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Title: The Slayer Of souls

Author: Robert Chambers

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

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

Produced by: Chris Curnow, Michael, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

*** 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
newspapers. What was in your baggage?”

“Nothing,” said Cleves, ghastly pale.

“All right. We’ll have your effects packed up again and brought over
here. Are you going to tell your wife?”

Cleves, still deathly pale, cast a swift glance toward her. She sat on
the sofa in animated conversation with Benton. She laughed once, and
Benton smiled at what she was saying.

“Is there any need to tell her, Recklow?”

“Not for a while, anyway.”

“All right. I suppose the Yezidees are responsible for this horrible
business.”

“Certainly. Your poor servant’s head lay at the foot of a curtain-pole
which had been placed upright between two chairs. On the pole were tied
three tufts of hair from the dead man’s head. The pole had been rubbed
with blood.”

“That’s Mongol custom,” muttered Cleves. “They made a toug and
‘greased’ it!—the murderous devils!”

“They did more. They left at the foot of your bed and at the foot of
your wife’s bed two white sheets. And a knife lay in the centre of each
sheet. That, of course, is the symbol of the Sect of Assassins.”

Cleves nodded. His body, as he leaned there on the window sill in the
moonlight, trembled. But his face had grown dark with rage.

“If I could—could only get my hands on one of them,” he whispered
hoarsely.

“Be careful. Don’t wear a face like that. Your wife is looking at us,”
murmured Recklow.

With an effort Cleves raised his head and smiled across the room at his
wife.

“Our luggage will be sent over shortly,” he said. “If you’re tired,
we’ll say good-night.”

So she rose and the three men came to make their adieux and pay their
compliments and devoirs. Then, with a smile that seemed almost happy,
she went into her own apartment on her husband’s arm.

Cleves and his wife had connecting bedrooms and a sitting-room between.
Here they paused for a moment before the always formal ceremony of
leave-taking at night. There were roses on the centre table. Tressa
dropped one hand on the table and bent over the flowers.

“They seem so friendly,” she said under her breath.

He thought she meant that she found even in flowers a refuge from the
solitude of a loveless marriage.

He said quietly: “I think you will find the world very friendly, if you
wish.” But she shook her head, looking at the roses.

Finally he said good-night and she extended her hand, and he took it
formally.

Then their hands fell away. Tressa turned and went toward her bedroom.
At the door she stopped, turned slowly.

“What shall I do about Yulun?” she asked.

“What is there to do? Yulun is in China.”

“Yes, her body is.”

“Do you mean that the rest of her—whatever it is—could come here?”

“Why, of course.”

“So that Benton could see her?”

“Yes.”

“Could he see her just as she is? Her face and figure—clothes and
everything?”

“Yes.”

“Would she seem real or like a ghost—spirit—whatever you choose to call
such things?”

Tressa smiled. “She’d be exactly as real as you or I, Victor. She’d
seem like anybody else.”

“That’s astonishing,” he muttered. “Could Benton hear her speak?”

“Certainly.”

“Talk to her?”

Tressa laughed: “Of course. If Yulun should _make the effort_ she could
leave her body as easily as she undresses herself. It is no more
difficult to divest one’s self of one’s body than it is to put off one
garment and put on another.... And, somehow, I think Yulun will do it
to-night.”

“Come _here_?”

“It would be like her.” Tressa laughed. “Isn’t it odd that she should
have become so enamoured of Mr. Benton—just seeing him there in the
moonlight that night at Orchid Lodge?”

For a moment the smile curved her lips, then the shadow fell again
across her eyes, veiling them in that strange and lovely way which
Cleves knew so well; and he looked into her impenetrable eyes in
troubled silence.

“Victor,” she said in a low voice, “were you afraid to tell me that
your man had been murdered?”

After a moment: “You always know everything,” he said unsteadily. “When
did you learn it?”

“Just before Mr. Recklow told you.”

“How did you learn it, Tressa?”

“I looked into our apartment.”

“When?”

“While you were telephoning.”

“You mean you looked into our rooms from _here_?”

“Yes, clairvoyantly.”

“What did you see?”

“The Iaglamichi!” she said with a shudder. “Kai! The Toug of Djamouk is
anointed at last!”

“Is that the beast of a Mongol who did this murder?”

“Djamouk and Prince Sanang planned it,” she said, trembling a little.
“But that butchery was Yaddin’s work, I think. Kai! The work of
Yaddined-Din, Tougtchi to Djamouk the Fox!”

They stood confronting each other, the length of the sitting-room
between them. And after the silence had lasted a full minute Cleves
reddened and said: “I am going to sleep on the couch at the foot of
your bed, Tressa.”

His young wife reddened too.

He said: “This affair has thoroughly scared me. I can’t let you sleep
out of my sight.”

“I am quite safe. And you would have an uncomfortable night,” she
murmured.

“Do you mind if I sleep on the couch, Tressa?”

“No.”

“Will you call me when you are ready?”

“Yes.”

She went into her bedroom and closed the door.

When he was ready he slipped a pistol into the pocket of his
dressing-gown, belted it over his pyjamas, and walked into the
sitting-room. His wife called him presently, and he went in. Her
night-lamp was burning and she extended her hand to extinguish it.

“Could you sleep if it burns?” he asked bluntly.

“Yes.”

“Then let it burn. This business has got on my nerves,” he muttered.

They looked at each other in an expressionless way. Both really
understood how useless was this symbol of protection—this man the girl
called husband;—how utterly useless his physical strength, and the
pistol sagging in the pocket of his dressing-gown. Both understood that
the only real protection to be looked for must come from her—from the
gifted and guardian mind of this young girl who lay there looking at
him from the pillows.

“Good-night,” he said, flushing; “I’ll do my best. But only one of
God’s envoys, like you, knows how to do battle with things that come
out of hell.”

After a moment’s silence she said in a colourless voice: “I wish you’d
lie down on the bed.”

“Had you rather I did?”

“Yes.”

So he went slowly to the bed, placed his pistol under the pillow, drew
his dressing-gown around him, and lay down.

After he had lain unstirring for half an hour: “Try to sleep, Tressa,”
he said, without turning his head.

“Can’t you seem to sleep, Victor?” she asked. And he heard her turn her
head.

“No.”

“Shall I help you?”

“Do you mean use hypnosis—the power of suggestion—on me?”

“No. I can help you to sleep very gently. I can make you very
drowsy.... You are drowsy now.... You are very close to the edge of
sleep.... Sleep, dear.... Sleep, easily, naturally, confidently as a
tired boy.... You are sleeping, ... deeply ... sweetly ... my dear ...
my dear, dear husband.”




CHAPTER XI
YULUN THE BELOVED


Cleves opened his eyes. He was lying on his left side. In the pink glow
of the night-lamp he saw his wife in her night-dress, seated sideways
on the farther edge of the bed, talking to a young girl.

The strange girl wore what appeared to be a chamber-robe of frail gold
tissue that clung to her body and glittered as she moved. He had never
before seen such a dress; but he had seen the girl; he recognised her
instantly as the girl he had seen turn to look back at Tressa as she
crossed the phantom bridge over that misty Florida river. And Cleves
comprehended that he was looking at Yulun.

But this charming young thing was no ghost, no astral projection. This
girl was warm, living, breathing flesh. The delicate scent of her
strange garments and of her hair, her very breath, was in the air of
the room. Her half-hushed but laughing voice was deliciously human; her
delicate little hands, caressing Tressa’s, were too eagerly real to
doubt.

Both talked at the same time, their animated voices mingling in the
breathless delight of the reunion. Their exclamations, enchanting
laughter, bubbling chatter, filled his ears. But not one word of what
they were saying to each other could he understand.

Suddenly Tressa looked over her shoulder and met his astonished eyes.

“Tokhta!” she exclaimed. “Yulun! My lord is awake!”

Yulun swung around swiftly on the edge of the bed and looked laughingly
at Cleves. But when her red lips unclosed she spoke to Tressa: and,
“Darling,” she said in English, “I think your dear lord remembers that
he saw me on the Bridge of Dreams. And heard the bells of Yian across
the mist.”

Tressa said, laughing at her husband: “This is Yulun, flame-slender,
very white, loveliest in Yian. On the rose-marble steps of the Yezidee
Temple she flung a stemless rose upon Djamouk’s shroud, where he had
spread it like a patch of snow in the sun.

“And at the Lake of the Ghosts, where there is freedom to love, for
those who desire love, came Yaddin, Tougtchi to Djamouk the Fox, in
search of love—and Yulun, flame-slim, and flower-white.... Tell my dear
lord, Yulun!”

Yulun laughed at Cleves out of her dark eyes that slanted charmingly at
the corners.

“Kai!” she cried softly, clapping her palms. “I took his roses and tore
them with my hands till their petals rained on him and their golden
hearts were a powdery cloud floating across the water.

“I said: ‘Even the damned do not mate with demons, my Tougtchi! So go
to the devil, my Banneret, and may Erlik seize you!’”

Cleves, his ears ringing with the sweet confusion of their girlish
laughter, rose from his pillow, supporting himself on one arm.

“You are Yulun. You are alive and real——” He looked at Tressa: “She is
real, isn’t she?” And, to Yulun: “Where do you come from?”

The girl replied seriously: “I come from Yian.” She turned to Tressa
with a dazzling smile: “Thou knowest, my heart’s gold, how it was I
came. Tell thy dear lord in thine own way, so that it shall be simple
for his understanding.... And now—because my visit is ending—I think
thy dear lord should sleep. Bid him sleep, my heart’s gold!”

At that calm suggestion Cleves sat upright on the bed,—or attempted to.
But sank back gently on his pillow and met there a dark, delicious rush
of drowsiness.

He made an effort—or tried to: the smooth, sweet tide of sleep swept
over him to the eyelids, leaving him still and breathing evenly on his
pillow.

The two girls leaned over and looked down at him.

“Thy dear lord,” murmured Yulun. “Does he love thee, rose-bud of Yian?”

“No,” said Tressa, under her breath.

“Does he know thou art damned, heart of gold?”

“He says no soul is ever really harmed,” whispered Tressa.

“Kai! Has he never heard of the Slayer of Souls?” exclaimed Yulun
incredulously.

“My lord maintains that neither the Assassin of Khorassan nor the
Sheiks-el-Djebel of the Eight Towers, nor their dark prince Erlik, can
have power over God to slay the human soul.”

“Tokhta, Rose of Yian! Our souls were slain there in the Yezidee
temple.”

Tressa looked down at Cleves:

“My dear lord says no,” she said under her breath.

“And—Sanang?”

Tressa paled: “His mind and mine did battle. I tore my heart from his
grasp. I have laid it, bleeding, at my dear lord’s feet. Let God judge
between us, Yulun.”

“There was a day,” whispered Yulun, “when Prince Sanang went to the
Lake of the Ghosts.”

Tressa, very pallid, looked down at her sleeping husband. She said:

“Prince Sanang came to the Lake of the Ghosts. The snow of the
cherry-trees covered the young world.

“The water was clear as sunlight; and the lake was afire with scarlet
carp.... Yulun—beloved—the nightingale sang all night long—all night
long.... Then I saw Sanang shining, all gold, in the moonlight.... May
God remember him in hell!”

“May God remember him.”

“Sanang Noïane. May he be accursed in the Namaz Ga!”

“May he be tormented in Jehaunum!—Sanang, Slayer of Souls.”

Tressa leaned forward on the bed, stretched herself out, and laid her
face gently across her husband’s feet, touching them with her lips.

Then she straightened herself and sat up, supported by one hand, and
looking silently down at the sleeping man.

“No soul shall die,” she said. “Niaz!”

“Is it written?” asked Yulun, surprised.

“My lord has said it.”

“Allahou Ekber,” murmured Yulun; “thy lord is only a man.”

Tressa said: “Neither the Tekbir nor the fatha, nor the warning of
Khidr, nor the Yacaz of the Khagan, nor even the prayers of the Ten
Imaums are of any value to me unless my dear lord confirms the truth of
them with his own lips.”

“And Erlik? Is he nothing, then?”

“Erlik!” repeated Tressa insolently. “Who is Erlik but the servant of
Satan who was stoned?”

Her beautiful, angry lips were suddenly distorted; her blue eyes
blazed. Then she spat, her mouth still tremulous with hatred. She said
in a voice shaking with rage:

“Yulun, beloved! Listen attentively. I have slain two of the Slayers of
the Eight Towers. With God’s help I shall slay them all—all!—Djamouk,
Yaddin, Arrak Sou-Sou—all!—every one!—Tiyang Khan, Togrul,—all shall I
slay, even to the last one among them!”

“_Sanang, also?_”

“I leave him to God. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of
the living God!”

Yulun calmly paraphrased the cant phrase of the Assassins: “For it is
written that we belong to God and we return to Him. Heart of gold, I
shall execute my duty!”

Then Yulun slipped from the edge of the bed to the floor, and stood
there looking oddly at Tressa, her eyes rain-bright as though choking
back tears—or laughter.

“Heart of a rose,” she said in a suppressed voice, “my time is nearly
ended.... So.... I go to the chamber of this strange young man who
holds my soul like a pearl afire between his hands.... I think it it
written that I shall love him.”

Tressa rose also and placed her lips close to Yulun’s ear: “His name,
beloved, is Benton. His room is on this floor. Shall we _make the
effort_ together?”

“Yes,” said Yulun. “Lay your body down upon the bed beside your lord
who sleeps so deeply.... And now stretch out.... And fold both
hands.... And now put off thy body like a silken garment.... So! And
leave it there beside thy lord, asleep.”

They stood together for a moment, shining like dewy shapes of tall
flowers, whispering and laughing together in the soft glow of the night
lamp.

Cleves slept on, unstirring. There was the white and sleeping figure of
his wife lying on the bed beside him.

But Tressa and Yulun were already melting away between the wall and the
confused rosy radiance of the lamp.

Benton, in night attire and chamber-robe belted in, fresh from his bath
and still drying his curly hair on a rough towel, wandered back into
his bedroom.

When his short, bright hair was dry, he lighted a cigarette, took the
automatic from his dresser, examined the clip, and shoved it under his
pillow.

Then he picked up the little leather-bound Testament, seated himself,
and opened it. And read tranquilly while his cigarette burned.

When he was ready he turned out the ceiling light, leaving only the
night lamp lighted. Then he knelt beside his bed,—a custom surviving
the nursery period,—and rested his forehead against his folded hands.

Then, as he prayed, something snapped the thread of prayer as though
somebody had spoken aloud in the still room; and, like one who has been
suddenly interrupted, he opened his eyes and looked around and upward.

The silent shock of her presence passed presently. He got up from his
knees, looking at her all the while.

“You are Yulun,” he said very calmly.

The girl flushed brightly and rested one hand on the foot of the bed.

“Do you remember in the moonlight where you walked along the hedge of
white hibiscus and oleander—that night you said good-bye to Tressa in
the South?”

“Yes.”

“Twice,” she said, laughing, “you stopped to peer at the blossoms in
the moonlight.”

“I thought I saw a face among them.”

“You were not sure whether it was flowers or a girl’s face looking at
you from the blossoming hedge of white hibiscus,” said Yulun.

“I know now,” he said in an odd, still voice, unlike his own.

“Yes, it was I,” she murmured. And of a sudden the girl dropped to her
knees without a sound and laid her head on the velvet carpet at his
feet.

So swiftly, noiselessly was it done that he had not comprehended—had
not moved—when she sat upright, resting on her knees, and grasped the
collar of her tunic with both gemmed hands.

“Have pity on me, lord of my lost soul!” she cried softly.

Benton stooped in a dazed way to lift the girl; but found himself knee
deep in a snowy drift of white hibiscus blossoms—touched nothing but
silken petals—waded in them as he stepped forward. And saw her standing
before him still grasping the collar of her golden tunic.

A great white drift of bloom lay almost waist deep between them; the
fragrance of oleander, too, was heavy in the room.

“There are years of life before the flaming gates of Jehaunum open. And
I am very young,” said Yulun wistfully.

Somebody else laughed in the room. Turning his head, he saw Tressa
standing by the empty fireplace.

“What you see and hear need not disturb you,” she said, looking at
Benton out of brilliant eyes. “There is no god but God; and His prophet
has been called by many names.” And to Yulun: “Have I not told you that
nothing can harm our souls?”

Yulun’s expression altered and she turned to Benton: “Say it to me!”
she pleaded.

As in a dream he heard his own words: “Nothing can ever really harm the
soul.”

Yulun’s hands fell from her tunic collar. Very slowly she lifted her
head, looking at him out of lovely, proud young eyes.

She said, evenly, her still gaze on him: “I am Yulun of the Temple. My
heart is like a blazing pearl which you hold between your hands. May
the four Blessed Companions witness the truth of what I say.”

