avenge the blood of your people with the bloody moon."
When the boy was eighteen, Alligator Pearson died. It was, said tradition, the time of the year when bloody moon occurred. The neighbors found the stark form of the old pioneer in the trail leading to his cabin. He lay face downward in the path, without mark of violence on his person. Yet he had died in terror, with twisted face and staring eyes. Twenty years later, the second Pearson, by a white wife who followed the princess, was in like manner, at about the same time of year, assassinated. A kindred mystery shrouded his death. The bloody moon had been seen an hour previously by his wife, as she had gone down the road to the tobacco field to look for him, supper being delayed and growing cold, and she uneasy and fearful. She found him among the tobacco plants, face to the ground, eyes and mouth full of dust.
In his own lifetime young Pearson had twice known the shock of this swift, inexplicable visitation. The first occasion came about the time he was ten years old. Grandfather Pearson, third in line from the original pioneer, hale and hearty, had eaten his supper and retired, his bedroom being the roofroom under the gable. The rest of the family were in the living room below, his granny knitting, his mother enjoying her after-supper dip of snuff, and his father smoking. Suddenly the very oaken rafters of the old house quivered from the frightful scream. He dashed with his father up to the roof-room.
They found the old man alone, sitting starkly up in bed, his eyes wide and staring, the breath only a moment since left his body. They found no sign on the old man's person more than a tiny abrasion on his gray, hairy chest. But the time was spring of the year, at the full of the moon; and the flood of light through the window upon the puncheon floor was as red as blood.
When he looked again, the glow had mellowed to its normal milk-white. Was it the bloody moon that had killed his grandsire? The doctor pronounced the cause heart failure. Who could deny that the practitioner was correct in his diagnosis? For often enough the human heart does fail when the sins of the father begin their grim visitation down the generations.
The details of his own father's taking-off he did not often reflect upon. That tragedy was still too poignant, too recent. The time was a year before, at the first full moon in May. His father had visited Bowling Green that day, making the trip on mule-back. He was expected home before sundown, but something must have delayed him, for night fell and he had not returned. The moon had risen when mule and rider appeared at the front gate.
It was his father's custom to dismount there and halloo for some of the boys to come out and put up and feed the mule. This time no such familiar call came. Going to the door to see why his father did not dis¬ mount and come in, young Pearson saw beast and rider, statuesque in the red flood of moonlight, in a vivid vision of tragic death. The mark of the curse of the Indian bloody moon was written indelibly on the sagging lifeless body of his parent. He carried the old man in and placed him upon the bed in the living room. But no one ever knew how he had come by his death.
Now he had just seen, in all of its terrible portent, the bloody moon. And the time was spring of the year, in the month of May!
Pearson rose shakily, going into the house and closing and bolting the door. Perhaps it would be a useless
