked himself around in his seat until they could see only his profile. But they could see his lips moving as if he were muttering savagely to himself.
“My name’s Cunningham,” said Cunningham. “I want to see those people. They sound sort of interesting.”
“And my name’s Gray,” said the other, shifting to a seat beside Cunningham. “I’m interested, too. I want to hear them talk. Dialect, you know. It’s my hobby.”
“But they’re supposed to talk perfectly good English——” began Cunningham, when he stopped short.
The train had halted leisurely at a tiny station and the conductor was gossiping with an ancient worthy on the station platform. A single passenger had boarded the coach and entered the door. He looked unmistakably unlike the other natives in the car, though he was dressed precisely in the fashion of the average New Englander. But as he came into full view at the end of the aisle he caught sight of the foreign passenger Cunningham had puzzled over.
The newcomer turned a sickly gray in color. He gave a gasp, and then a yell of fear. He turned and bolted from the train, while the foreign passenger started from his seat and with the expression of a devil raced after him. The newcomer darted into a clump of trees and brushwood and vanished. The well-dressed passenger stood quivering on the platform of the day-coach. The conductor gaped at him. The other passengers stared.
Then the well-dressed man came quietly back inside and to his seat. Veins were standing out on his forehead from fury and his hands were shaking with rage. He sat down and stared woodenly out of the window, holding himself still by a terrific effort of will.
Gray glanced sidewise at Cunningham.
“It looks,” he observed in a low tone, “as if our trail will have some interesting developments. That man who just ran away was one of the Strange People. He looks like the pictures of them. It ought to be lively up in the hills when our friend yonder arrives. Eh?”
“I—I’ll say so,” said Cunningham joyously.
He talked jerkily with Gray as the train finished its journey. Without really realizing it, he told Gray nearly everything connected with his journey and his quest. Cunningham was busily weaving wild theories to account for the scene when the first of the Strange People appeared before the third passenger. Otherwise he might have recognized the fact that Gray was very cleverly pumping him of everything he knew. But that did not occur to him until later.
Gray looked more at ease when the train reached Bendale and he and Cunningham sought a hotel together. They saw the third man sending a telegram and, again, arranging for a horse and buggy at a livery stable. He ignored them, but his lips were pressed together in thin, cruel lines.
Cunningham was very well satisfied as he arranged for his room and for a team to take him to Coulters the next day. Ostensibly he was going to try for some fishing, though nothing larger than minnows would be found in that section. But Cunningham considered that the route to romance and adventure was beginning to offer promise.
Still, next morning both he and Gray were startled when the hotel-keeper came to them agitatedly.
“There was three strangers on the train yesterday, wa’n’t there?” he asked in a high-pitched voice that trembled with excitement.
“Yes,” said Cunningham. “Why?”
“D’ye know the other man?” asked the hotelkeeper excitedly. “Know who he was or anything?”
“No, not at all,” Cunningham answered alertly, while Gray listened.
“Would ye recognize him if ye saw him?” quavered the hotel-keeper.
“Of course,” said Cunningham. “Why? What’s the matter?”
Gray had struck a match to light a cigar, but it burned his fingers as he listened.
“He rented a horse an’ buggy last night,” quavered the native. “He drove off to Coulters way, he said. An’ this mornin’ the horse came back with him in the buggy, but he was dead.”
“Dead!” Cunningham jumped and found himself growing a trifle pale.
“Yes, dead, that’s what he is!” said the innkeeper shrilly. “Them Strange People done it! Because it looks like he was beat to death with clubs an’ maybe fifty men was on the job!”
3
The route to romance led through Bendale to Coulters, but now there was a dead man in the way. It had taken youth and hope and several other things to set out as Cunningham had done in the first place. The quest of a pictured smile among a strange people in unfamiliar country is not a thing the average young man can bring himself to. He will be afraid of looking foolish. But to continue on the quest when one has just seen a dead man the girl’s own people have killed, more courage still is needed.
Cunningham was not quite so joyous now. He had gone with Gray to identify the foreigner. He had turned sick at the expression on the man’s face. He had promised to stay within call for the inquest. And then he and Gray had gone on to Coulters.