Then a delicate veil of colour wrapped her white skin from throat to
temple; she looked at Benton with sudden and exquisite distress,
frightened and ashamed at his silence.

In the intense stillness Benton moved toward her. Into his outstretched
hands her two hands fell; but, bending above them, his lips touched
only two white hibiscus flowers that lay fresh and dewy in his palms.

Bewildered, he straightened up; and saw the girl standing by the mantel
beside Tressa, who had caught her by the left hand.

“Tokhta! Look out!” she said distinctly.

Suddenly he saw two men in the room, close to him—their broad faces,
slanting eyes, and sparse beards thrust almost against his shoulder.

“Djamouk! Yaddin-ed-Din!” cried Tressa in a terrible voice. But quick
as a flash Yulun tore a white sheet from the bed, flung it on the
floor, and, whipping a tiny, jewelled knife from her sleeve, threw it
glittering upon the sheet at the feet of the two men.

“One shroud for two souls!” she said breathlessly, “—and a knife like
that to sever them from their bodies!”

The two men sprang backward as the sheet touched their feet, and now
they stood there as though confounded.

“Djamouk, Kahn of the Fifth Tower!” cried Tressa in a clear voice, “you
have put off your body like a threadbare cloak, and your form that
stands there is only your mind! And it is only the evil will of Yaddin
in the shape of his body that confronts us in this room of a man you
have doomed!”

Yulun, intent as a young leopardess on her prey, moved soundlessly
toward Yaddin.

“Tougtchi!” she said coldly, “you did murder this day, my Banneret, and
the Toug of Djamouk has been greased. Now look out for yourself!”

“Don’t stir!” came Tressa’s warning voice, as Benton snatched his
pistol from the pillow. “Don’t fire! Those men have no real substance!
For God’s sake don’t fire! I tell you they have no bodies!”

Suddenly something—some force—flung Benton on the bed. The two men did
not seem to touch him at all, but he lay there struggling, crushed,
held by something that was strangling him.

Through his swimming eyes he saw Yaddin trying to drive a long nail
into his skull with a hammer,—felt the piercing agony of the first
crashing blow,—struggled upright, drenched in blood, his ears ringing
with the screaming of Yaddin.

Then, there in the little rococo bedroom of the Ritz-Carlton, began a
strange and horrible struggle—the more dreadful because the struggle
was not physical and the combatants never touched each other—scarcely
moved at all.

Yaddin, still screaming, confronted Yulun. The girl’s eyes were ablaze,
her lips parted with the violence of her breathing. And Yaddin writhed
and screamed under the terrible concentration of her gaze, his inferior
but ferocious mind locked with her mind in deadly battle.

The girl said slowly, showing a glimmer of white teeth: “Your will to
do evil to my young lord is breaking, Yaddin-ed-Din.... I am breaking
it. The nail and hammer were but symbols. It was your brain that
brooded murder—that willed he should die as though shattered by
lightning when that blood-vessel burst in his brain!”

“Sorceress!” shrieked Yaddin, “what are you doing to my heart, where my
body lies asleep in a berth on the Montreal Express!”

“Your heart is weak, Yaddin. Soon the valves shall fail. A negro porter
shall discover you dead in your berth, my Banneret!”

The man’s swarthy face became livid with the terrific mental battle.

“Let me go back to my body!” he panted. “What are you doing to me that
I can not go back? I will go back! I wish it!—I——”

“Let us go back and rejoin our bodies!” cried Djamouk in an agonised
voice. “There are teeth in my throat, deep in my throat, biting and
tearing out the cords.”

“Cancer,” said Tressa calmly. “Your body shall die of it while your
soul stumbles on through darkness.”

“My Tougtchi!” shouted Djamouk, “I hear my soul bidding my body
farewell! I must go before my mind expires in the terrible gaze of this
young sorceress!”

He turned, drifted like something misty to the solid wall.

“My soul be ransom for yours!” cried Yulun to Tressa. “Bar that man’s
path to life!”

Tressa flung out her right hand and, with her forefinger, drew a
barrier through space, bar above bar.

And Benton, half swooning on his bed, saw a cage of terrible and living
light penning in Djamouk, who beat upon the incandescent bars and
grasped them and clawed his way about, squealing like a tortured rat in
a red-hot cage.

Through the deafening tumult Yulun’s voice cut like a sword:

“Their bodies are dying, Heart of a Rose!... Listen! I hear their souls
bidding their minds farewell!”

And, after a dreadful silence: “The train speeding north carries two
dead men! God is God. Niaz!”

The bars of living fire faded. Two cinder-like and shapeless shadows
floated and eddied like whitened ashes stirred by a wind on the hearth;
then drifted through the lamp-light, fading, dissolving, lost gradually
in thin air.

Tressa, leaning back against the mantel, covered her face with both
hands.

Yulun crept to the bed where Benton lay, breathing evenly in deepest
sleep.

With the sheer sleeve of her tunic she wiped the blood from his face.
And, at her touch, the wound in the temple closed and the short, bright
hair dried and curled over a forehead as clean and fresh as a boy’s.

Then Yulun laid her lips against his, rested so a moment.

“Seek me, dear lord,” she whispered. “Or send me a sign and I shall
come.”

And, after a pause, she said, her lips scarcely stirring: “Love me. My
heart is a flaming pearl burning between your hands.”

Then she lifted her head.

But Tressa had rejoined her body, where it lay asleep beside her deeply
sleeping husband.

So Yulun stood a moment, her eyes remote. Then, after a while, the
little rococo bedroom in the Ritz-Carlton was empty save for a young
man asleep on the bed, holding in his clenched hand a white hibiscus
blossom.




CHAPTER XII
HIS EXCELLENCY


His Excellency President Tintinto, Chief Executive of one of the newer
and cruder republics, visiting New York incognito with his Secretaries
of War and of the Navy, had sent for John Recklow. And now the
reception was in full operation.

Recklow was explaining. “In the beginning,” he said, “the Bolsheviks’
aim was to destroy everything and everybody except themselves, and then
to reorganise for their own benefit what was left of a wrecked world.
That was their programme——”

“Quite a programme,” interrupted the Secretary of War, with something
that almost resembled a giggle. But his prominent eyes continued to
stare at Recklow untouched by the mirth which stretched his large,
silly mouth.

The face of the Secretary of the Navy resembled the countenance of a
benevolent manatee. The visage of the President was a study in tinted
chalks.

Recklow said: “To combat that sort of Bolshevism was a business that we
of the United States Secret Service understood—or supposed we
understood.

“Then, suddenly, out of unknown Mongolia and into the civilised world
stepped eight men.”

“Yezidees,” said the President mechanically. “Your Government has sent
me a very full report.”

“Yezidees of the Sect of the Assassins,” continued Recklow; “—the most
ancient sect in the world surviving from ancient times—the Sorcerers of
Asia. And, as it was in ancient times, so it is now: the Yezidees are
devil worshipers; their god is Satan; _his_ prophet is Erlik, Prince of
Darkness; _his_ regent on earth is the old man of Mount Alamout; and to
this ancient and sinister title a Yezidee sorcerer called Prince
Sanang, or Sanang Noïane, has succeeded.

“His murderous deputies were the Eight Khans of the Eight Towers. Four
of these assassins are dead—Gutchlug, Yarghouz, Djamouk the Fox, and
Yaddin-ed-Din. One is in prison charged with murder,—Albert Feke.

“Four of the sorcerers remain alive: Tiyang Khan, Togrul, Arrak,
Sou-Sou, called The Squirrel, and the Old Man of the Mountain himself,
Saï-Sanang, Prince of the Yezidees.”

Recklow paused; the pop-eyes of the War Secretary were upon him; the
benevolent manatee gazed mildly at him; the countenance of the
President seemed more like a Rocky Mountain goat than ever—chiselled
out of a block of tinted chalk.

Recklow said: “To the menace of Bolshevism, which endangers this
Republic and yours, has been added a more terrible threat—the threat of
powerful and evil minds made formidable by psychic knowledge.

“For these Yezidee Sorcerers are determined to conquer, seize, and
subdue the minds of mankind. They are here for that frightful purpose.
Powerfully, terrifically equipped to surprise and capture the unarmed
minds of our people, enslave their very thoughts and use them to their
own purposes, these Sorcerers of the Yezidees assumed control of the
Bolsheviki, who were merely envious and ferocious bandits, but whose
crippled minds are now utterly enslaved by these Assassins from Asia.

“And this is what the United States Secret Service has to combat. And
its weapons are not warrants, not pistols. For in this awful battle
between decency and evil, it is mind against mind in an occult death
grapple. And our only weapon against these minds made powerful by
psychic knowledge and made terrible by an esoteric ability akin to what
is called black magic,—our only weapon is the mind of a young girl.”

“I understand,” said the President, “that she became an adept in occult
practices while imprisoned in the Yezidee Temple of Erlik at Yian.”

Recklow looked into the President’s face, which had grown very pale.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “God alone knows what this child learned in the
Yezidee Temple. All I know is that with this knowledge she has met the
Yezidees in a battle of minds, has halted them, confounded them, fought
them with their own occult knowledge, and has slain four of them.”

The intense silence was broken by the frivolous titter of the Secretary
of War:

“Of course I don’t believe any of this supernatural stuff,” he said
with the split grin which did not modify his protruding stare. “This
girl is merely a clever detective, that is the gist of the matter. And
I don’t believe anything else.”

“Perhaps, sir, you will believe this, then,” said John Recklow quietly.
“I cut it from the _Times_ this morning.” And he handed the clipping to
the Secretary of War.

NEW PLOT IN EAST

Moslem and Hindu Conspirators
Have Formed Secret
Organisation

Have World Revolution in View

Think to Rouse Asia, America, and Africa
to Outbreaks by Their
Propaganda.




Copyright, 1919, by _The New York Times_ Company.
Special Cable to _The New York Times_.

July 1.—A significant event has recently taken place. Under the name of
the Oriental League has recently been established a central
organisation uniting all the various secret societies of Moslem and
Hindu nationalists. The aim of the new association is to prepare for
joint revolutionary action in Asia, America, and Africa.

The effects of this vast conspiracy may already be traced in recent
events in Egypt, India, and Afghanistan. For the first time, through
the creation of this league, the racial and religious differences which
have divided Eastern conspirators have been overcome. The Ottoman
League, founded by Mahmud Muktar Pasha, Munir Pasha, and Ahmed Rechid
Bey, has adhered to the new organisation. So have the extreme Egyptian
nationalists and the Hindu revolutionary group, “Pro India,” emissaries
of which were recently sentenced for bringing bombs into Switzerland
during the war at the instigation of the German General Staff.

At a “Constituent Assembly” of the league, which took place in Yian,
there were present, besides Young Turks, Egyptians and Hindus,
delegates representing Persia, Afghanistan, Algeria, Morocco, and
Mongolia.

The league is of Mongolian origin. Its leading spirit is a certain
Prince Sanang, of whom little is known.

Associated with this mischievous and rather mysterious Mongolian
personage are three better known criminals, now fugitives from
justice—Talaat, Enver, and Djemal. It is to Enver Pasha’s talent for
intrigue that the union between Moslems and Hindus, the most striking
and dangerous feature of the movement, is chiefly due.

Considerable funds are at the disposal of the league. These are partly
supplied from Germany. Besides enjoying the support of the Germans, the
league is also in close touch with Lenine, who very soon after his
advent to power organised an Oriental Department in Moscow.

The alliance between the league and the Russian Bolsheviki was brought
about by the notorious German Socialist agent, “Parvus,” who is now in
Switzerland. Many weeks ago he conferred with the Soviet rulers in
Moscow, whence he went to Afghanistan, hoping to reorganise the new
Amir’s army and establish lines of communication for propaganda in
India.

Evidence exists that the recent insurrection in Egypt, the sudden
attack of the Afghans, and the rising in India, remarkable for
co-operation between Moslems and Hindus, were connected with the
activities of the league.

The Secretary looked up after he finished the reading.

“I don’t see anything about Black Magic in this?” he remarked
flippantly.

Recklow’s features became very grave.

“I think,” he said, “that everybody—myself included—and, with all
respect, even yourself, sir,—and your honourable colleague,—and perhaps
even his Excellency your President,—should be on perpetual guard over
their minds, and the thoughts that range there, lest, surreptitiously,
stealthily, some taint of Yezidee infection lodge there and take
root—and spread—perhaps—throughout your new Republic.”

The Secretary of War grinned. “They say I’m something of a socialist
already,” he chuckled. “Do you think your magic Yezidees are
responsible?”

The President, troubled and pallid, gazed steadily at Recklow.

“Mine is a single-track mind,” he remarked as though to himself.

Recklow said nothing. It is one kind of mind, after all. However,
single-track roads are now obsolete.

“A single-track mind,” repeated the President. “And—I should not like
anything to happen to the switch. It would mean ditching—or a rusty
siding at best.... Please do all that is possible to get those four
Yezidees, Mr. Recklow.”

Recklow said calmly: “Our only hope is in this young girl, Tressa
Norne, who is now Mrs. Cleves.”

“My conscience!” piped the Secretary of the Navy. “What would happen to
us if these Yezidees should murder her?”

“God knows,” replied John Recklow, unsmiling.

“Why not put her aboard our new dreadnought?” suggested the Secretary,
“and keep her cruising until you United States Secret Service fellows
get the rest of these infernal Yezidees and clap ’em into jail?”

“We can do nothing without her,” said Recklow sombrely.

There was a painful silence. The President joined his finger tips and
stared palely into space.

“May I not say,” he suggested, “that I think it a vital necessity that
these Yezidees be caught and destroyed before they do any damage to the
minds of myself and my cabinet?”

“God grant it, sir,” said Recklow grimly.

“Mine,” murmured the President, “is a single-track mind. I should be
very much annoyed if anybody tampered with the rails—very much annoyed
indeed, Mr. Recklow.”

“They mustn’t murder that girl,” said the Secretary of the Navy. “Do
you need any Marines, Mr. Recklow? Why not ask your Government for a
few?”

Recklow rose: “Mr. President,” he said, “I shall not deny that my
Government is very deeply disturbed by this situation. In the
beginning, these eight Assassins, and Sanang, came here for the purpose
of attacking, overpowering, and enslaving the minds of the people of
the United States and of the South American Republics.

“But now, after four of their infamous colleagues have been destroyed,
the ferocious survivors, thoroughly alarmed, have turned their every
energy toward accomplishing the death of Mrs. Cleves! Why, sir,
scarcely a day passes but that some attempt upon her life is made by
these Yezidees.

“Scarcely a day passes that this young girl is not suddenly summoned to
defend her mind as well as her body against the occult attacks of these
Mongol Sorcerers. Yes, sir, Sorcerers!” repeated Recklow, his calm
voice deep with controlled passion, “—whatever your honourable
Secretary of War may think about it!”

His cold, grey eyes measured the President as he stood there.

“Mr. President, I am at my wits’ end to protect her from assassination!
Her husband is always with her—Victor Cleves, sir, of our Secret
Service. But wherever he takes her these devils follow and send their
emissaries to watch her, to follow, to attempt her mental destruction
or her physical death.

“There is no end to their stealthy cunning, to their devilish devices,
to their hellish ingenuity!

“And all we can do is to guard her person from the approach of
strangers, and stand ready, physically, to aid her.

“She is our only barrier—_your_ only defence—between civilisation and
horrors worse than Bolshevism.

“I believe, Mr. President, that civilisation in North and South
America—in your own Republic as well as in ours—depends, literally,
upon the safety of Tressa Cleves. For, if the Yezidees kill her, then I
do not see what is to save civilisation from utter disintegration and
total destruction.”

There was a silence. Recklow was not certain that the President had
been listening.

His Excellency sat with finger tips joined, gazing pallidly into space;
and Recklow heard him murmuring under his breath and all to himself, as
though to fix the deathless thought forever in his brain:

“May I not say that mine is a single-track mind? May I not say it? May
I not,—may I not,—not, not, not——”




CHAPTER XIII
SA-N’SA


June sunshine poured through the window of his bedroom in the Ritz; and
Cleves had just finished dressing when he heard his wife’s voice in the
adjoining sitting-room.

He had not supposed that Tressa was awake. He hastened to tie his tie
and pull on a smoking jacket, listening all the while to his wife’s
modulated but gay young voice.

Then he opened the sitting-room door and went in. And found his wife
entirely alone.

She looked up at him, her lips still parted as though checked in what
she had been saying, the smile still visible in her blue eyes.

“Who on earth are you talking to?” he asked, his bewildered glance
sweeping the sunny room again.

She did not reply; her smile faded as a spot of sunlight wanes, veiled
by a cloud—yet a glimmer of it remained in her gaze as he came over to
her.

