"BUT I AM A WITCH"

Barbee had not believed April Bell when she had said that, half mockingly, over drinks.

But now, feeling himself flow and change, assuming the lithe, powerful shape of a wolf and loping through the night, he could believe her.

For ahead of him glimmered the white shape of a running wolf bitch—who called to him with the voice of April Bell.

_DARKER

^{THAN YOU THINK}

JACK WILLIAMSON

A DELL BOOK Published by Dell Publishing Co., Inc. 1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza New York, New York 10017

Copyright 1948 by Jack Williamson Copyright 1940 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Unknown.

Illustrations copyright 1940 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Illustrations reprinted by permission of the artist, Edd Cartier

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

Dell ® TM 681510, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.

ISBN: 0-440-11746-1

Printed in the United States of America Reprinted by arrangement with the author. First Dell printing—July 1979

CONTENTS

Chapter

I The Girl in White Fur

II The Kitten Killing

3. The White Jade Wolf

4. The Witch Child

V The Thing Behind the Veil

VI As a Wolf Runs—

VII The Trap in the Study

VIII The Huntress in the Dark

IX Nightmare's Aftermath

X A Friend of April Bell

XI As a Saber-Tooth Slays—

XII Hair of the Tiger

XIII Private Hell

XIV As a Serpent Strikes—

XV The Human Side

XVI The Most Frightful Shape

XVII Not All Human

XVIII Rebirth of the Witch Folk

XIX On Sardis Hill

XX The Child of Night

XXI Into the Shadows

CHAPTER ONE

The Girl in White Fur

The girl came up to Will Barbee while he stood outside of the glass-and-stucco terminal building at Trojan Field, Clarendon's new municipal airport, hopefully watching the leaden sky for a glimpse of the incoming planes. There was no reason for the sudden shiver that grated his teeth together—unless it was a fresh blast of the damp east wind. She looked as trimly cool and beautiful as a streamlined electric icebox.

She had a million dollars' worth of flame-red hair. White, soft, sweetly serious, her face confirmed his first dazzled impression—that she was something very wonderful and rare. She met his eyes, and her rather large mouth drew into a quick pleasant quirk.

Barbee turned to face her, breathless. He looked again into her gravely smiling eyes—they were really green. He searched her for the cause of that cold shudder of intuitive alarm, and became aware of an equally illogical attraction—life had turned Barbee a little cynical toward women, and he liked to consider himself totally immune.

Her green gabardine business suit was modishly severe, plainly expensive, and cunningly chosen to accent the color of her eyes. Against the windy chill of this overcast October afternoon, she wore a short coat of some heavy white fur that he decided must be Arctic wolf—bleached, perhaps, or albino.

But the kitten was unusual.

She carried a snakeskin novelty bag, with the double handle over her arm, like two thick coils of a diamondback. The bag was open, like a flattened basket, and the kitten peered contentedly out of it. It was a perfectly darling little black kitten, less than half grown. It wore a wide red silk ribbon, neatly tied in a double bow.

They made a striking picture, but the kitten, blinking peacefully at the lights coming on in the cloudy dusk, just didn't seem to fit. The girl didn't look quite the type to shriek with delight over such a clever pet. And the slick chick she appeared to be, the chic young businesswoman, simply wouldn't include even the very cutest black kitten in her street ensemble.

He tried to forget that odd little shiver of alarm, and wondered how she knew him. Clarendon was not a large city, and reporters get around. That red hair was something you wouldn't forget. He looked again, to be sure her disturbing eyes were really fixed on him. They were.

"Barbee?"

Her voice was crisp and vigorous. The soft, throaty vitality of it was as exciting, somehow, as her hair and her eyes. Her manner remained casually impersonal.

"Will Barbee," he admitted. "Leg man for the Clarendon Star."

More than ever interested, he enlarged upon that modest fact. Perhaps he hoped to discover the cause of his brief shiver. He didn't want her to go away.

"My editor wants two birds with one stone tonight," he told her. "The first is Colonel Walraven—twenty years since he wore the uniform, but still he likes the title. He has just quit a cushy berth in the Washington bureaucracy and come home to run for the senate. But he won't have much to say for the papers. Not till he sees Preston Troy."