Cunningham was not happy. Here was adventure, but it was stark and depressing. And romance. The pictured face was no less appealing and no less ideal. But the picture had been taken four months before. In the interval what might not have happened? Many people were concerned in the killing of the foreigner. Did the girl of the photograph know of it? Was she in the secret of the death that had been dealt out? Did she know who had killed the man, or why?
“You’d a lot better have stayed behind, Cunningham,” said Gray, as their team jogged over the country road to the summer boarding-house where they were to stay. “I don’t think this is going to be pleasant from now on. No place for a romance-hunter.”
“You’re not staying back,” Cunningham observed. “And you’re just following a hobby.”
“Umph. That dialect business. Yes,” said Gray. His lips twitched grimly. “But a hobby can be as exacting as a profession. Still, I didn’t expect to come up here and run slap into a first-class murder.”
Gray puffed on his cigar and slapped the horses with the reins.
“The pleasantest part,” he added, “is that we shall probably be just about as unwelcome as that chap was last night.”
Cunningham did not answer, and they drove in silence for a long time.
Discomforting thoughts assailed Cunningham. He knew as clearly as anyone that it was absurd to grow romantic about a girl merely from a picture. But though it may be absurd, it is by no means uncommon. The obtaining of autographed photographs from Hollywood ranks with radio as a national occupation. Cunningham was not disturbed by the comparative idiocy of traveling several hundred miles and running into some danger just to see a girl whose picture haunted his dreams. But the thought of finding her involved in such an unpleasant mess as the killing of the foreigner; that was different.
A tidy-minded person would have abandoned the quest at once. He would have abandoned the clearly marked trail to romance and high adventure and gone home. A man who acted upon sober common sense would have done the same thing. But such persons do not ever find romance and very rarely even the mildest of adventures. It takes folly and belief to come at romance!—such folly as enabled Cunningham presently to see his duty clear before him.
Maria needed someone to protect her. She was a Stranger, and the native New Hampshireites hated the Strange People cordially. Cunningham had heard enough at the police station that morning to know that the investigation of the foreigner’s killing would be close to a persecution. But if Cunningham were there, near enough to protect the girl who had smiled so shyly yet so pleasantly at the camera, why——
Gray grunted suddenly.
“There’s our boarding-house,” he said, pointing with the whip. “I suppose the Strange People live up in the hills yonder.”
Cunningham stared up at green-clad giants that were tumbled here and there and everywhere in inextricable confusion and grandeur. Hill and valley, vale and mountain, reared up or dipped down until it seemed that as far as the eye could reach the earth had once been a playground of Titans.
A four-square, angular building of typical New England build lay beside the road at the foot of the hills.
“They came here,” grunted Gray, waving his whip. “They had gold, rough gold, to buy ground with. Where did they come from and why did they pick out this part of the world to settle in? The soil’s too thin to grow anything much but hay. The ground’s so rough you have to sow your fields with a shotgun. The biggest crops are stones and summer boarders.”
“I’m wondering,” said Cunningham, whose thoughts had wandered as his eyes roved the heights, “I’m wondering were they knew that chap that was killed.”
“Where they knew him?”
“The Stranger on the train recognized him at first glance. But that chap had a copy of the Geographic Magazine and he’d found where they were from that. He had learned about them just as we did.”
Gray frowned. Then he looked respectfully at Cunningham.
“You’re right. They knew him somewhere, a couple of years ago. But where?”
Cunningham shrugged.
“The article says nowhere.”
And the article did. According to the writer, the Strange People were an enigma, an anomaly, and a mystery. And they had just proved that they could be a threat as well.
The livery team drew up before Coulters’ solitary building. It was a crossroads post-office and summer hotel with a dreary general store tucked under one wing.
A man was sitting on the porch, smoking. He was watching them intently and as they alighted he rose to greet them.
One glance made Cunningham exclaim under his breath. This man was the counterpart of the foreigner on the train—the one who had been killed. The same olive skin, the same keen and venomous eyes, and even the same too-full lips with their incongruous suggestion of cruelty. He was dressed, too, in the same immaculate fashion from meticulously tailored clothes to handmade boots.