“I thought they’d brought our breakfast,” he said, “—hearing your
voice.... Did you sleep well?”

“Yes, Victor.”

He seated himself, and his perplexed scrutiny included her frail
morning robe of China silk, her lovely bare arms, and her splendid hair
twisted up and pegged down with a jade dagger. Around her bare throat
and shoulders, too, was a magnificent necklace of imperial jade which
he had never before seen; and on one slim, white finger a superb jade
ring.

“By Jove!” he said, “you’re very exotic this morning, Tressa. I never
before saw that negligee effect.”

The girl laughed, glanced at her ring, lifted a frail silken fold and
examined the amazing embroidery.

“I wore it at the Lake of the Ghosts,” she said.

The name of that place always chilled him. He had begun to hate it,
perhaps because of all that he did not know about it—about his wife’s
strange girlhood—about Yian and the devil’s Temple there—and about
Sanang.

He said coldly but politely that the robe was unusual and the jade very
wonderful.

The alteration in his voice and expression did not escape her. It meant
merely masculine jealousy, but Tressa never dreamed he cared in that
way.

Breakfast was brought, served; and presently these two young people
were busy with their melons, coffee, and toast in the sunny room high
above the softened racket of traffic echoing through avenue and street
below.

“Recklow telephoned me this morning,” he remarked.

She looked up, her face serious.

“Recklow says that Yezidee mischief is taking visible shape. The
Socialist Party is going to be split into bits and a new party,
impudently and publicly announcing itself as the Communist Party of
America, is being organised. Did you ever hear of anything as
shameless—as outrageous—in this Republic?”

She said very quietly: “Sanang has taken prisoner the minds of these
wretched people. He and his remaining Yezidees are giving battle to the
unarmed minds of our American people.”

“Gutchlug is dead,” said Cleves, “—and Yarghouz and Djamouk, and
Yaddin.”

“But Tiyang Khan is alive, and Togrul, and that cunning demon Arrak
Sou-Sou, called The Squirrel,” she said. She bent her head, considering
the jade ring on her finger. “—And Prince Sanang,” she added in a low
voice.

“Why didn’t you let me shoot him when I had the chance?” said Cleves
harshly.

So abrupt was his question, so rough his sudden manner, that the girl
looked up in dismayed surprise. Then a deep colour stained her face.

“Once,” she said, “Prince Sanang held my heart prisoner—as Erlik held
my soul.... I told you that.”

“Is that the reason you gave the fellow a chance?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.... And possibly you gave Sanang a chance because he still holds
your—affections!”

She said, crimson with the pain of the accusation: “I tore my heart out
of his keeping.... I told you that.... And, believing—trying to believe
what you say to me, I have tried to tear my soul out of the claws of
Erlik.... Why are you angry?”

“I don’t know.... I’m not angry.... The whole horrible situation is
breaking my nerve, I guess.... With whom were you talking before I came
in?”

After a silence the girl’s smile glimmered.

“I’m afraid you won’t like it if I tell you.”

“Why not?”

“You—such things perplex and worry you.... I am afraid you won’t like
me any the better if I tell you who it was I had been talking with.”

His intent gaze never left her. “I want you to tell me,” he repeated.

“I—I was talking with Sa-n’sa,” she faltered.

“With whom?”

“With Sa-n’sa.... We called her Sansa.”

“Who the dickens is Sansa?”

“We were three comrades at the Temple,” she said timidly, “—Yulun,
Sansa, and myself. We loved each other. We always went to the Lake of
the Ghosts together—for protection——”

“Go on!”

“Sansa was a girl of the Aroulads, born at Buldak—as was Temujin. The
night she was born three moon-rainbows made circles around her Yaïlak.
The Baroulass horsemen saw this and prayed loudly in their saddles.
Then they galloped to Yian and came crawling on their bellies to Sanang
Noïane with the news of the miracle. And Sanang came with a thousand
riders in leather armour. And, ‘What is this child’s name?’ he shouted,
riding into the Yaïlak with his black banners flapping around him like
devil’s wings.

“A poor Manggoud came out of the tent of skins, carrying the new born
infant, and touched his head to Sanang’s stirrup. ‘This babe is called
Tchagane,’ he said, trembling all over. ‘No!’ cries Sanang, ‘she is
called Sansa. Give her to me and may Erlik seize you!’

“And he took the baby on his saddle in front of him and struck his
spurs deep; and so came Sansa to Yian under a roaring rustle of black
silk banners.... It is so written in the Book of Iron.... Allahou
Ekber.”


Cleves had leaned his elbow on the table, his forehead rested in his
palm.

Perhaps he was striving in a bewildered way to reconcile such occult
and amazing things with the year 1920—with the commonplace and noisy
city of New York—with this pretty, modern, sunlit sitting-room in the
Ritz-Carlton on Madison Avenue—with this girl in her morning negligee
opposite, her coffee and melon fragrant at her elbow, her wonderful
blue eyes resting on him.

“Sansa,” he repeated slowly, as though striving to grasp even a single
word from the confusion of names and phrases that were sounding still
in his ears like the vibration of distant and unfamiliar seas.

“Is this the girl you were talking with just now? In—in _this_ room?”
he added, striving to understand.

“Yes.”

“She wasn’t here, of course.”

“Her body was not.”

“Oh!”

Tressa said in her sweet, humorous way: “You must try to accustom
yourself to such things, Victor. You know that Yulun talks to me.... I
wanted to talk to Sansa. The longing awakened me. So—_I made the
effort_.”

“And she came—I mean the part of her which is not her body.”

“Yes, she came. We talked very happily while I was bathing and
dressing. Then we came in here. She is such a darling!”

“Where is she?”

“In Yian, feeding her silk-worms and making a garden. You see, Sansa is
quite wealthy now, because when the Japanese came she filled a bullock
cart with great lumps of spongy gold from the Temple and filled another
cart with Yu-stone, and took the Hezar of Baroulass horsemen on guard
at the Lake of the Ghosts. And with this Keutch, riding a Soubz horse,
and dressed like an Urieng lancer, my pretty little comrade Tchagane,
who is called Sansa, marched north preceded by two kettle-drums and a
toug with two tails——”

Tressa’s clear laughter checked her; she clapped her hands, breathless
with mirth at the picture she evoked.

“Kai!” she laughed; “what adorable impudence has Sansa! Neither
Tchortcha nor Khiounnou dared ask her who were her seven ancestors! No!
And when her caravan came to the lovely Yliang river, my darling Sansa
rode out and grasped the lance from her Tougtchi and drove the point
deep into the fertile soil, crying in a clear voice: ‘A place for
Tchagane and her people! Make room for the toug!’

“Then her Manggoud, who carried the spare steel tip for her lance, got
out of his saddle and, gathering a handful of mulberry leaves, rubbed
the shaft of the lance till it was all pale green.

“‘Toug iaglachakho!’ cries my adorable Sansa! ‘Build me here my
Urdu![2]—my Mocalla![3] And upon it pitch my tent of skins!”

Again Tressa’s laughter checked her, and she strove to control it with
the jade ring pressed to her lips.

“Oh, Victor,” she added in a stifled voice, looking at him out of eyes
full of mischief, “you don’t realise how funny it was—Sansa and her
toug and her Urdu—Oh, Allah!—the bones of Tchinguiz must have rattled
in his tomb!”

Her infectious laughter evoked a responsive but perplexed smile from
Cleves; but it was the smile of a bewildered man who has comprehended
very little of an involved jest; and he looked around at the modern
room as though to find his bearings.

Suddenly Tressa leaned forward swiftly and laid one hand on his.

“You don’t think all this is very funny. You don’t like it,” she said
in soft concern.

“It isn’t that, Tressa. But this is New York City in the year 1920. And
I can’t—I absolutely can not get into touch—hook up, mentally, with
such things—with the unreal Oriental life that is so familiar to you.”

She nodded sympathetically: “I know. You feel like a Mergued Pagan from
Lake Baïkal when all the lamps are lighted in the Mosque;—like a camel
driver with his jade and gold when he enters Yarkand at sunrise.”

“Probably I feel like that,” said Cleves, laughing outright. “I take
your word, dear, anyway.”

But he took more; he picked up her soft hand where it still rested on
his, pressed it, and instantly reddened because he had done it. And
Tressa’s bright flush responded so quickly that neither of them
understood, and both misunderstood.

The girl rose with heightened colour, not knowing why she stood up or
what she meant to do. And Cleves, misinterpreting her emotion as a
silent rebuke to the invasion of that convention tacitly accepted
between them, stood up, too, and began to speak carelessly of
commonplace things.

She made the effort to reply, scarcely knowing what she was saying, so
violently had his caress disturbed her heart,—and she was still
speaking when their telephone rang.

Cleves went; listened, then, still listening, summoned Tressa to his
side with a gesture.

“It’s Selden,” he said in a low voice. “He says he has the Yezidee
Arrak Sou-Sou under observation, and that he needs you desperately.
Will you help us?”

“I’ll go, of course,” she replied, turning quite pale.

Cleves nodded, still listening. After a while: “All right. We’ll be
there. Good-bye,” he said sharply; and hung up.

Then he turned and looked at his wife.

“I wish to God,” he muttered, “that this business were ended. I—I can’t
bear to have you go.”

“I am not afraid.... Where is it?”

“I never heard of the place before. We’re to meet Selden at ‘Fool’s
Acre.’”

“Where is it, Victor?”

“I don’t know. Selden says there are no roads,—not even a spotted
trail. It’s a wilderness left practically blank by the Geological
Survey. Only the contours are marked, and Selden tells me that the
altitudes are erroneous and the unnamed lakes and water courses are all
wrong. He says it is his absolute conviction that the Geological Survey
never penetrated this wilderness at all, but merely skirted it and
guessed at what lay inside, because the map he has from Washington is
utterly misleading, and the entire region is left blank except for a
few vague blue lines and spots indicating water, and a few heights
marked ‘1800.’”

He turned and began to pace the sitting-room, frowning, perplexed,
undecided.

“Selden tells me,” he said, “that the Yezidee, Arrak Sou-Sou, is in
there and very busy doing something or other. He says that he can do
nothing without you, and will explain why when we meet him.”

“Yes, Victor.”

Cleves turned on his heel and came over to where his wife stood beside
the sunny window.

“I hate to ask you to go. I know that was the understanding. But this
incessant danger—your constant peril——”

“That does not count when I think of my country’s peril,” she said in a
quiet voice. “When are we to start? And what shall I pack in my trunk?”

“Dear child,” he said with a brusque laugh, “it’s a wilderness and we
carry what we need on our backs. Selden meets us at a place called
Glenwild, on the edge of this wilderness, and we follow him in on our
two legs.”

He glanced across at the mantel clock.

“If you’ll dress,” he said nervously, “we’ll go to some shop that
outfits sportsmen for the North. Because, if we can, we ought to leave
on the one o’clock train.”

She smiled; came up to him. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “Because
I also am nervous and tired; and I mean to make an end of every Yezidee
remaining in America.”

“Sanang, too?”

They both flushed deeply.

She said in a steady voice: “Between God and Erlik there is a black
gulf where a million million stars hang, lighting a million million
other worlds.

“Prince Sanang’s star glimmers there. It is a sun, called Yramid. And
it lights the planet, Yu-tsung. Let him reign there between God and
Erlik.”

“You will slay this man?”

“God forbid!” she said, shuddering. “But I shall send him to his own
star. Let my soul be ransom for his! And may Allah judge between
us—between this man and me.”

Then, in the still, sunny room, the girl turned to face the East. And
her husband saw her lips move as though speaking, but heard no sound.


“What on earth are you saying there, all to yourself?” he demanded at
last.

She turned her head and looked at him across her left shoulder.

“I asked Sansa to help me.... And she says she will.”

Cleves nodded in a dazed way. Then he opened a window and leaned there
in the sunshine, looking down into Madison Avenue. And the roar of
traffic seemed to soothe his nerves.

But “Good heavens!” he thought; “do such things really go on in New
York in 1920! Is the entire world becoming a little crazy? Am I really
in my right mind when I believe that the girl I married is talking,
without wireless, to another girl in China!”

He leaned there heavily, gazing down into the street with sombre eyes.

“What a ghastly thing these Yezidees are trying to do to the
world—these Assassins of men’s minds’!” he thought, turning away toward
the door of his bedroom.

As he crossed the threshold he stumbled, and looking down saw that he
had tripped over a white sheet lying there. For a moment he thought it
was a sheet from his own bed, and he started to pick it up. Then he saw
the naked blade of a knife at his feet.

With an uncontrollable shudder he stepped out of the shroud and stood
staring at the knife as though it were a snake. It had a curved blade
and a bone hilt coarsely inlaid with Arabic characters in brass.

The shroud was a threadbare affair—perhaps a bed-sheet from some cheap
lodging house. But its significance was so repulsive that he hesitated
to touch it.

However, he was ashamed to have it discovered in his room. He picked up
the brutal-looking knife and kicked the shroud out into the corridor,
where they could guess if they liked how such a rag got into the
Ritz-Carlton.

Then he searched his bedroom, and, of course, discovered nobody hiding.
But chills crawled on his spine while he was about it, and he shivered
still as he stood in the centre of the room examining the knife and
testing edge and point.

Then, close to his ear, a low voice whispered: “Be careful, my lord;
the Yezidee knife is poisoned. But it is written that a poisoned heart
is more dangerous still.”

He had turned like a flash; and he saw, between him and the
sitting-room door, a very young girl with slightly slanting eyes, and
rose and ivory features as perfect as though moulded out of tinted
bisque.

She wore a loose blue linen robe, belted in, short at the elbows and
skirt, showing two creamy-skinned arms and two bare feet in straw
sandals. In one hand she had a spray of purple mulberries, and she
looked coolly at Cleves and ate a berry or two.

“Give me the knife,” she said calmly.

He handed it to her; she wiped it with a mulberry leaf and slipped it
through her girdle.

“I am Sansa,” she said with a friendly glance at him, busy with her
fruit.

Cleves strove to speak naturally, but his voice trembled.

“Is it you—I mean your real self—your own body?”

“It’s my real self. Yes. But my body is asleep in my mulberry grove.”

“In—in China?”

“Yes,” she said calmly, detaching another mulberry and eating it. A few
fresh leaves fell on the centre table.

Sansa chose another berry. “You know,” she said, “that I came to Tressa
this morning,—to my little Heart of Fire I came when she called me. And
I was quite sleepy, too. But I heard her, though there was a night wind
in the mulberry trees, and the river made a silvery roaring noise in
the dark.... And now I must go. But I shall come again very soon.”

She smiled shyly and held out her lovely little hand, “—As Tressa tells
me is your custom in America,” she said, “I offer you a good-bye.”

He took her hand and found it a warm, smooth thing of life and pulse.

“Why,” he stammered in his astonishment, “you _are_ real! You are not a
ghost!”

“Yes, I am real,” she answered, surprised, “but I’m not in my body,—if
you mean that.” Then she laughed and withdrew her hand, and, going,
made him a friendly gesture.

“Cherish, my lord, my darling Heart of Fire. Serpents twist and twine.
So do rose vines. May their petals make your path of velvet and sweet
scented. May everything that is round be a pomegranate for you two to
share; may everything that sways be lilies bordering a path wide enough
for two. In the name of the Most Merciful God, may the only cry you
hear be the first sweet wail of your first-born. And when the tenth
shall be born, may you and Heart of Fire bewail your fate because both
of you desire more children!”

She was laughing when she disappeared. Cleves thought she was still
there, so radiant the sunshine, so sweet the scent in the room.

But the golden shadow by the door was empty of her. If she had slipped
through the doorway he had not noticed her departure. Yet she was no
longer there. And, when he understood, he turned back into the empty
room, quivering all over. Suddenly a terrible need of Tressa assailed
him—an imperative necessity to speak to her—hear her voice.

“Tressa!” he called, and rested his hand on the centre table, feeling
weak and shaken to the knees. Then he looked down and saw the mulberry
leaves lying scattered there, tender and green and still dewy with the
dew of China.

“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.

“Keep flashing the ground,” he said harshly. “I don’t want you to step
into some hell-hole. I’m sorry I brought you, anyway.”

“But I had to come,” she said in a low voice.

Like the two men, she wore a grey flannel shirt, knickers, and spiral
puttees.

They, however, carried rifles as well as packs; and the girl’s pack was
lighter.

They had halted by a swift, icy rivulet to eat, without building a
fire. After that they crossed the Ireland Vlaie and the main creek,
where remains of a shanty stood on the bluff above the right bank—the
last sign of man.

Beyond lay the uncharted land, skimped and shirked entirely in certain
regions by map-makers;—an unknown wilderness on the edges of which
Selden had often camped when deer shooting.