The girl was still listening. The black kitten yawned at the lights flashing on, and the little crowd of waiting relatives and friends clustered along the steel-mesh barrier that kept the public off the field, and the white-clad attendants beyond, busy preparing to service the planes. But the girl's intense green eyes still watched his face, and her magical voice murmured softly: "Who is your other bird?"

"A big one," Barbee said. "Dr. Lamarck Mondrick. Kingpin of the Humane Research Foundation, out by the university. He's due here tonight, on a chartered plane from the West Coast, with his little expedition. They've been to the Gobi—but probably you know all about them?"

"No." Something in her voice stirred his pulse. "What about them?"

"Archeologists," he said. "They had dug in Mongolia before the war. When the Japs surrendered, in '45, they cut all sorts of diplomatic red tape to get back again. Sam Quain, who is Mondrick's right hand man, had served on some war mission to China, and he knew the ropes. I don't know exactly what they went to look for, but it must be something special."

She looked interested, and he went on: "They're our home-town boys, coming back tonight, after two years of perilous tangles with armies and bandits and sandstorms and scorpions, in darkest Mongolia. They're supposed to be bringing home something that will rock the world of archeology."

"And what would that be?"

"My job tonight is to find that out." Barbee still studied her with gray puzzled eyes. The black kitten blinked at him happily. Nothing about her explained that brief tingle of intuitive alarm. Her green-eyed smile seemed still aloofly impersonal, and he was afraid she would go away. Gulping, he asked desperately: "Do I know you?"

"I'm a rival." She was suddenly less remote; her voice held a purring chuckle of friendliness. "April Bell, of the Clarendon Call." She showed him a tiny black notebook, palmed in her left hand. "I was warned to beware of you, Will Barbee."

"Oh." He grinned and nodded toward the little groups of passengers inside the glass front of the terminal building, waiting for the airliner. "I was afraid you had just stopped off, on your way back to Hollywood or Broadway. But you aren't really on the Call?"

He looked at that flame-colored hair, and shook his head in admiration. "I'd have seen you."

"I'm new," she admitted. "In fact, I took my journalism degree just last summer. I only began Monday on the Call, and this is my first real assignment." Her voice was childishly confidential. "I'm afraid I'm pretty much a stranger in Clarendon, now—I was born here, but we went to California when I was still a little girl."

Her white teeth gleamed, in a smile innocently hopeful.

"I'm so new," she confided softly, "and I want so much to make good on the Call. I do want to turn in a good story on this Mondrick expedition. It all sounds so strange and thrilling, but I'm afraid I didn't learn many ologies in college. Would you mind, Barbee, if I ask you a few silly questions?"

Barbee was looking at her teeth. They were even and strong and very white—the sort of teeth with which beautiful women in dentifrice advertisements gnawed bones. It occurred to him that the spectacle of April Bell gnawing a red bone would be infinitely fascinating.

"Would you really mind?"

Barbee gulped and called back his thoughts. He grinned at her, beginning to understand. She was a fresh cub, new to the newspaper game—but clever as Lilith. The kitten was doubtless intended to complete a touching picture of helpless femininity, and annihilate any male resistance that her appealing eyes and devastating hair had failed to conquer.

"We're rivals, lady," he reminded her, as sternly as possible. Her look of hurt reproach tugged at him, but he kept the gruff abruptness in his voice. "And your name couldn't really be April Bell."

"It was Susan." Her greenish eyes turned dark, pleading hopefully. "But I think April will look so much nicer on my first by-line." Her voice was small and husky. "Please—about the expedition—Dr. Mondrick must be pretty important, if all the papers want a story on him?"

"He'll make good copy," Barbee agreed. "His whole expedition is only four men, and I'm sure they had quite an adventure, just getting to those sites in the desert and back again, in times like these. Sam Quain has Chinese friends, and they must have helped."

With a tiny fountain pen, she made flowing marks in the little black notebook. The deft smooth grace of her white hands, oddly, made him think of some wild creature, unfettered and shy.

Chinese friends," she murmured as she wrote, and looked up beseechingly. "Really, haven't you any idea what it is they're bringing back?"