“How do you do?” he said politely. “I’ve been hoping to find you here. You reached Bendale on yesterday’s train?”
Gray’s face was quite impassive.
“Yes,” he admitted.
The foreigner exhibited half a dozen magazine pages. They were the ones containing the article on the Strange People which had brought both Gray and Cunningham to the spot.
“I believe you recognize this?”
Gray nodded, watching the man keenly.
“Before you arrange for rooms,” suggested the foreigner, smiling so that his teeth showed unpleasantly, “I would like to speak to you a moment. My brother saw you on the train. He telegraphed for me to meet you here. I may add that I had myself driven all night over very bad roads to get here, and I probably ruined a car in trying to meet you.”
“Well?” asked Gray shortly.
The foreigner reached into his pocket and pulled out a thick wallet. He opened it, and an incredible mass of yellow-backed bills was exposed to view.
“In the first place,” he said pleasantly, “I would like to offer each of you a present—let us say, five thousand dollars apiece—just to go home and forget that you ever saw that magazine article or ever heard of the Strange People in the hills up there.”
4
Gray turned to the buckboard and began to hand down his suitcases. The last of them was on the ground before he spoke.
“I’m afraid we can’t do business,” he said without expression. “I am here on a matter of scientific interest. I want to study their dialect. By the way, have you had any news from Bendale this morning?”
The foreigner shook his head impatiently.
“News? No. But if I make it ten thousand——”
“I’m afraid not,” said Gray pleasantly. “I’m not in a money-making business. My friend Cunningham may be willing to take you up.”
But Cunningham tossed his own suit-cases down.
“No,” he said contentedly. “I came here for fun. For adventure, if you choose to put it that way. And anything I’m offered so much to stay out of must be too much fun to miss.”
The foreigner gnawed at his fingertips as they started for the hotel.
“Wait a moment,” he said urgently. “Perhaps we can still come to some agreement. You wish to study dialect? You wish to find adventure? We may still work together.”
“How?” Gray put down his suitcases to light a cigar, while he gazed abstractedly at the foreign-looking man.
“I—I—er—my name is Vladimir,” said the foreigner nervously. “I will promise you five thousand dollars each and all assistance in your separate desires. You”—he spoke to Gray—“you will have all opportunities to hear them talk and study their speech. And you, er, you shall have all the adventures the hills afford. If only you will, er, help us to maintain a certain, er, discretion.”
Cunningham found himself disliking this man extremely.
“Discretion?” he demanded. “You mean keep our mouths shut?”
Vladimir beamed at him.
“Ah, yes! You are a young man. Adventure? There are pretty girls in the hills. I will give them orders. You will find them fascinating. And five thousand dollars in addition to smiles——”
“Suppose you talk plainly,” said Gray shortly, before Cunningham could speak.
“You will find my brother among the Strangers,” Vladimir told them eagerly. “You saw him on the train. Find him and tell him of the bargain I have just made with you. And he will tell you just what you may repeat or speak of what you see. And if you agree to work with us I will give you more money. Ten thousand dollars!”
“But what is the work you are planning?” asked Gray, again before Cunningham could reply. Cunningham was seething.
“It would not be wise to say. But the sheriff of the county has agreed to work with us—for a gift, of course—and will assist us with the full force of the law. If he does so, there can be no objection to your aiding us.”
“Oh,” said Gray gently. “The sheriff’s in it too?”
“To be sure. He—he will guide you to my brother,” offered Vladimir eagerly. “Do not go inside the hotel. Let the sheriff take you to the hotel where my brother waits. Talk to my brother. And you will earn ten thousand dollars each!”
Cunningham’s head began to whirl. Vladimir hadn’t heard of the death of his brother. But he had some plan to the detriment of the Strange People, and so obviously of Maria. Otherwise he would not have found it necessary to bribe the sheriff. And yet, both Vladimir and his brother had been at a long distance the day before. They had hurried here on learning where the Strange People were. The Strange People knew them and feared them; might even be hiding especially from them! But why?
Cunningham could not explain it, but he knew that he had not mistaken the route to adventure. Coulters was on the way. But there was a mile and a half still to go.