It was along this edge he was leading them, now, to a lean-to which he
had erected, and from which he had travelled in to Glenwild to use the
superintendent’s telephone to New York.

There seemed to be no animal life stirring in this forest; their
torches illuminated no fiery orbs of dazed wild things surprised at
gaze in the wilderness; no leaping furry form crossed their
flashlights’ fan-shaped radiance.

There were no nocturnal birds to be seen or heard, either: no bittern
squawked from hidden sloughs; no herons howled; not an owl-note, not a
whispering cry of a whippoorwill, not the sudden uncanny twitter of
those little birds that become abruptly vocal after dark, interrupted
the dense stillness of the forest.

And it was not until his electric torch glimmered repeatedly upon
reaches of dusk-hidden bog that Cleves understood how Selden took his
bearings—for the night was thick and there were no stars.

“Yes,” said Selden tersely, “I’m trying to skirt the bog until I shine
a peeled stick.”


An hour later the peeled alder-stem glittered in the beam of the
torches. In ten minutes something white caught the electric rays.

It was Selden’s spare undershirt drying on a bush behind the lean-to.

“Can we have a fire?” asked Cleves, relieving his wife of her pack and
striding into the open-faced camp.

“Yes, I’ll fix it,” replied Selden. “Are you all right, Mrs. Cleves?”

Tressa said: “Delightfully tired, thank you.” And smiled faintly at her
husband as he let go his own pack, knelt, and spread a blanket for his
wife.

He remained there, kneeling, as she seated herself.

“Are you quite fit?” he asked bluntly. Yet, through his brusqueness her
ear caught a vague undertone of something else—anxiety perhaps—perhaps
tenderness. And her heart stirred deliciously in her breast.

He inflated a pillow for her; the firelight glimmered, brightened,
spread glowing across her feet. She lay back with a slight sigh,
relaxed.

Then, suddenly, the thrill of her husband’s touch flooded her face with
colour; but she lay motionless, one arm flung across her eyes, while he
unrolled her puttees and unlaced her muddy shoes.

A heavenly warmth from the fire dried her stockinged feet. Later, on
the edge of sleep, she opened her eyes and found herself propped
upright on her husband’s shoulder.

Drowsily, obediently she swallowed spoonfuls of the hot broth which he
administered.

“Are you really quite comfortable, dear?” he whispered.

“Wonderfully.... And so very happy.... Thank you—dear.”

She lay back, suffering him to bathe her face and hands with warm
water.

When the fire was only a heap of dying coals, she turned over on her
right side and extended her hand a little way into the darkness.
Searching, half asleep, she touched her husband, and her hand relaxed
in his nervous clasp. And she fell into the most perfect sleep which
she had known in years.


She dreamed that somebody whispered to her, “Darling, darling, wake up.
It is morning, beloved.”

Suddenly she opened her eyes; and saw her husband set a tray, freshly
plaited out of Indian willow, beside her blanket.

“Here’s your breakfast, pretty lady,” he said, smilingly. “And over
there is an exceedingly frigid pool of water. You’re to have the camp
to yourself for the next hour or two.”

“You dear fellow,” she murmured, still confused by sleep, and reached
out to touch his hand. He caught hers and kissed it, back and palm, and
got up hastily as though scared.

“Selden and I will stand sentry,” he muttered. “There is no hurry, you
know.”

She heard him and his comrade walking away over dried leaves; their
steps receded; a dry stick cracked distantly; then silence stealthily
invaded the place like a cautious living thing, creeping unseen through
the golden twilight of the woods.

Seated in her blanket, she drank the coffee; ate a little; then lay
down again in the early sun, feeling the warmth of the heap of
whitening coals at her feet, also.

For an hour she dozed awake, drowsily opening her eyes now and then to
look across the glade at the pool over which a single dragon-fly
glittered on guard.

Finally she rose resolutely, grasped a bit of soap, and went down to
the edge of the pool.


Tressa was in flannel shirt and knickers when her husband and Selden
hailed the camp and presently appeared walking slowly toward the dead
fire.

Their grave faces checked her smile of greeting; her husband came up
and laid one hand on her arm, looking at her out of thoughtful,
preoccupied eyes.

“What is the Tchordagh?” he said in a low voice.

The girl’s quiet face went white.

“The—the Tchordagh!” she stammered.

“Yes, dear. What is it?”

“I don’t—don’t know where you heard that term,” she whispered. “The
Tchordagh is the—the power of Erlik. It is a term.... In it is
comprehended all the evil, all the cunning, all the perverted spiritual
intelligence of Evil,—its sinister might,—its menace. It is an
Alouäd-Yezidee term, and it is written in brass in Eighur characters on
the Eight Towers, and on the Rampart of Gog and Magog;—nowhere else in
the world!”

“It is written on a pine tree a few paces from this camp,” said Cleves
absently.

Selden said: “It has not been there more than an hour or two, Mrs.
Cleves. A square of bark was cut out and on the white surface of the
wood this word is written in English.”

“Can you tell us what it signifies?” asked Cleves, quietly.

Tressa’s studied effort at self-control was apparent to both men.

She said: “When that word is written, then it is a death struggle
between all the powers of Darkness and those who have read the written
letters of that word.... For it is written in The Iron Book that no one
but the Assassin of Khorassan—excepting the Eight Sheiks—shall read
that written word and live to boast of having read it.”

“Let us sit here and talk it over,” said Selden soberly.

And when Tressa was seated on a fallen log, and Cleves settled down
cross-legged at her feet, Selden spoke again, very soberly:

“On the edges of these woods, to the northwest, lies a sea of briers,
close growing, interwoven and matted, strong and murderous as barbed
wire.

“Miles out in this almost impenetrable region lies a patch of trees
called Fool’s Acre.

“At Wells I heard that the only man who had ever managed to reach
Fool’s Acre was a trapper, and that he was still living.

“I found him at Rainbow Lake—a very old man, who had a fairly clear
recollection of Fool’s Acre and his exhausting journey there.

“And he told me that man had been there before he had. For there was a
roofless stone house there, and the remains of a walled garden. And a
skull deep in the wild grasses.”

Selden paused and looked down at the recently healed scars on his
wrists and hands.

“It was a rotten trip,” he said bluntly. “It took me three days to cut
a tunnel through that accursed tangle of matted brier and grey
birch.... Fool’s Acre is a grove of giant trees—first growth pine, oak,
and maple. Great outcrops of limestone ledges bound it on the east. A
brook runs through the woods.

“There is a house there, _no longer roofless_, and built of slabs of
fossil-pitted limestone. The glass in the windows is so old that it is
iridescent.

“A seven-foot wall encloses the house, built also of slabs blasted out
of the rock outcrop, and all pitted with fossil shells.

“Inside is a garden—not the _remains_ of one—a beautiful garden full of
unfamiliar flowers. And in this garden I saw the Yezidee on his knees
_making living things out of lumps of dead earth_!”

“The Tchordagh!” whispered the girl.

“What was the Yezidee doing?” demanded Cleves nervously.

Involuntarily all three drew nearer each other there in the sunshine.

“It was difficult for me to see,” said Selden in his quiet, serious
voice. “It was nearly twilight: I lay flat on top of the wall under the
curving branches of a huge syringa bush in full bloom. The Yezidees——”

“Were there two!” exclaimed Cleves.

“Two. They were squatting on the old stone path bordering one of the
flower-beds.” He turned to Tressa: “They both wore white cloths twisted
around their heads, and long soft garments of white. Under these their
bare, brown legs showed, but they wore things on their naked feet which
were shaped like what we call Turkish slippers—only different.”

“Black and green,” nodded Tressa with the vague horror growing in her
face.

“Yes. The soles of their shoes were bright green.”

“Green is the colour sacred to Islam,” said Tressa. “The priests of
Satan defile it by staining with green the soles of their footwear.”

After an interval: “Go on,” said Cleves nervously.

Selden drew closer, and they bent their heads to listen:

“I don’t, even now, know what the Yezidees were actually doing. In the
twilight it was hard to see clearly. But I’ll tell you what it looked
like to me. One of these squatting creatures would scoop out a handful
of soil from the flower-bed, and mould it for a few moments between his
lean, sinewy fingers, and then he’d open his hands and—and something
_alive_—something small like a rat or a toad, or God knows what, would
escape from between his palms and run out into the grass——”

Selden’s voice failed and he looked at Cleves with sickened eyes.

“I can’t—can’t make you understand how repulsive to me it was to see a
wriggling live thing creep out between their fingers and—and go running
or scrambling away—little loathsome things with humpy backs that hopped
or scurried through the grass——”

“What on earth _were_ these Yezidees doing, Tressa?” asked Cleves
almost roughly.

The girl’s white face was marred by the imprints of deepening horror.

“It is the Tchor-Dagh,” she said mechanically. “They are using every
resource of hell to destroy me—testing the gigantic power of Evil—as
though it were some vast engine charged with thunderous
destruction!—and they were testing it to discover its terrific capacity
to annihilate——”

Her voice died in her dry throat; she dropped her bloodless visage into
both hands and remained seated so.

Both men looked at her in silence, not daring to interfere. Finally the
girl lifted her pallid face from her hands.

“That is what they were doing,” she said in a dull voice. “Out of
inanimate earth they were making things animate—living creatures—to—to
test the hellish power which they are storing—concentrating—for my
destruction.”

“What is their purpose?” asked Cleves harshly. “What do these Mongol
Sorcerers expect to gain by making little live things out of lumps of
garden dirt?”

“They are testing their power,” whispered the girl.

“Like tuning up a huge machine?” muttered Selden.

“Yes.”

“For what purpose?”

“To make larger living creatures out of—of clay.”

“They can’t—they can’t _create_!” exclaimed Cleves. “I don’t know
how—by what filthy tricks—they make rats out of dirt. But they can’t
make a—anything—like a—like a man!”

Tressa’s body trembled slightly.

“Once,” she said, “in the temple, Prince Sanang took dust which was
brought in sacks of goat-skin, and fashioned the heap of dirt with his
hands, so that it resembled the body of a man lying there on the marble
floor under the shrine of Erlik.... And—and then, there in the shadows
where only the Dark Star burned—that black lamp which is called the
Dark Star—the long heap of dust lying there on the marble pavement
began to—to _breathe_!—”

She pressed both hands over her breast as though to control her
trembling body: “I saw it; I saw the long shape of dust begin to
breathe, to stir, move, and slowly lift itself——”

“A Yezidee trick!” gasped Cleves; but he also was trembling now.

“God!” whispered the girl. “Allah alone knows—the Merciful, the Long
Suffering—He knows what it was that we temple girls saw there—that
Yulun saw—that Sa-n’sa and I beheld there rising up like a man from the
marble floor—and standing erect in the shadowy twilight of the Dark
Star....”

Her hands gripped at her breast; her face was deathly.

“Then,” she said, “I saw Prince Sanang draw his sabre of Indian steel,
and he struck ... once only.... And a dead man fell down where the
_thing_ had stood. And all the marble was flooded with scarlet blood.”

“A trick,” repeated Cleves, in the ghost of his own voice. But his gaze
grew vacant.

Presently Selden spoke in tones that sounded weakly querulous from
emotional reaction:

“There is a path—a tunnel under the matted briers. It took me more than
a week to cut it out. It is possible to reach Fool’s Acre. We can
try—with our rifles—if you say so, Mrs. Cleves.”

The girl looked up. A little colour came into her cheeks. She shook her
head.

“Their bodies may not be there in the garden,” she said absently. “What
you saw may not have been that part of them—the material which dies by
knife or bullet.... And it is necessary that these Yezidees should
die.”

“Can you do anything?” asked Cleves, hoarsely.

She looked at her husband; tried to smile:

“I must try.... I think we had better not lose any time—if Mr. Selden
will lead us.”

“Now?”

“Yes, we had better go, I think,” said the girl. Her smile still
remained stamped on her lips, but her eyes seemed preoccupied as though
following the movements of something remote that was passing across the
far horizon.




CHAPTER XIV
A DEATH TRAIL


The way to Fool’s Acre was under a tangled canopy of thorns, under
rotting windfalls of grey mirch, through tunnel after tunnel of fallen
débris woven solidly by millions of strands of tough cat-briers which
cut the flesh like barbed wire.

There was blood on Tressa, where her flannel shirt had been pierced in
a score of places. Cleves and Selden had been painfully slashed.

Silent, thread-like streams flowed darkling under the tangled mass that
roofed them. Sometimes they could move upright; more often they were
bent double; and there were long stretches where they had to creep
forward on hands and knees through sparse wild grasses, soft, rotten
soil, or paths of sphagnum which cooled their feverish skin in velvety,
icy depths.

At noon they rested and ate, lying prone under the matted roof of their
tunnel.

Cleves and Selden had their rifles. Tressa lay like a slender boy, her
brier-torn hands empty.

And, as she lay there, her husband made a sponge of a handful of
sphagnum moss, and bathed her face and her arms, cleansing the dried
blood from the skin, while the girl looked up at him out of grave,
inscrutable eyes.


The sun hung low over the wilderness when they came to the woods of
Fool’s Acre. They crept cautiously out of the briers, among ferns and
open spots carpeted with pine needles and dead leaves which were
beginning to burn ruddy gold under the level rays of the sun.

Lying flat behind an enormous oak, they remained listening for a while.
Selden pointed through the woods, eastward, whispering that the house
stood there not far away.

“Don’t you think we might risk the chance and use our rifles?” asked
Cleves in a low voice.

“No. It is the Tchor-Dagh that confronts us. I wish to talk to Sansa,”
she murmured.

A moment later Selden touched her arm.

“My God,” he breathed, “who is that!”

“It is Sansa,” said Tressa calmly, and sat up among the ferns. And the
next instant Sansa stepped daintily out of the red sunlight and seated
herself among them without a sound.

Nobody spoke. The newcomer glanced at Selden, smiled slightly, blushed,
then caught a glimpse of Cleves where he lay in the brake, and a
mischievous glimmer came into her slanting eyes.

“Did I not tell my lord truths?” she inquired in a demure whisper. “As
surely as the sun is a dragon, and the flaming pearl burns between his
claws, so surely burns the soul of Heart of Flame between thy guarding
hands. There are as many words as there are demons, my lord, but it is
written that _Niaz_ is the greatest of all words save only the name of
God.”

She laughed without any sound, sweetly malicious where she sat among
the ferns.

“Heart of Flame,” she said to Tressa, “you called me and I _made the
effort_.”

“Darling,” said Tressa in her thrilling voice, “the Yezidees are making
living things out of dust,—as Sanang Noïane made that thing in the
Temple.... And slew it before our eyes.”

“The Tchor-Dagh,” said Sansa calmly.

“The Tchor-Dagh,” whispered Tressa.

Sansa’s smooth little hands crept up to the collar of her odd, blue
tunic; grasped it.

“In the name of God the Merciful,” she said without a tremor, “listen
to me, Heart of Flame, and may my soul be ransom for yours!”

“I hear you, Sansa.”

Sansa said, her fingers still grasping the embroidered collar of her
tunic:

“Yonder, behind walls, two Tower Chiefs meddle with the Tchor-Dagh,
making living things out of the senseless dust they scrape from the
garden.”

Selden moistened his dry lips. Sansa said:

“The Yezidees who have come into this wilderness are Arrak Sou-Sou, the
Squirrel; and Tiyang Khan.... May God remember them in Hell!”

“May God remember them,” said Tressa mechanically.

“And these two Yezidee Sorcerers,” continued Sansa coolly, “have
advanced thus far in the Tchor-Dagh; for they now roam these woods,
digging like demons, for the roots of Ginseng; and thou knowest, O
Heart of Flame, what that indicates.”

“Does Ginseng grow in these woods!” exclaimed Tressa with a new terror
in her widening eyes.

“Ginseng grows here, little Rose-Heart, and the roots are as perfect as
human bodies. And Tiyang Khan squats in the walled garden moulding the
Ginseng roots in his unclean hands, while Sou-Sou the Squirrel
scratches among the dead leaves of the woods for roots as perfect as a
naked human body.

“All day long the Sou-Sou rummages among the trees; all day long Tiyang
pats and rubs and moulds the Ginseng roots in his skinny fingers. It is
the Tchor-Dagh, Heart of Flame. And these Sorcerers must be destroyed.”

“Are their bodies here?”

“Arrak is in the body. And thus it shall be accomplished: listen
attentively, Rose Heart Afire!—I shall remain here with——” she looked
at Selden and flushed a trifle, “—with you, my lord. And when the
Squirrel comes a-digging, so shall my lord slay him with a bullet....
And when I hear his soul bidding his body farewell, then I shall make
prisoner his soul.... And send it to the Dark Star.... And the rest
shall be in the hands of Allah.”

