Page:Weird Tales Volume 10 Issue 03 (1927-09).djvu/144

(Continued from page 428)

horn. The mammoth lunged forward, the hounds leaped in white arcs of flying fur, and Johnson's scream stabbed through the din of animal howls.

They saw the huntress leap from her titanic steed to catch Johnson in her arms; saw the ivory figure knocked from his grasp. The golden hair of the huntress enveloped him like a ruddy silk mantle and her mouth was pressed to his throat.

But a greater tragedy was imminent. As if the scent of human blood maddened it, the mammoth plunged forward, his great tusks lunging between the leaping hounds to stab his human enemy; and the hounds closed in with unearthly yelpings.

Transfixed by the sight, the men at the cabin stared at the calamity they were powerless to avert, until there came a loud crunch as the mammoth ’s foot trod on the ivory figure of the huntress which Johnson had dropped.

Then, as if at a signal, the ghost-beasts seemed frozen in their tracks, and from them came a glistening white mist which swayed to and fro as it rose and drifted across the face of the young moon, and the watchers saw, like a frail cloud, the shining form of that lovely, hell-born huntress, as it blew away on the wind of dawn.

Light grew swiftly. The sun came up and shone on a mountainous mass of hairy mammoth flesh and long-furred hounds lying on the tundra.

As they stood, chained to the spot by paralysis of horror, every nerve taut, the men at the cabin saw that mound of flesh subside to pulp, and a dreadful stench arose in a smoky steam. By noon there was a gelatinous mass, which by nightfall had soaked into the earth, leaving only the skeletons. A clean, cold wind from the snows sweetened the air where Jo prodded the bones with a stick to recover all that was left of his ivory huntress, a head on which the features faithfully depicted her inscrutable smile, with lips and teeth slightly parted.

Cressey did not offer to buy it, and the head still hangs above Jo's cabin door. One glance at that lovely face had power to recall all too vividly the fate of Stamwell and Johnson, for whom crosses were erected in the valley and lop-sticks near by carved with their names. Cressey did not smile nor dispute the assertion of Baptiste that he should never return to that valley.

"M'sieu," said Baptiste, "dat devil-womans have dreenk your blood wan time, an' eef some day she come back, she catch you again, because all womans ees jealous, an' eef a womans git jealous eet open doors of ver' bad hells. You do what Baptiste say, you wear a li'l crucifix all time." And though not a religious man, Cressey has never since been without that symbol.