Gray moved suddenly.
“Cunningham, if you want to take up this proposition—”
Cunningham picked up his bags and moved toward the hotel.
“I can’t fill the contract,” he said shortly.
“But it is so simple!” protested Vladimir. “Simply talk to my brother——”
Gray was already up on the porch.
“Can’t do even that,” he said grimly. “You evidently haven’t heard. You’d better get Bendale on the ’phone and find out. Your brother was on the train with us yesterday, it’s true. He went up to the village of the Strangers last night. But his horse brought his body back this morning. They’d killed him.”
Vladimir gasped, and went ashen. Sheer incredulity flashed across his features. Then he believed and was stunned. But there was no grief whatever to be seen on his face. Instead there was a terrible wrath, a rage so beastly and cruel that Cunningham shivered when he saw it.
“They killed him, eh?” he said very softly, like a cat purring. “They dared to kill him, eh? Ah, when I am through with them they will go down on their knees and beg me to kill them! Beg me!”
His eyes were fixed and glassy with fury. Cunningham instinctively looked for the foam of madness to appear upon his lips. But he turned and went softly within the hotel.
“Charming example of family affection,” said Gray. “Why didn’t you take his money?”
“I wouldn’t miss this,” Cunningham told him, “for ten times five thousand. What in blazes is up in those hills?”
“I suggest,” Gray said dryly, “that we go and see. Got a gun?”
Cunningham nodded.
“There’s no time like the present,” grunted Gray. “The sheriff was over here, busily being bribed, when that killing was discovered. Let’s get up in the hills before it’s overrun with deputies. It won’t take a second to get our rooms.”
As a matter of fact it was nearly an hour later when they strode out of the hotel and made abruptly for the mountain-slope.
For another hour they scrambled up stiff slopes among thorny brushwood and small trees. Cunningham was already trying to sort out the hodgepodge of events. Adventure—or mystery at any rate—crowded about him. Romance must inevitably follow. That seemed so certain that he was almost able to discount it. He was sure by now that Gray was not in the hills for any study of dialects, and he contentedly ran over the list to date. A killing and the offer of a bribe. A corrupted sheriff and the threat of ‘unspeakable revenge. And Gray——
Cunningham, you see, was following a definite route which cut across common sense and sanity. Therefore he kept his eyes open more widely than Gray. And therefore he was tingling all over with a not altogether pleasant thrill when Gray turned on him suddenly.
“Cunningham,” he said sharply, “tell me the truth for once. Why did you come up here? Who sent you?”
Cunningham grinned, casting little side-glances at the trees about him.
“Nobody,” he said joyously. “I came up here for adventure and for romance. And I’m finding them. For instance, there are half a dozen people hiding behind those trees and watching us.”
“The devil!” Gray stopped short and stared about him. It was a creepy feeling to realize that they were being spied upon from the woods. Suddenly he saw a furtive movement as a blurred figure slipped from behind one trunk to another. Its figure was that of a man, but he could see nothing else about it. “Creepy, eh?” said Gray grimly.
“There’s a girl with them,” Cunningham told him. “The girl. Maria.”
But Gray rushed suddenly at a clump of brushwood as if to seize something hiding there. A human figure started up and plunged away. And then something came flicking through the air, glittering, and stuck fast in a tree-trunk with a dull “ping!” It was a long-bladed knife, and it had missed Gray’s throat by inches.
And without a word or a sign the air seemed suddenly full of the little flickering flames which were knife-blades glittering in the sunlight. And which, also, were death.
5
Cunningham flung himself down on the ground. His revolver came out instinctively, but he shouted, “We’re friends, you idiots! Friends!”
There was no answer, but the knives stopped their silent rush through the air. It seemed as if the hidden men in the forest were debating in whispers, and the stillness was deadly. Cunningham lay still, gradually worming his revolver around to a convenient position for firing. He was tingling all over, but he found himself thinking with a supreme irrelevance that he thought he had seen the girl whose picture crackled in his breast pocket as he moved. He was quite sure of it.
He stood up suddenly and began to dust himself off. It was taking a chance, but it was wise. A young man stepped out from among the trees near by.