"Not even a hint," he told her. "Somebody at the Foundation just called the Star this afternoon, and tipped us off that they'd be here in a chartered plane, by seven. The Foundation man said they'd have a hot story—some big scientific announcement. He wanted photographers, and scientific staff writers, but the Star doesn't go in for heavy science. I'm supposed to cover Walraven and the expedition, too."

He was trying to remember the name of a certain mythological lady. She had been fascinating—as lovely, no doubt, as April Bell. But, in the legend, she had a disturbing way of changing the men she fascinated into unpleasant beasts. What was her name— Circe?

Barbee hadn't spoken that name aloud—he was certain of it. But a quick, humorous quirk of the girl's red mouth, and a gleam of slightly malicious amusement in her eyes, gave him a brief, rattled impression that he had—though he didn't even know what had made him think of that mythical sorceress.

For an uncomfortable instant, he tried to unravel the association. He had read a little of Menninger and Freud, and sampled Frazer's Golden Bough. The symbolism of such folktales, he knew, expressed the fears and hopes of early man, and the notion popping into his own head must betray something about his own unconscious. Exactly what, he didn't want to know.

He laughed abruptly, and said: "I'll tell you anything I can—though I'll probably get it in the neck when Preston Troy reads my story in the Call, too. Or shall I write it out for you?"

"My shorthand is very good, thank you."

"Well, Dr. Mondrick was a big-shot anthropologist at Clarendon University, before he resigned, ten years ago, to establish his Foundation. He's not one of your narrow specialists, and he doesn't blow his own horn. But any of his associates will tell you that he's about the greatest all-around student of mankind in the world today. Biologist, psychologist, archeologist, sociologist, ethnologist—he seems to know everything that matters about his pet subject, mankind.

"Mondrick is the big shot of the Foundation. He raises the jack and spends it—without much publicity about the exact projects he's at work on. He led three expeditions to the Gobi, before the war interrupted, and then he rushed right back. The digs are in the Ala-shan section of the southwestern Gobi—just about the driest, meanest, hottest desert going."

"Go on," the girl prompted eagerly, pen poised above her tiny notebook. "Haven't you any idea what they're after?"

"We start even there—and the best man wins!" Barbee grinned. "But, whatever it is, Mondrick has been after it for twenty years. He organized the Foundation, just to find it. It's his life work, and the life work of such a man is apt to be important."

The little groups of spectators stirred expectantly outside the steel fence, and a small boy pointed excitedly into the gray overcast. The damp wind shuddered to the drum of mighty motors. Barbee looked at his watch.

"Five forty," he told the girl. "The airliner isn't due till six, the dispatcher says. So this must be Mondrick's plane coming in early."

"Already?" Greenish eyes shining, she seemed almost as breathless as the pointing boy. But she watched him, not the sky. "You know the others?" she asked. "The men with Mondrick?"

A flood of memories slowed Barbee's reply. His mind saw three once-familiar faces, and the murmur of the waiting crowd became the haunting echo of once-known voices, ringing down the years. He nodded, a little sadly.

"Yes, I know them."

"Then tell me."

April Bell's crisp voice broke his brief reverie. She waited, with her quick pen ready. He knew he shouldn't spill all his background material to a rival from the Call, but her hair was sullen flame, and the dark warmth of her oddly long eyes thawed his reluctance.

"The three men who went back to Mongolia with Mondrick in '45 are Sam Quain and Nick Spivak and Rex Chittum. They're the oldest friends I have. We were all freshmen together at the university, while Mondrick still was teaching there. Sam and I boarded two years at Mondrick's house, and afterwards the four of us were all suitemates in Trojan Hall on the campus. We all took Mondrick's courses, and—well— you see—"

Barbee stammered, and halted awkwardly. An old pain awakened, throbbing at his throat.

"Go on," whispered April Bell, and the quick flash of her sympathetic smile made him resume.

"Mondrick was already gathering his disciples, you see. He must already have planned this Research Foundation, though he didn't organize it until after I graduated. I believe he was picking men, then, to train for this search in the Gobi, for whatever it is."

Something made him gulp.

"Anyway, we all took his courses—in what he called the 'humane sciences.' We worshipped him. He got scholarships for us, and gave us all the special help he could, and took us with him on his summer field trips to Central America and Peru."

The girl's eyes were uncomfortably penetrating.

"What happened to you, Barbee?"