She turned to Tressa and caught her hands in both of her own:

“It is written on the Iron Pages,” she whispered, “that we belong to
Erlik and we return to him. But in the Book of Gold it is written
otherwise: ‘God preserve us from Satan who was stoned!’ ... Therefore,
in the name of Allah! Now then, Heart of Flame, do your duty!”

A burning flush leaped over Tressa’s features.

“Is my soul, then, my own!”

“It belongs to God,” said Sansa gravely.

“And—Sanang?”

“God is greatest.”

“But—was God there—at the Lake of the Ghosts?”

“God is everywhere. It is so written in the Book of Gold,” replied
Sansa, pressing her hands tenderly.

“Recite the Fatha, Heart of Flame. Thy lips shall not stiffen; God
listens.”

Tressa rose in the sunset glory and stood as though dazed, and all
crimsoned in the last fiery bars of the declining sun.

Cleves also rose.

Sansa laughed noiselessly: “My lord would go whither thou goest, Heart
of Fire!” she whispered. “And thy ways shall be his ways!”

Tressa’s cheeks flamed and she turned and looked at Cleves.

Then Sansa rose and laid a hand on Tressa’s arm and on her husband’s:

“Listen attentively. Tiyang Khan must be destroyed. The signal sounds
when my lord’s rifle-shot makes a loud noise here among these trees.”

“Can I prevail against the Tchor-Dagh?” asked Tressa, steadily.

“Is not that event already in God’s hands, darling?” said Sansa softly.
She smiled and resumed her seat beside Selden, amid the drooping fern
fronds.

“Bid thy dear lord leave his rifle here,” she added quietly.

Cleves laid down his weapon. Selden pointed eastward in silence.

So they went together into the darkening woods.


In the dusk of heavy foliage overhanging the garden, Tressa lay flat as
a lizard on the top of the wall. Beside her lay her husband.

In the garden below them flowers bloomed in scented thickets, bordered
by walks of flat stone slabs split from boulders. A little lawn, very
green, centred the garden.

And on this lawn, in the clear twilight still tinged with the sombre
fires of sundown, squatted a man dressed in a loose white garment.

Save for a twisted breadth of white cloth, his shaven head was bare.
His sinewy feet were naked, too, the lean, brown toes buried in the
grass.

Tressa’s lips touched her husband’s ear.

“Tiyang Khan,” she breathed. “Watch what he does!”

Shoulder to shoulder they lay there, scarcely daring to breathe. Their
eyes were fastened on the Mongol Sorcerer, who, squatted below on his
haunches, grave and deliberate as a great grey ape, continued busy with
the obscure business which so intently preoccupied him.

In a short semi-circle on the grass in front of him he had placed a
dozen wild Ginseng roots. The roots were enormous, astoundingly shaped
like the human body, almost repulsive in their weird symmetry.

The Yezidee had taken one of these roots into his hands. Squatting
there in the semi-dusk, he began to massage it between his long,
muscular fingers, rubbing, moulding, pressing the root with caressing
deliberation.

His unhurried manipulation, for a few moments, seemed to produce no
result. But presently the Ginseng root became lighter in colour and
more supple, yielding to his fingers, growing ivory pale, sinuously
limber in a newer and more delicate symmetry.

“Look!” gasped Cleves, grasping his wife’s arm. “_What_ is that man
doing?”

“The Tchor-Dagh!” whispered Tressa. “Do you see what lies twisting
there in his hands?”

The Ginseng root had become the tiny naked body of a woman—a little
ivory-white creature, struggling to escape between the hands that had
created it—dark, powerful, masterly hands, opening leisurely now, and
releasing the living being they had fashioned.

The thing scrambled between the fingers of the Sorcerer, leaped into
the grass, ran a little way and hid, crouched down, panting, almost
hidden by the long grass. The shocked watchers on the wall could still
see the creature. Tressa felt Cleves’ body trembling beside her. She
rested a cool, steady hand on his.

“It is the Tchor-Dagh,” she breathed close to his face. “The Mongol
Sorcerer is becoming formidable.”

“Oh, God!” murmured Cleves, “that thing he made is _alive_! I saw it. I
can see it hiding there in the grass. It’s frightened—breathing! It’s
alive!”

His pistol, clutched in his right hand, quivered. His wife laid her
hand on it and cautiously shook her head.

“No,” she said, “that is of no use.”

“But what that Yezidee is doing is—is blasphemous——”

“Watch him! His mind is stealthily feeling its way among the laws and
secrets of the Tchor-Dagh. He has found a thread. He is following it
through the maze into hell’s own labyrinth! He has created a tiny thing
in the image of the Creator. He will try to create a larger being now.
Watch him with his Ginseng roots!”

Tiyang, looming ape-like on his haunches in the deepening dusk, moulded
and massaged the Ginseng roots, one after another. And one after
another, tiny naked creatures wriggled out of his palms between his
fingers and scuttled away into the herbage.

Already the dim lawn was alive with them, crawling, scurrying through
the grass, creeping in among the flower-beds, little, ghostly-white
things that glimmered from shade into shadow like moonbeams.

Tressa’s mouth touched her husband’s ear:

“It is for the secret of Destruction that the Yezidee seeks. But first
he must learn the secret of creation. He is learning.... And he must
learn no more than he has already learned.”

“That Yezidee is a living man. Shall I fire?”

“No.”

“I can kill him with the first shot.”

“Hark!” she whispered excitedly, her hand closing convulsively on her
husband’s arm.

The whip-crack of a rifle-shot still crackled in their ears.

Tiyang had leaped to his feet in the dusk, a Ginseng root, half-alive,
hanging from one hand and beginning to squirm.

Suddenly the first moonbeam fell across the wall. And in its lustre
Tressa rose to her knees and flung up her right hand.

Then it was as though her palm caught and reflected the moon’s ray, and
hurled it in one blinding shaft straight into the dark visage of
Tiyang-Khan.

The Yezidee fell as though he had been pierced by a shaft of steel, and
lay sprawling there on the grass in the ghastly glare.

And where his features had been there gaped only a hole into the head.

Then a dreadful thing occurred; for everywhere the grass swarmed with
the little naked creatures he had made, running, scrambling, scuttling,
darting into the black hole which had been the face of Tiyang-Khan.

They poured into the awful orifice, crowding, jostling one another so
violently that the head jerked from side to side on the grass, a
wabbling, inert, soggy mass in the moonlight.

And presently the body of Tiyang-Khan, Warden of the Rampart of Gog and
Magog, and Lord of the Seventh Tower, began to burn with white fire—a
low, glimmering combustion that seemed to clothe the limbs like an
incandescent mist.

On the wall knelt Tressa, the glare from her lifted hand streaming over
the burning form below.

Cleves stood tall and shadowy beside his wife, the useless pistol
hanging in his grasp.

Then, in the silence of the woods, and very near, they heard Sansa
laughing. And Selden’s anxious voice:

“Arrak is dead. The Sou-Sou hangs across a rock, head down, like a shot
squirrel. Is all well with you?”

“Tiyang is on his way to his star,” said Tressa calmly. “Somewhere in
the world his body has bid its mind farewell.... And so his body may
live for a little, blind, in mental darkness, fed by others, and locked
in all day, all night, until the end.”

Sansa, at the base of the wall, turned to Selden.

“Shall I bring my body with me, one day, my lord?” she asked demurely.

“Oh, Sansa——” he whispered, but she placed a fragrant hand across his
lips and laughed at him in the moonlight.




CHAPTER XV
IN THE FIRELIGHT


In 1920 the whole spiritual world was trembling under the thundering
shock of the Red Surf pounding the frontiers of civilisation from pole
to pole.

Up out of the hell-pit of Asia had boiled the molten flood, submerging
Russia, dashing in giant waves over Germany and Austria, drenching
Italy, France, England with its bloody spindrift.

And now the Red Rain was sprinkling the United States from coast to
coast, and the mindless administration, scared out of its stupidity at
last, began a frantic attempt to drain the country of the filthy flood
and throw up barriers against the threatened deluge.

In every state and city Federal agents made wholesale arrests—too late!

A million minds had already been perverted and dominated by the
terrible Sect of the Assassins. A million more were sickening under the
awful psychic power of the Yezidee.

Thousands of the disciples of the Yezidee devil-worshipers had already
been arrested and held for deportation,—poor, wretched creatures whose
minds were no longer their own, but had been stealthily surprised,
seized and mastered by Mongol adepts and filled with ferocious hatred
against their fellow men.

Yet, of the Eight Yezidee Assassins only two now remained alive in
America,—Togrul, and Sanang, the Slayer of Souls.

Yarghouz was dead; Djamouk the Fox, Kahn of the Fifth Tower was dead;
Yaddin-ed-Din, Arrak the Sou-Sou, Gutchlug, Tiyang Khan, all were dead.
Six Towers had become dark and silent. From them the last evil thought,
the last evil shape had sped; the last wicked prayer had been said to
Erlik, Khagan of all Darkness.

But his emissary on earth, Prince Sanang, still lived. And at Sanang’s
heels stole Togrul, Tougtchi to Sanang Noïane, the Slayer of Souls.


In the United States there had been a cessation of the active campaign
of violence toward those in authority. Such unhappy dupes of the
Yezidees as the I. W. W. and other radicals were, for the time,
physically quiescent. Crude terrorism with its more brutal outrages
against life and law ceased. But two million sullen eyes, in which all
independent human thought had been extinguished, watched unblinking the
wholesale arrests by the government—watched panic-stricken officials
rushing hither and thither to execute the mandate of a miserable
administration—watched and waited in dreadful silence.

In that period of ominous quiet which possessed the land, the little
group of Secret Service men that surrounded the young girl who alone
stood between a trembling civilisation and the threat of hell’s own
chaos, became convinced that Sanang was preparing a final and terrible
effort to utterly overwhelm the last vestige of civilisation in the
United States.

What shape that plan would develop they could not guess.

John Recklow sent Benton to Chicago to watch that centre of infection
for the appearance there of the Yezidee Togrul.

Selden went to Boston where a half-witted group of parlour-socialists
at Cambridge were talking too loudly and loosely to please even the
most tolerant at Harvard.

But neither Togrul nor Sanang had, so far, materialised in either city;
and John Recklow prowled the purlieus of New York, haunting strange
byways and obscure quarters where the dull embers of revolution always
smouldered, watching for the Yezidee who was the deep-bedded, vital
root of this psychic evil which menaced the minds of all
mankind,—Sanang, the Slayer of Souls.

Recklow’s lodgings were tucked away in Westover Court—three bedrooms, a
parlour and a kitchenette. Tressa Cleves occupied one bedroom; her
husband another; Recklow the third.

And in this tiny apartment, hidden away among a group of old buildings,
the very existence of which was unknown to the millions who swarmed the
streets of the greatest city in the world,—here in Westover Court, a
dozen paces from the roar of Broadway, was now living a young girl upon
whose psychic power the only hope of the world now rested.


The afternoon had turned grey and bitter; ragged flakes still fell; a
pallid twilight possessed the snowy city, through which lighted trains
and taxis moved in the foggy gloom.

By three o’clock in the afternoon all shops were illuminated; the south
windows of the Hotel Astor across the street spread a sickly light over
the old buildings of Westover Court as John Recklow entered the tiled
hallway, took the stairs to the left, and went directly to his
apartment.

He unlocked the door and let himself in and stood a moment in the entry
shaking the snow from his hat and overcoat.

The sitting-room lamp was unlighted but he could see a fire in the
grate, and Tressa Cleves seated near, her eyes fixed on the glowing
coals.

He bade her good evening in a low voice; she turned her charming head
and nodded, and he drew a chair to the fender and stretched out his wet
shoes to the warmth.

“Is Victor still out?” he inquired.

She said that her husband had not yet returned. Her eyes were on the
fire, Recklow’s rested on her shadowy face.

“Benton got his man in Chicago,” he said. “It was not Togrul Kahn.”

“Who was it?”

“Only a Swami fakir who’d been preaching sedition to a little group of
greasy Bengalese from Seattle.... I’ve heard from Selden, too.”

She nodded listlessly and lifted her eyes.

“Neither Sanang nor Togrul have appeared in Boston,” he said. “I think
they’re here in New York.”

The girl said nothing.

After a silence:

“Are you worried about your husband?” he asked abruptly.

“I am always uneasy when he is absent,” she said quietly.

“Of course.... But I don’t suppose he knows that.”

“I suppose not.”

Recklow leaned over, took a coal in the tongs and lighted a cigar.
Leaning back in his armchair, he said in a musing voice:

“No, I suppose your husband does not realise that you are so deeply
concerned over his welfare.”

The girl remained silent.

“I suppose,” said Recklow softly, “he doesn’t dream you are in love
with him.”

Tressa Cleves did not stir a muscle. After a long silence she said in
her even voice:

“Do you think I am in love with my husband, Mr. Recklow?”

“I think you fell in love with him the first evening you met him.”

“I did.”

Neither of them spoke again for some minutes. Recklow’s cigar went
wrong; he rose and found another and returned to the fire, but did not
light it.

“It’s a rotten day, isn’t it?” he said with a shiver, and dumped a
scuttle of coal on the fire.

They watched the blue flames playing over the grate.

Tressa said: “I could no more help falling in love with him than I
could stop my heart beating.... But I did not dream that anybody knew.”

“Don’t you think he ought to know?”

“Why? He is not in love with me.”

“Are you sure, Mrs. Cleves?”

“Yes. He is wonderfully sweet and kind. But he could not fall in love
with a girl who has been what I have been.”

Recklow smiled. “What have you been, Tressa Norne?”

“You know.”

“A temple-girl at Yian?”

“And at the Lake of the Ghosts,” she said in a low voice.

“What of it?”

“I can not tell you, Mr. Recklow.... Only that I lost my soul in the
Yezidee Temple——”

“That is untrue!”

“I wish it were untrue.... My husband tells me that nothing can really
harm the soul. I try to believe him.... But Erlik lives. And when my
soul at last shall escape my body, it shall not escape the Slayer of
Souls.”

“That is monstrously untrue——”

“No. I tell you that Prince Sanang slew my soul. And my soul’s ghost
belongs to Erlik. How can any man fall in love with such a girl?”

“Why do you say that Sanang slew your soul?” asked Recklow, peering at
her averted face through the reddening firelight.

She lay still in her chair for a moment, then turned suddenly on him:

“He _did_ slay it! He came to the Lake of the Ghosts as my lover; he
meant to have done it there; but I would not have him—would not listen,
nor suffer his touch!—I mocked at him and his passion. I laughed at his
Tchortchas. They were afraid of me!—”

She half rose from her chair, grasped the arms, then seated herself
again, her eyes ablaze with the memory of wrongs.

“How dare I show my dear lord that I am in love with him when Sanang’s
soul caught my soul out of my body one day—surprised my soul while my
body lay asleep in the Yezidee Temple!—and bore it in his arms to the
very gates of hell!”

“Good God,” whispered Recklow, “what do you mean? Such things can’t
happen.”

“Why not? They do happen. I was caught unawares.... It was one golden
afternoon, and Yulan and Sansa and I were eating oranges by the
fountain in the inner shrine. And I lay down by the pool and _made the
effort_—you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. My soul left my body asleep and I went out over the tops of
the flowers—idly, without aim or intent—as the winds blow in summer....
It was in the Wood of the White Moth that I saw Sanang’s soul flash
downward like a streak of fire and wrap my soul in flame!... And, in a
flash, we were at the gates of hell before I could free myself from his
embrace.... Then, by the Temple pool, among the oranges, I cried out
asleep; and my terrified body sat up sobbing and trembling in Yulun’s
arms. But the Slayer of Souls had slain mine in the Wood of the White
Moth—slain it as he caught me in his flaming arms.... And now you know
why such a woman as I dare not bend to kiss the dust from my dear
Lord’s feet—Aie-a! Aie-a! I who have lost my girl’s soul to him who
slew it in the Wood of the White Moth!”

She sat rocking in her chair in the red firelight, her hands framing
her lovely face, her eyes staring straight ahead as though they saw
opening before them through the sombre shadows of that room all the
dread magic of the East where the dancing flame of Sanang’s blazing
soul lighted their path to hell through the enchanted forest.

Recklow had grown pale, but his voice was steady.

“I see no reason,” he said, “why your husband should not love you.”

“I tell you my girl’s soul belonged to Sanang—was part of his, for an
instant.”

“It is burned pure of dross.”

“It is _burned_.”

Recklow remained silent. Tressa lay deep in her armchair, twisting her
white fingers.

“What makes him so late?” she said.... “I sent my soul out twice to
look for him, and could not find him.”

“Send it again,” said Recklow, fearfully.