“You are our friends?” the young man demanded skeptically. “We have no friends.”
His speech had but the faintest of slurs in it, a teasing soft unfamiliarity which pricked one’s curiosity but could never be identified in any one syllable, much less put down in print.
Cunningham felt an abrupt relief, and quite as abruptly wanted to swear. He knew that this was the end of the route to romance and that the girl, Maria, was peering out from the tangled underbrush. And he had dived head foremost into a patch of loam and looked most unromantic. Therefore he said wrathfully, “If we weren’t your friends, don’t you think we’d have plugged into you with our gats? We saw you. You know that!”
The young man stared at him and Cunningham tried to rub the dirt off his nose and look dignified at the same time, thinking of the girl behind the trees.
Then the young man said skeptically, “What is a gat?”
“A revolver. A pistol. A handgun,” snapped Cunningham. “We’d have wiped out the lot of you.”
The man searched his face unbelievingly. A murmur came from somewhere behind him.
“Show me,” he said. He came boldly out from the brushwood and faced Cunningham squarely.
He was no older than Cunningham, but Cunningham instantly envied him his build. He was magnificently made and splendidly muscled—as were all the Strangers, as Cunningham learned later. He met Cunningham’s eyes frankly, yet defiantly.
Cunningham turned to where Gray still lay sprawled out in a heap of brush. Imperturbable puffs of smoke rose in the still woodland air.
“Go ahead and charm them, Cunningham,” said Gray’s voice dryly. “I’m under cover and I’ll start shooting if they start anything.”
“Show me that you could have killed us,” repeated the young man, facing Cunningham. “Use this thing you have.”
Cunningham held out his revolver. The Stranger looked at it curiously but impassively. He seemed totally unfamiliar with its nature or use.
“Great guns!” demanded Cunningham in exasperation. “Don’t you know what it is?”
The young man hesitated and then shook his head.
“No. I do not know what it is.”
He waited defiantly as Cunningham gaped at him. People in these United States who had never seen a revolver! He grunted.
“All right, I’ll show you, then.”
He picked up a bit of weather-rotted rock and set it up for a target. He drew off ten paces and leveled his pistol. He fired, and half the rock flew to fragments. It was seamed and cracked by the freezings and thawings of many years.
The young man flinched at the sound.
“It is like a shotgun,” he observed calmly. “You can use it twice. And then?”
He tapped the hilt of his knife suggestively.
“Then this,” snapped Cunningham.
He fired again and again and again. The rock was splinters.
“And I’ve still two shots left,” he observed grimly. “My friend yonder has six more. If we were not your friends would we have waited for you to chuck rocks at us?”
The young man debated. He inspected Cunningham’s face again.
“N-no,” he admitted. “Perhaps not. But why did you come here?”
Cunningham reached into his pocket and flipped the torn-out pages of the magazine article to him.
“Look at the pictures. That’s why I came,” he said grimly. “And if you want to know more——”
The young man had cried out in astonishment. He turned and beckoned to the woods behind him. A second man appeared. Then a third. They stared at the pictures, fumbling them with their fingers.
The young man turned once more to Cunningham with a very pale face.
“Tell us,” he begged. “How did these come to be? Tell us! If you are our friends, tell us everything!”
For all his blank astonishment, Cunningham realized that he had made a bull’s-eye.
For ten minutes he talked to them, at first in commonplace speech, and as he realized that the most ordinary of technical terms meant nothing to them, he spoke as if to children. He watched their faces and explained until he saw comprehension dawn. And he became filled with a vast incredulity. These people spoke grammatical English, better than the native New Englanders. But they knew nothing of revolvers, though they had seen shotguns and rifles. They knew nothing of cameras, though they could read and write. And they were in a civilized state of a civilized nation! Only the most passionately preserved isolation and an incredible ignorance to begin with could account for it.
They listened intently. Now and again another figure crept out of the wood. They were sitting in a semicircle about him now, watching his face as he spoke. Old men, young men, but no sign of the girl. Presently the younger men began to comment to one another on what Cunningham was saying. Gray got up and sat down more comfortably with his back against a boulder. The comments of the younger men were low-voiced, and sometimes one or another of them smiled. Presently a little chuckle ran about the circle.
