is what I've waited for, calmly at first. Curious. Alert. Sure of most factors. But I don't know how much I can stand. I keep losing my grip, gaining it, and losing it again."
His hand shook as he dialed the call through. "Hello, Herb? This is Colt."
"John—how are you?"
"Not so good. And, like a fool, I dismissed my servants today. I'm alone. . . .
All the while he talked, Colt listened. The weird music of the wind was muted by distance. It waxed louder.
"My writing routine for the last week's been shot to hell, Herb. Been trying to get some rest early tonight, but—"
What was that? Colt winced. A tiny breeze, preamble to the wind now on its way, rattled a shutter. Colt thought, did I lock every door, check everything?
"Sorry to hear that, John—" Herb Thompson was talking. Colt gave ear, then:
"Herb, I'd like to have you come for the night. Can you arrange—"
"I'll have to ask the little woman, John. Hold on."
A pause. Thompson was conferring with his wife. And far off the wind rose steadily, rapidly. "Sorry, Colt, Alice says we've got company coming."
"Oh." Colt swallowed. "Look, Herb, it's important. I've got theories about—well." He stopped, groping for words.
"Sounds like a case of nerves," said Thompson. "Why don't you come over here?"
"That wouldn't help." Colt shook his head. "I don't know what would. I—well—I'll call back in half an hour."
He hung up. What could Herb do? Nothing. It wouldn't be fair to drag an innocent into this set-up. And, anyway, how explain to Herb about the wind? Police help? They'd send a soft-pad squad.
Colt deliberately opened the front door. A lopsided frame of moonlight stroked across the gleaming floor, picked out his wine-colored robe and slippers. He stood, shivering, waiting.
The great wind could be only a mile away now, soughing through a long high, dim corridor of swaying elms, plunging down the arboreal path toward Colt's lonely country manor.
Colt lit a cigarette, but his dark eyes fastened on the tree lane; eyes that had seen Rangoon, Stockholm, swept from Nairobi to the Amazon.
It was a dark, meaningful wind. Others might have been amused by Colt's wild thoughts. Thompson, for instance, would laugh uproariously.
But Colt was not amused. Alone out here, the nine o'clock countryside steeped in a vast tide of shadowed, eerie silence, this fortress of a house his final refuge, the last roll of dice forced on him, Colt could only wait.
The last stand. Decks cleared for action. Colt dragged on his cigarette, flicked it away, thinking, if I scream no one will hear me. No one. I'm far from town. Too damned far.
He'd phone Herb in twenty minutes. What to say? Something like this: "Herb, it began ten years ago when I was investi-pating phenomena. I'd been around, seen hurricanes, typhoons and whirlwinds. I knew what wind could do.
"Well, I was in Tibet. I heard of a mountain called the mountain of Winds; the space where the dark winds from all over the earth congregate at one time or other. It's a vast evil mountain, gray and jutting; hard, bony rock without a hand or foothold. Blasphemy to touch it.
"I touched it, Herb. More, I scaled it. Up thousands of sickening, dizzy feet, climbing where only madmen climb to probe into what's better left undissected. I gained its crest raw and wounded.
Of all the high, wild places I've seen