For ten minutes the girl lay as though asleep, then her eyes unclosed
and she said drowsily: “I can not find him.”

“Did—did you learn anything while—while you were—away?” asked Recklow
cautiously.

“Nothing. There is a thick darkness out there—I mean a darkness
gathering over the whole land. It is like a black fog. When the damned
pray to Erlik there is a darkness that gathers like a brown mist——”

Her voice ceased; her hands tightened on the arms of her chair.

“_That_ is what Sanang is doing!” she said in a breathless voice.

“What?” demanded Recklow.

“_Praying!_ That is what he is doing! A million perverted minds which
he has seized and obsessed are being concentrated on blasphemous
prayers to Erlik! Sanang is directing them. Do you understand the
terrible power of a million minds all _willing_, in unison, the
destruction of good and the triumph of evil? A million human minds!
More! For that is what he is doing. That is the thick darkness that is
gathering over the entire Western world. It is the terrific
materialisation of evil power from evil minds, all focussed upon the
single thought that evil must triumph and good die!”

She sat, gripping the arms of her chair, pale, rigid, terribly alert,
dreadfully enlightened, now, concerning the awful and new menace
threatening the sanity of mankind.

She said in her steady, emotionless voice: “When the Yezidee Sorcerers
desire to overwhelm a nomad people—some yort perhaps that has resisted
the Sheiks of the Eight Towers, then the Slayer of Souls rides with his
Black Banners to the Namaz-Ga or Place of Prayer.

“Two marble bridges lead to it. There are fourteen hundred mosques
there. Then come the Eight, each with his shroud, chanting the prayers
for those dead in hell. And there the Yezidees pray blasphemously, all
their minds in ferocious unison.... And I have seen a little yort full
of Broad Faces with their slanting eyes and sparse beards, sicken and
die, and turn black in the sun as though the plague had breathed on
them. And I have seen the Long Noses and bushy beards of walled towns
wither and perish in the blast and blight from the Namaz-Ga where the
Slayer of Souls sat his saddle and prayed to Erlik, and half a million
Yezidees prayed in blasphemous unison.”

Recklow’s head rested on his left hand. The other, unconsciously, had
crept toward his pistol—the weapon which had become so useless in this
awful struggle between this girl and the loosened forces of hell.

“Is that what you think Sanang is about?” he asked heavily.

“Yes. I know it. He has seized the minds of a million men in America.
Every anarchist is to-day concentrating in one evil and supreme mental
effort, under Sanang’s direction, to will the triumph of evil and the
doom of civilisation.... I wish my husband would come home.”

“Tressa?”

She turned her pallid face in the firelight: “If Sanang has appointed a
Place of Prayer,” she said, “he himself will pray on that spot. That
will be the Namaz-Ga for the last two Yezidee Sorcerers still alive in
the Western World.”

“That’s what I wished to ask you,” said Recklow softly. “Will you try
once more, Tressa?”

“Yes. I will send out my soul again to look for the Namaz-Ga.”

She lay back in her armchair and closed her eyes.

“Only,” she added, as though to herself, “I wish my dear lord were safe
in this room beside me.... May God’s warriors be his escort. And surely
they are well armed, and can prevail over demons. Aie-a! I wish my lord
would come home out of the darkness.... Mr. Recklow?”

“Yes, Tressa.”

“I thought I heard him on the stairs.”

“Not yet.”

“Aie-a!” she sighed and closed her eyes again.

She lay like one dead. There was no sound in the room save the soft
purr of the fire.

Suddenly from the sleeping girl a frightened voice burst: “Yulun!
Yulun! Where is that yellow maid of the Baroulass?... What is she
doing? That sleek young thing belongs to Togrul Kahn? Yulun! I am
afraid of her! Tell Sansa to watch that she does not stir from the Lake
of the Ghosts!... Warn that young Baroulass Sorceress that if she stirs
I slay her. And know how to do it in spite of Sanang and all the
prayers from the Namaz-Ga! Yulun! Sansa! Watch her, follow her, hearts
of flame! My soul be ransom for yours! Tokhta!”

The girl’s eyes unclosed. Presently she stirred slightly, passed one
hand across her forehead, turned her head toward Recklow.

“I could not discover the Namaz-Ga,” she said wearily. “I wish my
husband would return.”




CHAPTER XVI
THE PLACE OF PRAYER


Her husband called her on the telephone a few minutes later:

“Fifty-three, Six-twenty-six speaking! Who is this?”

“V-sixty-nine,” replied his young wife happily. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. Is M. H. 2479 there?”

“He is here.”

“Very well. An hour ago I saw Togrul Khan in a limousine and chased him
in a taxi. His car got away in the fog but it was possible to make out
the number. An empty Cadillac limousine bearing that number is now
waiting outside the 44th Street entrance to the Hotel Astor. The
doorman will hold it until I finish telephoning. Tell M. H. 2479 to
send men to cover this matter——”

“Victor!”

“Be careful! Yes, what is it?”

“I beg you not to stir in this affair until I can join you——”

“Hurry then. It’s just across the street from Westover Court——” His
voice ceased; she heard another voice, faintly, and an exclamation from
her husband; then his hurried voice over the wire: “The doorman just
sent word to hurry. The car number is N. Y. _015 F 0379_! I’ve got to
run! Good-b——”


He left the booth at the end of Peacock Alley, ran down the marble
steps to the left and out to the snowy sidewalk, passing on his way a
young girl swathed to the eyes in chinchilla who was hurrying into the
hotel. As he came to where the limousine was standing, he saw that it
was still empty although the door stood open and the engine was
running. Around the chauffeur stood the gold laced doorman, the
gorgeously uniformed carriage porter and a mounted policeman.

“Hey!” said the latter when he saw Cleves,—“what’s the matter here?
What are you holding up this car for?”

Cleves beckoned him, whispered, then turned to the doorman.

“Why did you send for me? Was the chauffeur trying to pull out?”

“Yes, sir. A lady come hurrying out an’ she jumps in, and the shawfur
he starts her humming——”

“A lady! Where did she go?”

“It was that young lady in chinchilla fur. The one you just met when
you run out. Yessir! Why, as soon as I held up the car and called this
here cop, she opens the door and out she jumps and beats it into the
hotel again——”

“Hold that car, Officer!” interrupted Cleves. “Keep it standing here
and arrest anybody who gets into it! I’ll be back again——”

He turned and hurried into the hotel, traversed Peacock Alley scanning
every woman he passed, searching for a slim shape swathed in
chinchilla. There were no chinchilla wraps in Peacock Alley; none in
the dining-room where people already were beginning to gather and the
orchestra was now playing; no young girl in chinchilla in the waiting
room, or in the north dining-room.

Then, suddenly, far across the crowded lobby, he saw a slender,
bare-headed girl in a chinchilla cloak turn hurriedly away from the
room-clerk’s desk, holding a key in her white gloved hand.

Before he could take two steps in her direction she had disappeared in
the crowd.

He made his way through the packed lobby as best he could amid throngs
of people dressed for dinner, theatre, or other gaiety awaiting them
somewhere out there in the light-smeared winter fog; but when he
arrived at the room clerk’s desk he looked for a chinchilla wrap in
vain.

Then he leaned over the desk and said to the clerk in a low voice: “I
am a Federal agent from the Department of Justice. Here are my
credentials. Now, who was that young woman in chinchilla furs to whom
you gave her door key a moment ago?”

The clerk leaned over his counter and, dropping his voice, answered
that the lady in question had arrived only that morning from San
Francisco; had registered as Madame Aoula Baroulass; and had been given
a suite on the fourth floor numbered from 408 to 414.

“Do you mean to arrest her?” added the clerk in a weird whisper.

“I don’t know. Possibly. Have you the master-key?”

The clerk handed it to him without a word; and Cleves hurried to the
elevator.

On the fourth floor the matron on duty halted him, but when he murmured
an explanation she nodded and laid a finger on her lips.

“Madame has gone to her apartment,” she whispered.

“Has she a servant? Or friends with her?”

“No, sir.... I did see her speak to two foreign looking gentlemen in
the elevator when she arrived this morning.”

Cleves nodded; the matron pointed out the direction in silence, and he
went rapidly down the carpeted corridor, until he came to a door
numbered 408.

For a second only he hesitated, then swiftly fitted the master-key and
opened the door.

The room—a bedroom—was brightly lighted; but there was nobody there.
The other rooms—dressing closet, bath-room and parlour, all were
brilliantly lighted by ceiling fixtures and wall brackets; but there
was not a person to be seen in any of the rooms—nor, save for the
illumination, was there any visible sign that anybody inhabited the
apartment.

Swiftly he searched the apartment from end to end. There was no baggage
to be seen, no garments, no toilet articles, no flowers in the vases,
no magazines or books, not one article of feminine apparel or of
personal bric-a-brac visible in the entire place.

Nor had the bed even been turned down—nor any preparation for the
night’s comfort been attempted. And, except for the blazing lights, it
was as though the apartment had not been entered by anybody for a
month.

All the windows were closed, all shades lowered and curtains drawn. The
air, though apparently pure enough, had that vague flatness which one
associates with an unused guest-chamber when opened for an airing.

Now, deliberately, Cleves began a more thorough search of the
apartment, looking behind curtains, under beds, into clothes presses,
behind sofas.

Then he searched the bureau drawers, dressers, desks for any sign or
clew of the girl in the chinchillas. There was no dust anywhere,—the
hotel management evidently was particular—but there was not even a pin
to be found.

Presently he went out into the corridor and looked again at the number
on the door. He had made no mistake.

Then he turned and sped down the long corridor to where the matron was
standing beside her desk preparing to go off duty as soon as the other
matron arrived to relieve her.

To his impatient question she replied positively that she had seen the
girl in chinchillas unlock 408 and enter the apartment less than five
minutes before he had arrived in pursuit.

“And I saw her lights go on as soon as she went in,” added the matron,
pointing to the distant illuminated transom.

“Then she went out through into the next apartment,” insisted Cleves.

“The fire-tower is on one side of her; the scullery closet on the
other,” said the matron. “She could not have left that apartment
without coming out into the corridor. And if she had come out I should
have seen her.”

“I tell you she isn’t in those rooms!” protested Cleves.

“She must be there, sir. I saw her go in a few seconds before you came
up.”

At that moment the other matron arrived. There was no use arguing. He
left the explanation of the situation to the woman who was going off
duty, and, hastening his steps, he returned to apartment 408.

The door, which he had left open, had swung shut. Again he fitted the
master-key, entered, paused on the threshold, looked around nervously,
his nostrils suddenly filled with a puff of perfume.

And there on the table by the bed he saw a glass bowl filled with a
mass of Chinese orchids—great odorous clusters of orange and snow-white
bloom that saturated all the room with their freshening scent.

So astounded was he that he stood stock still, one hand still on the
door-knob; then in a trice he had closed and locked the door from
inside.

_Somebody_ was in that apartment. There could be no doubt about it. He
dropped his right hand into his overcoat pocket and took hold of his
automatic pistol.

For ten minutes he stood so, listening, peering about the room from bed
to curtains, and out into the parlour. There was not a sound in the
place. Nothing stirred.

Now, grasping his pistol but not drawing it, he began another stealthy
tour of the apartment, exploring every nook and cranny. And, at the
end, had discovered nothing new.

When at length he realised that, as far as he could discover, there was
not a living thing in the place excepting himself, a very faint chill
grew along his neck and shoulders, and he caught his breath suddenly,
deeply.

He had come back to the bedroom, now. The perfume of the orchids
saturated the still air.

And, as he stood staring at them, all of a sudden he saw, where their
twisted stalks rested in the transparent bowl of water, something
moving—something brilliant as a live ember gliding out from among the
mass of submerged stems—a living fish glowing in scarlet hues and
winnowing the water with grotesquely trailing fins as delicate as
filaments of scarlet lace.

To and fro swam the fish among the maze of orchid stalks. Even its eyes
were hot and red as molten rubies; and as its crimson gills swelled and
relaxed and swelled, tints of cherry-fire waxed and waned over its fat
and glowing body.

And vaguely, now, in the perfume saturated air, Cleves seemed to sense
a subtle taint of evil,—something sinister in the intense stillness of
the place—in the jewelled fish gliding so silently in and out among the
pallid convolutions of the drowned stems.

As he stood staring at the fish, the drugged odour of the orchids heavy
in his throat and lungs, something stirred very lightly in the room.

Chills crawling over every limb, he looked around across his shoulder.

There was a figure seated cross-legged in the middle of the bed!

Then, in the perfumed silence, the girl laughed.

For a full minute neither of them moved. No sound had echoed her low
laughter save the deadened pulsations of his own heart. But now there
grew a faint ripple of water in the bowl where the scarlet fish,
suddenly restless, was swimming hither and thither as though pursued by
an invisible hand.

With the slight noise of splashing water in his ears, Cleves stood
staring at the figure on the bed. Under her chinchilla the girl seemed
to be all a pale golden tint—hair, skin, eyes. The scant shred of an
evening gown she wore, the jewels at her throat and breast, all were
yellow and amber and saffron-gold.

And now, looking him in the eyes, she leisurely disengaged the robe of
silver fur from her naked shoulders and let it fall around her on the
bed. For a second the lithe, willowy golden thing gathered there as
gracefully as a coiled snake filled him with swift loathing. Then,
almost instantly, the beauty of the lissome creature fascinated him.

She leaned forward and set her elbows on her two knees, and rested her
face between her hands—like a gold rose-bud between two ivory petals,
he thought, dismayed by this young thing’s beauty, shaken by the dull
confusion of his own heart battering his breast like the blows of a
rising tide.

“What do you wish?” she inquired in her soft young voice. “Why have you
come secretly into my rooms to search—and clasping in your hand a
loaded pistol deep within your pocket?”

“Why have you hidden yourself until now?” he retorted in a dull and
laboured voice.

“I have been here.”

“Where?”

“Here!... Looking at you.... And watching my scarlet fish. His name is
Dzelim. He is nearly a thousand years old and as wise as a magician.
Look upon him, my lord! See how rapidly he darts around his tiny
crystal world!—like a comet through outer star-dust, running the
eternal race with Time.... And—yonder is a chair. Will my lord be
seated—at his new servant’s feet?”

A strange, physical weariness seemed to weight his limbs and shoulders.
He seated himself near the bed, never taking his heavy gaze from the
smiling, golden thing which squatted there watching him so intently.

“Whose limousine was that which you entered and then left so abruptly?”
he asked.

“My own.”

“What was the Yezidee Togrul Kahn doing in it?”

“Did you see anybody in my car?” she asked, veiling her eyes a little
with their tawny lashes.

“I saw a man with a thick beard dyed red with henna, and the bony face
and slant eyes of Togrul the Yezidee.”

“May my soul be ransom for yours, my lord, but you lie!” she said
softly. Her lips parted in a smile; but her half-veiled eyes were
brilliant as two topazes.

“Is that your answer?”

She lifted one hand and with her forefinger made signs from right to
left and then downward as though writing in Turkish and in Chinese
characters.

“It is written,” she said in a low voice, “that we belong to God and we
return to him. Look out what you are about, my lord!”

He drew his pistol from his overcoat and, holding it, rested his hand
on his knee.

“Now,” he said hoarsely, “while we await the coming of Togrul Kahn, you
shall remain exactly where you are, and you shall tell me exactly who
you are in order that I may decide whether to arrest you as an alien
enemy inciting my countrymen to murder, or to let you go as a foreigner
who is able to prove her honesty and innocence.”

The girl laughed:

“Be careful,” she said. “My danger lies in your youth and
mine—somewhere between your lips and mine lies my only danger from you,
my lord.”

A dull flush mounted to his temples and burned there.

“I am the golden comrade to Heavenly-Azure,” she said, still smiling.
“I am the Third Immaum in the necklace Keuke wears where Yulun hangs as
a rose-pearl, and Sansa as a pearl on fire.

“Look upon me, my lord!”

There was a golden light in his eyes which seemed to stiffen the
muscles and confuse his vision. He heard her voice again as though very
far away:

“It is written that we shall love, my lord—thou and I—this night—this
night. Listen attentively. I am thy slave. My lips shall touch thy
feet. Look upon me, my lord!”

There was a dazzling blindness in his eyes and in his brain. He swayed
a little still striving to fix her with his failing gaze. His pistol
hand slipped sideways from his knee, fell limply, and the weapon
dropped to the thick carpet. He could still see the glimmering golden
shape of her, still hear her distant voice:

“It is written that we belong to God.... Tokhta!...”

Over his knees was settling a snow-white sheet; on it, in his lap, lay
a naked knife. There was not a sound in the room save the rushing and
splashing of the scarlet fish in its crystal bowl.

Bending nearer, the girl fixed her yellow eyes on the man who looked
back at her with dying gaze, sitting upright and knee deep in his
shroud.