Cunningham stammered. He felt like a fool, explaining that he was here because of an article in a magazine, and then having to explain what a magazine was, what a camera was, and all the rest. It was when the feeling of folly was strongest upon him that the chuckle went around. And then he noted that the young men had been quietly retrieving the knives they had sent flickering through the air. Everyone now had his knife back in his belt and was fingering its hilt while he gazed smilingly at Cunningham.
The smiles were bland and friendly, but a feeling of horror came to him. They were playing with him! They were pretending to listen to him, but actually they were toying with him as a cat toys with a mouse. They ringed him about, now, thirty or more of them. From time to time they edged closer to him. And one of them would ask a question in that teasing soft unfamiliar dialect of theirs, which you could not put your finger on. And he would edge a little closer, and smile.
Sweat came out on Cunningham’s forehead. He felt as if he were in a nightmare. The smiles were terrifying. They masked a sinister purpose, a deadly and unspeakable purpose. Cunningham was remembering the dead man he had seen that morning. Some of these men had done him to death. Now they were edging closer to him, feigning to listen and feigning to smile.
He turned and found half a dozen of them very close to his back. He whirled back again and saw that they had edged closer while his back was turned. They sat upon the ground with their eyes fixed intently upon him, and smiled when he looked at them, and asked questions in their soft and unfamiliar accent. And always they moved closer....
Cunningham felt that his teeth would begin to chatter in an instant. And suddenly a look of intelligence passed from one to another. A signal!
6
Cunningham suddenly swung his pistol out. He was sweating in the horror they had inspired. Once they came for him he would be calm enough, but this ghoulish waiting until he should be momentarily off his guard was ghastly. He flung out his pistol in a wide arc.
“I’ll show you some target practise,” he said suddenly. “Clear a lane over there.”
He waved his hand and they parted reluctantly. Now and then they exchanged glances. He could see some of them peering about, as if looking to make sure that no one else was within sight. Cunningham managed to snatch a glance at Gray. Gray was staring at him with a queer distaste, and Cunningham tried to explain what he planned with a significant look. He’d clear a path for a rush, and then they could stand these people off.
He slipped fresh shells in place of the exploded ones.
“Now I’ll hit that tree-trunk over there,” he said sharply. Gray should understand and be ready to leap up. “Watch the bark fly.”
But Gray was sitting quite still. He was regarding Cunningham suspiciously.
“Like this,” snapped Cunningham. He glanced at Gray and made an almost imperceptible motion for him to jump up. They’d have to run for it in a moment.
He pressed on the trigger, and his eyes came back to the sights just as the hammer was falling. It was too late to stop the explosion and his heart stood still. From behind the very tree-trunk he was aiming at a girl’s face had peered.
From sheer instinct he jerked at the weapon almost before his brain had registered his impression. It went off with a roar, and as the echoes died away he heard the rattling of several twigs falling to the ground.
Cunningham gasped and the revolver nearly fell from his hands as he saw her still standing there, gazing interestedly at him. He rushed toward her, his terror of an instant before all forgotten.
“I might have killed you!” he gasped. “Are you hurt? Are you?”
Her eyes opened wide and she flushed faintly. She moved as if to flee. Then she glanced at the Strangers grouped about the place Cunningham had left and stepped out into the open.
“You—you made a very loud noise,” she said uncertainly. “That was all.”
It was the Girl. It was Maria, whose picture Cunningham had treasured and about whom he had day-dreamed. At another time he might have risen to the high heroic moment. He might have appeared in better guise. But in the transcendent relief of finding her safe his wrought-up emotions found escape in the form of rage. He whirled on the Strangers.
“Why didn’t you tell me she was there?” he demanded furiously. His horror of a moment before had vanished completely. He was angry enough to have waded into the bunch bare-handed. “You knew she was there! Damn it, I might have killed her! I might have shot her! Idiots!” he cried, half sobbing from relief; “you let me come close to killing her!”
Gray was still staring at him curiously.
“If you really mean these people well, Cunningham——” he was beginning curtly, when Cunningham turned to the girl again.