Then, noiselessly she uncoiled her supple golden body, extending her
right arm toward the knife.

“Throw back thy head, my lord, and stretch thy throat to the knife’s
sweet edge,” she whispered caressingly. “No!—do not close your eyes.
Look upon me. Look into my eyes. I am Aoula, temple girl of the
Baroulass! I am mistress to the Slayer of Souls! I am a golden
plaything to Sanang Noïane, Prince of the Yezidees. Look upon me
attentively, my lord!”

Her smooth little hand closed on the hilt; the scarlet fish splashed
furiously in the bowl, dislodging a blossom or two which fell to the
carpet and slowly faded into mist.

Now she grasped the knife, and she slipped from the bed to the floor
and stood before the dazed man.

“This is the Namaz-Ga,” she said in her silky voice. “Behold, this is
the appointed Place of Prayer. Gaze around you, my lord. These are the
shadows of mighty men who come here to see you die in the Place of
Prayer.”

Cleves’s head had fallen back, but his eyes were open. The Baroulass
girl took his head in both hands and turned it hither and thither. And
his glazing eyes seemed to sweep a throng of shadowy white-robed men
crowding the room. And he saw the bloodless, symmetrical visage of
Sanang among them, and the great red beard of Togrul; and his
stiffening lips parted in an uttered cry, and sagged open, flaccid and
soundless.

The Baroulass sorceress lifted the shroud from his knees and spread it
on the carpet, moving with leisurely grace about her business and
softly intoning the Prayers for the Dead.

Then, having made her arrangements, she took her knife into her right
hand again and came back to the half-conscious man, and stood close in
front of him, bending near and looking curiously into his dimmed eyes.

“Ayah!” she said smilingly. “This is the Place of Prayer. And you shall
add your prayer to ours before I use my knife. So! I give you back your
power of speech. Pronounce the name of Erlik!”

Very slowly his dry lips moved and his dry tongue trembled. The word
they formed was,

“Tressa!”

Instantly the girl’s yellow eyes grew incandescent and her lovely mouth
became distorted. With her left hand she caught his chin, forced his
head back, exposing his throat, and using all her strength drew the
knife’s edge across it.

But it was only her clenched fingers that swept the taut
throat—clenched and empty fingers in which the knife had vanished.

And when the Baroulass girl saw that her clenched hand was empty, felt
her own pointed nails cutting into the tender flesh of her own palm,
she stared at her blood-stained fingers in sudden terror—stared, spread
them, shrieked where she stood, and writhed there trembling and
screaming as though gripped in an invisible trap.

But she fell silent when the door of the room opened noiselessly behind
her;—and it was as though she dared not turn her head to face the end
of all things which had entered the room and was drawing nearer in
utter silence.

Suddenly she saw its shadow on the wall; and her voice burst from her
lips in a last shuddering scream.

Then the end came slowly, without a sound, and she sank at the knees,
gently, to a kneeling posture, then backward, extending her supple
golden shape across the shroud; and lay there limp as a dead snake.

Tressa went to the bowl of water and drew from it every blossom. The
scarlet fish was now thrashing the water to an iridescent spume; and
Tressa plunged in her hands and seized it and flung it out—squirming
and wheezing crimson foam—on the shroud beside the golden girl of the
Baroulass. Then, very slowly, she drew the shroud over the dying
things; stepped back to the chair where her husband lay unconscious;
knelt down beside him and took his head on her shoulder, gazing, all
the while, at the outline of the dead girl under the snowy shroud.

After a long while Cleves stirred and opened his eyes. Presently he
turned his head sideways on her shoulder.

“Tressa,” he whispered.

“Hush,” she whispered, “all is well now.” But she did not move her eyes
from the shroud, which now outlined the still shapes of _two_ human
figures.

“John Recklow!” she called in a low voice.

Recklow entered noiselessly with drawn pistol. She motioned to him; he
bent and lifted the edge of the shroud, cautiously. A bushy red beard
protruded.

“Togrul!” he exclaimed.... “But who is this young creature lying dead
beside him?”

Then Tressa caught the collar of her tunic in her left hand and flung
back her lovely face looking upward out of eyes like sapphires wet with
rain:

“In the name of the one and only God,” she sobbed—“if there be no
resurrection for dead souls, then I have slain this night in vain!

“For what does it profit a girl if her soul be lost to a lover and her
body be saved for her husband?”

She rose from her knees, the tears still falling, and went and looked
down at the outlined shapes beneath the shroud.

Recklow had gone to the telephone to summon his own men and an
ambulance. Now, turning toward Tressa from his chair:

“God knows what we’d do without you, Mrs. Cleves. I believe this
accounts for all the Yezidees except Sanang.”

“Excepting Prince Sanang,” she said drearily. Then she went slowly to
where her husband lay in his armchair, and sank down on the floor, and
laid her cheek across his feet.




CHAPTER XVII
THE SLAYER OF SOULS


In that great blizzard which, on the 4th of February, struck the
eastern coast of the United States from Georgia to Maine, John Recklow
and his men hunted Sanang, the last of the Yezidees.

And Sanang clung like a demon to the country which he had doomed to
destruction, imbedding each claw again as it was torn loose, battling
for the supremacy of evil with all his dreadful psychic power, striving
still to seize, cripple, and slay the bodies and souls of a hundred
million Americans.

Again he scattered the uncounted myriads of germs of the Black Plague
which he and his Yezidees had brought out of Mongolia a year before;
and once more the plague swept over the country, and thousands on
thousands died.

But now the National, State and City governments were fighting, with
physicians, nurses, and police, this gruesome epidemic which had come
into the world from they knew not where. And National, State and City
governments, aroused at last, were fighting the more terrible plague of
anarchy.

Nation-wide raids were made from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from
the Gulf to the Lakes. Thousands of terrorists of all shades and
stripes whose minds had been seized and poisoned by the Yezidees were
being arrested. Deportations had begun; government agents were
everywhere swarming to clean out the foulness that had struck deeper
into the body of the Republic than any one had supposed.

And it seemed, at last, as though the Red Plague, too, was about to be
stamped out along with the Black Death called Influenza.

But only a small group of Secret Service men knew that a resurgence of
these horrors was inevitable unless Sanang, the Slayer of Souls, was
destroyed. And they knew, too, that only one person in America could
hope to destroy Sanang, the last of the Yezidees, and that was Tressa
Cleves.

Only by the sudden onset of the plague in various cities of the land
had Recklow any clew concerning the whereabouts of Sanang.

In Boston, then Washington, then Kansas City, and then New York the
epidemic suddenly blazed up. And in these places of death the Secret
Service men always found a clew, and there they hunted Sanang, the
Yezidee, to kill him without mercy where they might find him.

But they never found Sanang Noïane; only the ghastly marks of his
poisoned claws on the body of the sickened nation—only minds diseased
by the Red Plague and bodies dying of the Black Death—civil and social
centres disorganized, disrupted, depraved, dying.

When the blizzard burst upon New York, struggling in the throes of the
plague, and paralysed the metropolis for a week, John Recklow sent out
a special alarm, and New York swarmed with Secret Service men searching
the snow-buried city for a graceful, slender, dark young man whose eyes
slanted a trifle in his amber-tinted face; who dressed fashionably,
lived fastidiously, and spoke English perfectly in a delightfully
modulated voice.

And to New York, thrice stricken by anarchy, by plague, and now by God,
hurried, from all parts of the nation, thousands of secret agents who
had been hunting Sanang in distant cities or who had been raiding the
traitorous and secret gatherings of his mental dupes.

Agent ZB-303, who was volunteer agent James Benton, came from Boston
with his new bride who had just arrived by way of England—a young girl
named Yulun who landed swathed in sables, and stretched out both lovely
little hands to Benton the instant she caught sight of him on the pier.
Whereupon he took the slim figure in furs into his arms, which was
interesting because they had never before met in the flesh.

So,—their honeymoon scarce begun, Benton and Yulun came from Boston in
answer to Recklow’s emergency call.

And all the way across from San Francisco came volunteer agent XLY-371,
otherwise Alek Selden, bringing with him a girl named Sansa whom he had
gone to the coast to meet, and whom he had immediately married after
she had landed from the Japanese steamer _Nan-yang Maru_. Which, also,
was remarkable, because, although they recognised each other instantly,
and their hands and lips clung as they met, neither had ever before
beheld the living body of the other.

The third man who came to New York at Recklow’s summons was volunteer
agent 53-6-26, otherwise Victor Cleves.

His young wife, suffering from nervous shock after the deaths of Togrul
Khan and of the Baroulass girl, Aoula, had been convalescing in a
private sanitarium in Westchester.

Until the summons came to her husband from Recklow, she had seen him
only for a few moments every day. But the call to duty seemed to have
effected a miraculous cure in the slender, blue-eyed girl who had lain
all day long, day after day, in her still, sunny room scarcely
unclosing her eyes at all save only when her husband was permitted to
enter for the few minutes allowed them every day.

The physician had just left, after admitting that Mrs. Cleves seemed to
be well enough to travel if she insisted; and she and her maid had
already begun to pack when her husband came into her room.

She looked around over her shoulder, then rose from her knees, flung an
armful of clothing into the trunk before which she had been kneeling,
and came across the room to him. Then she dismissed her maid from the
room. And when the girl had gone:

“I am well, Victor,” she said in a low voice. “Why are you troubled?”

“I can’t bear to have you drawn into this horrible affair once more.”

“Who else is there to discover and overcome Sanang?” she asked calmly.

He remained silent.

So, for a few moments they stood confronting each other there in the
still, sunny chamber—husband and wife who had never even exchanged the
first kiss—two young creatures more vitally and intimately bound
together than any two on earth—yet utterly separated body and soul from
each other—two solitary spirits which had never merged; two bodies
virginal and inviolate.

Tressa spoke first: “I must go. That was our bargain.”

The word made him wince as though it had been a sudden blow. Then his
face flushed red.

“Bargain or no bargain,” he said, “I don’t want you to go because I’m
afraid you can not endure another shock like the last one.... And every
time you have thrown your own mind and body between this Nation and
destruction you have nearly died of it.”

“And if I die?” she said in a low voice.

What answer she awaited—perhaps hoped for—was not the one he made. He
said: “If you die in what you believe to be your line of duty, then it
will be I who have killed you.”

“That would not be true. It is you who have saved me.”

“I have not. I have done nothing except to lead you into danger of
death since I first met you. If you mean spiritually, that also is
untrue. You have saved yourself—if that indeed were necessary. You have
redeemed yourself—if it is true you needed redemption—which I never
believed——”

“Oh,” she sighed swiftly, “Sanang surprised my soul when it was free of
my body—followed my soul into the Wood of the White Moth—caught it
there all alone—and—slew it!”

His lips and throat had gone dry as he watched the pallid terror grow
in her face.

Presently he recovered his voice: “You call that Yezidee the Slayer of
Souls,” he said, “but I tell you there is no such creature, no such
power!

“I suppose I—I know what you mean—having seen what we call souls
dissociated from their physical bodies—but that this Yezidee could do
you any spiritual damage I do not for one instant believe. The idea is
monstrous, I tell you——”

“I—I fought him—soul battling against soul——” she stammered, breathing
faster and irregularly. “I struggled with Sanang there in the Wood of
the White Moth. I called on God! I called on my two great dogs, Bars
and Alaga! I recited the Fatha with all my strength—fighting
convulsively whenever his soul seized mine; I cried out the name of
Khidr, begging for wisdom! I called on the Ten Imaums, on Ali the Lion,
on the Blessed Companions. Then I tore my spirit out of the grasp of
his soul—but there was no escape!—no escape,” she wailed. “For on every
side I saw the cloud-topped rampart of Gog and Magog, and the woods
rang with Erlik’s laughter—the dissonant mirth of hell——”

She began to shudder and sway a little, then with an effort she
controlled herself in a measure.

“There never has been,” she began again with lips that quivered in
spite of her—“there never has been one moment in our married lives when
my soul dared forget the Wood of the White Moth—dared seek yours....
God lives. But so does Erlik. There are angels; but there are as many
demons.... My soul is ashamed.... And very lonely ... very lonely ...
but no fit companion—for yours——”

Her hands dropped listlessly beside her and her chin sank.

“So you believe that Yezidee devil caught your soul when it was
wandering somewhere out of your body, and destroyed it,” he said.

She did not answer, did not even lift her eyes until he had stepped
close to her—closer than he had ever come. Then she looked up at him,
but closed her eyes as he swept her into his arms and crushed her face
and body against his own.

Now her red lips were on his; now her face and heart and limbs and
breast melted into his—her breath, her pulse, her strength flowed into
his and became part of their single being and single pulse and breath.
And she felt their two souls flame and fuse together, and burn together
in one heavenly blaze—felt the swift conflagration mount, overwhelm,
and sweep her clean of the last lingering taint; felt her soul,
unafraid, clasp her husband’s spirit in its white embrace—clung to him,
uplifted out of hell, rising into the blinding light of Paradise.

Far—far away she heard her own voice in singing whispers—heard her lips
pronounce _The Name_—“Ata—Ata! Allahou——”

Her blue eyes unclosed; through a mist, in which she saw her husband’s
face, grew a vast metallic clamour in her ears.

Her husband kissed her, long, silently; then, retaining her hand, he
turned and lifted the receiver from the clamouring telephone.

“Yes! Yes, this is 53-6-26. Yes, V-69 is with me.... When?...
To-day?... Very well.... Yes, we’ll come at once.... Yes, we can get a
train in a few minutes.... All right. Good-bye.”

He took his wife into his arms again.

“Dearest of all in the world,” he said, “Sanang is cornered in a row of
houses near the East River, and Recklow has flung a cordon around the
entire block. Good God! I _can’t_ take you there!”

Then Tressa smiled, drew his head down, looked into his face till the
clear blue splendour of her gaze stilled the tumult in his brain.

“I alone know how to deal with Prince Sanang,” she said quietly. “And
if John Recklow, or you, or Mr. Benton or Mr. Selden should kill him
with your pistols, it would be only his body you slay, not the evil
thing that would escape you and return to Erlik.”

“_Must_ you do this thing, Tressa?”

“Yes, I must do it.”

“But—if our pistols cannot kill this sorcerer, how are you going to
deal with him?”

“I know how.”

“Have you the strength?”

“Yes—the bodily and the spiritual. Don’t you know that I am already
part of you?”

“We shall be nearer still,” he murmured.

She flushed but met his gaze.

“Yes.... We shall be but one being.... Utterly.... For already our
hearts and souls are one. And we shall become of one mind and one body.

“I am no longer afraid of Sanang Noïane!”

“No longer afraid to slay him?” he asked quietly.

A blue light flashed in her eyes and her face grew still and white and
terrible.

“Death to the body? That is nothing, my lord!” she said, in a hard,
sweet voice. “It is written that we belong to God and that we return to
Him. All living things must die, Heart of the World! It is only the
death of souls that matters. And it has arrived at a time in the
history of mankind, I think, when the Slayer of Souls shall slay no
more.”

She looked at him, flushed, withdrew her hand and went slowly across
the room to the big bay window where potted flowers were in bloom.

From a window-box she took a pinch of dry soil and dropped it into the
bosom of her gown.

Then, facing the East, with lowered arms and palms turned outward:

“There is no god but God,” she whispered—“the merciful, the
long-suffering, the compassionate, the just.

“For it is written that when the heavens are rolled together like a
scroll, every soul shall know what it hath wrought.

“And those souls that are dead in Jehannum shall arise from the dead,
and shall have their day in court. Nor shall Erlik stay them till all
has been said.

“And on that day the soul of a girl that hath been put to death shall
ask for what reason it was slain.

“Thus it has been written.”

Then Tressa dropped to her knees, touched the carpet with her forehead,
straightened her lithe body and, looking over her shoulder, clapped her
hands together sharply.

Her maid opened the door. “Hasten with my lord’s luggage!” she cried
happily; and, still kneeling, lifted her head to her husband and
laughed up into his eyes.

“You should call the porter for we are nearly ready. Shall we go to the
station in a sleigh? Oh, wonderful!”

She leaped to her feet, extended her hand and caught his.

“Horses for the lord of the Yiort!” she cried, laughingly. “Kosh! Take
me out into this new white world that has been born to-day of the ten
purities and the ten thousand felicities! It has been made anew for you
and me who also have been born this day!”

He scarcely knew this sparkling, laughing girl with her quick grace and
her thousand swift little moods and gaieties.

Porters came to take his luggage from his own room; and then her trunk
and bags were ready, and were taken away.

The baggage sleigh drove off. Their own jingling sleigh followed; and
Tressa, buried in furs, looked out upon a dazzling, unblemished world,
lying silvery white under a sky as azure as her eyes.