“Please forgive me,” he begged, still white and shaking from his scare. “I didn’t know you were there!”
Her eyes met his wonderingly. Then the expression in them changed. She read the terror and understood its cause. She smiled shyly.
“I was safe. My friends were there.”
She meant the thirty or more Strangers, staring puzzledly at Cunningham and bewildered by his evident horror. Cunningham’s head cleared with a jerk. He felt more than ever like a fool. All men are tempted to feel that way in the presence of a pretty girl, if only to keep the pretty girl company, but Cunningham saw that the Strangers were honestly at a loss. There had been no secret purpose. They were as incredibly uninformed as they had seemed and they had been listening with all the attention their actions had displayed.
“Look here,” said Cunningham abjectly, “I guess I seem like a fool to you, Maria, but I did come here only to see you. I—I’ve been day-dreaming about you. Let me show you why I was scared and you’ll understand what it would have meant if I had hit you.”
He took her hand and fitted it to the pistol-grip. He put her finger on the trigger.
“Now, point it off that way,” he went on anxiously, “squeeze on this thing....”
There was the swift thudding of horses’ hoofs. A nasal voice cried shrilly, “Halt in th’ name of th’ law!”
Cunningham started and instinctively held fast to his revolver, which someone seemed trying to jerk away. He caught a glimpse of flying figures melting into the woods. Then he saw two men on horseback plunging up to the spot. One wore a bright star on his chest and the other carried a rifle.
“There, naow!” the sheriff of the county exclaimed, panting. “I got one of ’em, even if it was a girl.”
He lunged from his horse and seized Maria, who was wrenching frantically to get her finger out of the trigger-guard Cunningham had held tightly.
She flashed a glance of bitter hatred at Cunningham.
“Easy,” said Cunningham with sudden heat. “What are you arresting her for? I was showing her how to shoot a revolver.”
“No thanks to ye for that, then,” panted the sheriff. “Here, Joel, come an’ help me get the cuffs on her.”
Cunningham brought down a heavy hand on the sheriff’s arm.
“What’s this for?” he demanded hotly. “I didn’t hold her for you!”
“I’m arrestin’ her for murder, that’s what. She’s one of them Strange People, she is. An’ they killed that furriner last night. You know that. You saw him this mornin’. Mr. Vladimir told me. Joel, come here an’ help me. Help me get her hands in these cuffs.”
Cunningham wrenched the sheriff’s hands free.
“Don’t be a fool,” he snapped angrily. “That killing was the work of men! This girl had nothing to do with it!”
“I warn ye not to interfere with the law!” growled the sheriff.
“I’m not interfering with the law,” said Cunningham hotly. “I’m interfering with your doing what Vladimir’s bribed you to do! This girl would never get to jail. Vladimir’s much too anxious to get some of the Strangers in his hands. Hands off!”
He thrust the girl behind him, where she cowered for a moment.
“Get out of here,” snapped Cunningham. “And you start something about my resisting the law and I’ll start something about your taking bribes! Clear out and leave this girl alone!”
“Ye better not shield a murderer——” whined the sheriff uneasily.
“If you want murderers, look for men,” said Cunningham coldly. “Then I won’t stop you. But stick to the law, Sheriff, and forget about Vladimir.”
He drew back with the girl behind him and his eyes blazing. The revolver that had snared the girl was still clutched in his hand. The sheriff gazed at him venomously.
“I’ll tend to ye,” he said uncertainly.
“Try it,” Cunningham growled as he watched the two men ride slowly away. He watched until they had disappeared. Then he turned to Maria.
She was gone.
Cunningham stared blankly, then grinned sheepishly at Gray.
“I guess that was foolish, maybe,” he apologized, “but he made me mad.”
Gray was white as a sheet, but he tried to smile as he got up stiffly.
“You did good work for me,” he said grimly. “Look at my coat.”
He turned and showed a little rip in the back.
“When those chaps made for the woods,” he said grimly, “one of them dropped behind my own particular boulder and stuck the point of a knife in my back. If the sheriff had taken that girl off, the knife would have been sunk in me. Ugh! Let’s go back to Coulters.”
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