“Keuke Mongol—Heavenly Azure,” he whispered close to her crimsoned
cheek, “do you know how I have loved you—always—always?”

“No, I did not know that,” she said.

“Nor I, in the beginning. Yet it happened, also, from the beginning
when I first saw you.”

“That is a delicious thing to be told. Within me a most heavenly glow
is spreading.... Unglove your hand.”

She slipped the glove from her own white fingers and felt for his under
the furs.

“Aie,” she sighed, “you are more beautiful than Ali; more wonderful
than the Flaming Pearl. Out of ice and fire a new world has been made
for us.”

“Heavenly Azure—my darling!”

“Oh-h,” she sighed, “your words are sweeter than the breeze in Yian! I
shall be a bride to you such as there never has been since the days of
the Blessed Companions—may their names be perfumed and
sweet-scented!... Shall I truly be one with you, my lord?”

“Mind, soul, and body, one being, you and I, little Heavenly Azure.”

“Between your two hands you hold me like a burning rose, my lord.”

“Your sweetness and fire penetrate my soul.”

“We shall burn together then till the sky-carpet be rolled up. Kosh! We
shall be one, and on that day I shall not be afraid.”

The sleigh came to a clashing, jingling halt; the train plowed into the
depot buried in vast clouds of snowy steam.

But when they had taken the places reserved for them, and the train was
moving swifter and more swiftly toward New York, fear suddenly
overwhelmed Victor Cleves, and his face grew grey with the menacing
tumult of his thoughts.

The girl seemed to comprehend him, too, and her own features became
still and serious as she leaned forward in her chair.

“It is in God’s hands, Heart of the World,” she said in a low voice.
“We are one, thou and I,—or nearly so. Nothing can harm my soul.”

“No.... But the danger—to your life——”

“I fear no Yezidee.”

“The beast will surely try to kill you. And what can I do? You say my
pistol is useless.”

“Yes.... But I want you near me.”

“Do you imagine I’d leave you for a second? Good God,” he added in a
strangled voice, “isn’t there any way I can kill this wild beast? With
my naked hands——?”

“You must leave him to me, Victor.”

“And you believe you can slay him? _Do_ you?”

She remained silent for a long while, bent forward in her armchair, and
her hands clasped tightly on her knees.

“My husband,” she said at last, “what your astronomers have but just
begun to suspect is true, and has long, long been known to the
Sheiks-el-Djebel.

“For, near to this world we live in, are other worlds—planets that do
not reflect light. And there is a dark world called Yrimid, close to
the earth—a planet wrapped in darkness—a black star.... And upon it
Erlik dwells.... And it is peopled by demons.... And from it comes
sickness and evil——”

She moistened her lips; sat for a while gazing vaguely straight before
her.

“From this black planet comes all evil upon earth,” she resumed in a
hushed voice. “For it is very near to the earth. It is not a hundred
miles away. All strange phenomena for which our scientists can not
account are due to this invisible planet,—all new and sudden
pestilences; all convulsions of nature; the newly noticed radio
disturbances; the new, so-called inter-planetary signals—all—all have
their hidden causes within that black and demon-haunted planet long
known to the Yezidees, and by them called Yrimid, or Erlik’s World.
And—it is to this black planet that I shall send Sanang, Slayer of
Souls. I shall tear him from this earth, though he cling to it with
every claw; and I shall fling his soul into darkness—out across the
gulf—drive his soul forth—hurl it toward Erlik like a swift rocket
charred and falling from the sky into endless night.

“So shall I strive to deal with Prince Sanang, Sorcerer of Mount
Alamout, the last of the Assassins, Sheik-el-Djebel, and Slayer of
Souls.... May God remember him in hell.”


Already their train was rolling into the great terminal.

Recklow was awaiting them. He took Tressa’s hands in his and gazed
earnestly into her face.

“Have you come to show us how to conclude this murderous business?” he
asked grimly.

“I shall try,” she said calmly. “Where have you cornered Sanang?”

“Could you and Victor come at once?”

“Yes.” She turned and looked at her husband, who had become quite pale.

Recklow saw the look they exchanged. There could be no misunderstanding
what had happened to these two. Their tragedy had ended. They were
united at last. He understood it instantly,—realised how terrible was
this new and tragic situation for them both.

Yet, he knew also that the salvation of civilisation itself now
depended upon this girl. She must face Sanang. There was nothing else
possible.

“The streets are choked with snow,” he said, “but I have a coupé and
two strong horses waiting.”

He nodded to one of his men standing near. Cleves gave him the hand
luggage and checks.

“All right,” he said in a low voice to Recklow; and passed one arm
through Tressa’s.


The coupé was waiting on Forty-second Street, guarded by a policeman.
When they had entered and were seated, two mounted policemen rode ahead
of the lurching vehicle, picking a way amid the monstrous snow-drifts,
and headed for the East River.

“We’ve got him somewhere in a wretched row of empty houses not far from
East River Park. I’m taking you there. I’ve drawn a cordon of my men
around the entire block. He can’t get away. But I dared take no chances
with this Yezidee sorcerer—dared not let one of my men go in to look
for him—go anywhere near him,—until I could lay the situation before
you, Mrs. Cleves.”

“Yes,” she said calmly, “it was the only way, Mr. Recklow. There would
have been no use shooting him—no use taking him prisoner. A prisoner,
he remains as deadly as ever; dead, his mind still lives and breeds
evil. You are quite right; it is for me to deal with Sanang.”

Recklow shuddered in spite of himself. “Can you tear his claws from the
vitals of the world, and free the sick brains of a million people from
the slavery of this monster’s mind?”

The girl said seriously:

“Even Satan was stoned. It is so written. And was cast out. And dwells
forever and ever in Abaddon. No star lights that Pit. None lights the
Black Planet, Yrimid. It is where evil dwells. And there Sanang Noïane
belongs.”

And now, beyond the dirty edges of the snow-smothered city, under an
icy mist they caught sight of the river where ships lay blockaded by
frozen floes.

Gulls circled over it; ghostly factory chimneys on the further shore
loomed up gigantic, ranged like minarettes.

The coupé, jolting along behind the mounted policemen, struggled up
toward the sidewalk and stopped. The two horses stood steaming, knee
deep in snow. Recklow sprang out; Tressa gave him one hand and stepped
lithely to the sidewalk. Then Cleves got out and came and took hold of
his wife’s arm again.

“Well,” he said harshly to Recklow, “where is this damned Yezidee
hidden?”

Recklow pointed in silence, but he and Tressa had already lifted their
gaze to the stark, shabby row of abandoned three-story houses where
every dirty blind was closed.

“They’re to be demolished and model tenements built,” he said briefly.

A man muffled in a fur overcoat came up and took Tressa’s hand and
kissed it.

She smiled palely at Benton, spoke of Yulun, wished him happiness.
While she was yet speaking Selden approached and bent over her gloved
hand. She spoke to him very sweetly of Sansa, expressing pleasure at
the prospect of seeing her again in the body.

“The Seldens and ourselves have adjoining apartments at the Ritz,” said
Benton. “We have reserved a third suite for you and Victor.”

She inclined her lovely head, gravely, then turned to Recklow, saying
that she was ready.

“It makes no difference which front door I unlock,” he said. “All these
tenements are connected by human rat-holes and hidden runways leading
from one house to another.... How many men do you want?”

“I want you four men,—nobody else.”

Recklow led the way up a snow-covered stoop, drew a key from his
pocket, fitted it, and pulled open the door.

A musty chill struck their faces as they entered the darkened and empty
hallway. Involuntarily every man drew his pistol.

“I must ask you to do exactly what I tell you to do,” she said calmly.

“Certainly,” said Recklow, caressing his white moustache and striving
to pierce the gloom with his keen eyes.

Then Tressa took her husband’s hand. “Come,” she said. They mounted the
stairway together; and the three others followed with pistols lifted.

There was a vague grey light on the second floor; the broken rear
shutters let it in.

As though she seemed to know her way, the girl led them forward, opened
a door in the wall, and disclosed a bare, dusty room in the next house.

Through this she stepped; the others crept after her with weapons
ready. She opened a second door, turned to the four men.

“Wait here for me. Come only when I call,” she whispered.

“For God’s sake take me with you,” burst out Cleves.

“In God’s name stay where you are till you hear me call your name!” she
said almost breathlessly.

Then, suddenly she turned, swiftly retracing her steps; and they saw
her pass through the first door and disappear into the first house they
had entered.

A terrible silence fell among them. The sound of her steps on the bare
boards had died away. There was not a sound in the chilly dusk.

Minute after minute dragged by. One by one the men peered fearfully at
Cleves. His visage was ghastly and they could see his pistol-hand
trembling.

Twice Recklow looked at his wrist watch. The third time he said,
unsteadily: “She has been gone three-quarters of an hour.”

Then, far away, they heard a heavy tread on the stairs. Nearer and
nearer came the footsteps. Every pistol was levelled at the first door
as a man’s bulky form darkened it.

“It’s one of my men,” said Recklow in a voice like a low groan. “Where
on earth is Mrs. Cleves?”

“I came to tell you,” said the agent, “Mrs. Cleves came out of the
first house nearly an hour ago. She got into the coupé and told the
driver to go to the Ritz.”

“What!” gasped Recklow.

“She’s gone to the Ritz,” repeated the agent. “No one else has come
out. And I began to worry—hearing nothing of you, Mr. Recklow. So I
stepped in to see——”

“You say that Mrs. Cleves went out of the house we entered, got into
the coupé, and told the driver to go to the Ritz?” demanded Cleves,
astounded.

“Yes, sir.”

“Where is that coupé? Did it return?”

“It had not returned when I came in here.”

“Go back and look for it. Look in the other street,” said Recklow
sharply.

The agent hurried away over the creaking boards. The four men gazed at
one another.

“The thing to do is to obey her and stay where we are,” said Recklow
grimly. “Who knows what peril we may cause her if we move from——”

His words froze on his lips as Tressa’s voice rang out from the
darkness beyond the door they were guarding:

“Victor I I—I need you! Come to me, my husband!”

As Cleves sprang through the door into the darkness beyond, Benton
smashed a window sash with all the force of his shoulder, and, reaching
out through the shattered glass, tore the rotting blinds from their
hinges, letting in a flood of sickly light.

Against the bare wall stood Tressa, both arms extended, her hands flat
against the plaster, and each hand transfixed and pinned to the wall by
a knife.

A white sheet lay at her feet. On it rested a third knife. And, bending
on one knee to pick it up, they caught a glimpse of a slender young man
in fashionable afternoon attire, who, as they entered with the crash of
the shattered window in their ears, sprang to his nimble feet and stood
confronting them, knife in hand.

Instantly every man fired at him and the bullets whipped the plaster to
a smoke behind him, but the slender, dark skinned young man stood
motionless, looking at them out of brilliant eyes that slanted a
trifle.

Again the racket of the fusillade swept him and filled the room with
plaster dust.

Cleves, frantic with horror, laid hold of the knives that pinned his
wife’s hands to the wall, and dragged them out.

But there was no blood, no wound to be seen on her soft palms. She took
the murderous looking blades from him, threw one terrible look at
Sanang, kicked the shroud across the floor toward him, and flung both
knives upon it.

The place was still dim with plaster dust and pistol fumes as she
stepped forward through the acrid mist, motioning the four men aside.

“Sanang!” she cried in a clear voice, “may God remember you in hell,
for my feet have spurned your shroud, and your knives, which could not
scar my palms, shall never pierce my heart! Look out for yourself,
Prince Sanang!”

“Tokhta!” he said, calmly. “My soul be ransom for yours!”

“That is a lie! My soul is already ransomed! My mind is the more
powerful. It has already halted yours. It is conquering yours. It is
seizing your mind and enslaving it. It is mastering your will, Sanang!
Your mind bends before mine. You know it! You know it is bending. You
feel it is breaking down!”

Sanang’s eyes began to glitter but his pale brown face had grown almost
white.

“I slew you once—in the Wood of the White Moth,” he said huskily.
“There is no resurrection from such a death, little Heavenly Azure.
Look upon me! My soul and yours are one!”

“You are looking upon my soul,” she said.

“A lie! You are in your body!”

The girl laughed. “My body lies asleep in the Ritz upon my husband’s
bed,” she said. “My body is his, my mind belongs to him, my soul is
already one with his. Do you not know it, dog of a Yezidee? Look upon
me, Sanang Noïane! Look upon my unwounded hands! My shroud lies at your
feet. And there lie the knives that could not pierce my heart! I am
thrice clean! Listen to my words, Sanang! There is no other god but
God!”

The young man’s visage grew pasty and loose and horrible; his lips
became flaccid like dewlaps; but out of these sagging folds of livid
skin his voice burst whistling, screaming, as though wrenched from his
very belly:

“May Erlik strangle you! May you rot where you stand! May your face
become a writhing mass of maggots and your body a corruption of living
worms!

“For what you are doing to me this day may every demon in hell torment
you!

“Have a care what you are about!” he screeched. “You are slaying my
mind, you sorceress! You have seized my mind and are crushing it! You
are putting out its light, you Yezidee witch!—you are quenching the
last spark—of reason—in—me——”

“Sanang!”

His knife fell clattering to the floor. But he stood stock still, his
hands clutching his head—stood motionless, while scream on scream tore
through the loose and gaping lips, blowing them into ghastly, distorted
folds.

“Sanang Noïane!” she cried in her clear voice, “the Eight Towers are
darkened! The Rampart of Gog and Magog is fallen! On Mount Alamout
nothing is living. The minds of mankind are free again!”

She stepped forward, slowly, and stood near him chanting in a low voice
the Prayers for the Dead She bent down and unrolled the shroud, laid it
on his shoulders and drew it up and across his face, covering his dying
eyes, and swathed him so, slowly, from head to foot.

Then she gathered up the three knives, cast them upward into the air.
They did not fall again. They disappeared. And all the while, under her
breath, the girl was chanting the Prayers for the Dead as she moved
silently about her business.

Shrouded to the forehead in its white cerements, the muffled figure of
Sanang stood upright, motionless as a swathed and frozen corpse.

Outside, the daylight had become greyer. It had begun to snow again,
and a few flakes blew in through the shattered windows and clung to the
winding sheet of Sanang.

And now Tressa drew close to the shrouded shape and stood before it,
gazing intently upon the outlined features of the last of the Yezidees.

“Sanang,” she said very softly, “I hear your soul bidding your body
farewell. Tokhta!”

Then, under the strained gaze of the four men gathered there, the
shroud fell to the floor in a loose heap of white folds. There was
nobody under it; no trace of Sanang. The human shape of the Yezidee had
disappeared; but a greyish mist had filled the room, wavering up like
smoke from the shroud, and, like smoke, blowing in a long streamer
toward the window where the draught drew it out through the falling
snow and scattered the last shred of it against the greying sky.

In the room the mist thinned swiftly; the four men could now see one
another. But Tressa was no longer in the room. And in place of the
white shroud a piece of filthy tattered carpet lay on the floor. And a
dead rat, flattened out, dry and dusty, lay upon it.

“For God’s sake,” whispered Recklow hoarsely, “let us get out of this!”

Cleves, his pistol clutched convulsively, stared at him in terror. But
Recklow took him by the arm and drew him away, muttering that Tressa
was waiting for him, and might be ill, and that there was nothing
further to expect in this ghastly spot.


They went with Cleves to the Ritz. At the desk the clerk said that Mrs.
Cleves had the keys and was in her apartment.

The three men entered the corridor with him; watched him try the door;
saw him open it; lingered a moment after it had closed; heard the key
turn.

At the sound of the door closing the maid came.

“Madame is asleep in her room,” she whispered.

“When did she come in?”

“More than two hours ago, sir. I have drawn her bath, but when I opened
the door a few moments ago, Madame was still asleep.”

He nodded; he was trembling when he put off his overcoat and dropped
hat and gloves on the carpet.

From the little rose and ivory reception room he could see the closed
door of his wife’s chamber. And for a while he stood staring at it.

Then, slowly, he crossed this room, opened the door; entered.

In her bedroom the tinted twilight was like ashes of roses. He went to
the bed and looked down at her shadowy face; gazed intently; listened;
then, in sudden terror, bent and laid his hand on her heart. It was
beating as tranquilly as a child’s; but as she stirred, turned her
head, and unclosed her eyes, under his hand her heart leaped like a
wild thing caught unawares and the snowy skin glowed with an exquisite
and deepening tint as she lifted her arms and clasped them around her
husband’s, neck, drawing his quivering face against her own.

THE END


[1] “Look out!” Nomad-Mongol dialect.

[2] Urdu = An imperial encampment.

[3] Mocalla = A platform used as a Moslem pulpit.




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