"I was somehow left out," he admitted awkwardly. "I never quite knew why—because the same bug had bitten me. I loved all the work, and my grades were higher than Sam's. I'd have given my right arm to be with them on the first dig in the Gobi."

"What happened?" the girl insisted, without mercy.

"I never knew." He swallowed hard. "Something turned Mondrick against me—I never knew what. At the end of our senior year, Mondrick was giving us all inoculations and blood-group tests, to get us ready for another field trip. He called me into the lab, one day, and told me not to plan on going."

"But why?" the girl whispered.

"He wouldn't say why." Barbee spoke huskily, wincing from that old injury. "Of course he saw how hurt I was, but he wouldn't explain. He just turned gruff—as if the thing hurt him too—and promised to help me get any other job I wanted. That was when I went to work on the Star."

"And your friends went on to Mongolia?"

"That same summer," Barbee said. "With the first Foundation expedition."

Her green eyes searched him.

"But still," she said, "the four of you are friends?"

He nodded, faintly puzzled.

"Yes, we're friends. I felt a little bitter toward old Mondrick because he wouldn't tell me why he didn't want me. But I never had any quarrel at all with Sam and Nick and Rex. They're okay. Just the same, every time I run across them. The Four Muleteers, Sam used to call us, when we made those muleback summer jaunts into Mexico and Guatemala and Peru. If Mondrick ever told them why he kicked me out, they never spoke about it."

Barbee looked uncomfortably past the girl's bright hair into the cold leaden dusk that now was throbbing to the engines of the unseen plane.

"They didn't change," he said. "But of course we drifted apart. Mondrick was training them into a team of specialists in different departments of his 'humane sciences'—grooming them to look for that something in the Ala-shan. They didn't have much time for me."

Barbee caught his breath.

"Miss Bell," he demanded abruptly, to end that aching memory of old defeat, "how did you know my name?"

Her eyes lit with a teasing mockery.

"Perhaps that was just a hunch."

Barbee shivered again. He knew that he himself possessed what he called the "nose for news"—an intuitive perception of human motivations and the impending events that would spring from them. It wasn't a faculty he could analyze or account for, but he knew that it wasn't unusual. Most successful reporters possessed it, he believed—even though, in an age of skepticism for everything except mechanistic materialism, they wisely denied it.

That dim sense had been useful to him—on those summer field trips, before Mondrick turned him out, it had fed him to more than one promising prehistoric site, simply because he somehow knew where a band of wild hunters would prefer to camp or to dig a comrade's grave.

Commonly, however, that uncontrolled faculty had been more curse than blessing. It made him too keenly aware of all that people thought and did around him, kept him troubled with an uneasy alertness. Except when he was drunk. He drank too much, and knew that many other newsmen did. That vague sensitivity, he believed, was half the reason.

That some formless intuition, perhaps, could account for his brief shudder at the first glimpse of April Bell—though nothing about her long, warm eyes and flame-colored hair seemed at all alarming now. And her own hunch about his name wasn't completely surprising—except that it went too far.

A good deal too far. Barbee grinned at her and tried to relax that instinctive alarm. Doubtless her own editor had briefed her on the story he expected her to get and told her how to get it. Probably she was tantalizing men with her own irresistible mixture of wide-eyed innocence and guile. The strangest incongruity always had a sane explanation, if only you could find it.

"Now—please, Barbee—who are they?"

Her red head nodded eagerly toward a little group filing out of the terminal building, beyond the steel barrier. A thin little wisp of a man gestured excitedly toward the dull, thrumming sky. A tiny child cried to see, and her mother took her up. A tall blind woman came behind, guided by the leash of a huge tawny German shepherd.

"If you have such wonderful hunches," Barbee retorted, "why ask me?"

The girl smiled repentently.

"I'm sorry, Barbee. It's true I just came back, but I do have old friends in Clarendon, and my editor told me you used to work with Mondrick. These people must be waiting to welcome the expedition home. I'm sure you know them. May we talk to them?"

"If you like." Barbee didn't want to resist. "Come along."

Her arm slipped through his. Even white fur, where it touched his wrist, felt somehow electric. This girl did things to him. He had believed himself impervious to women; but her warm allure, balanced with that queer, lingering sense of unease, disturbed him more deeply than he wanted her to guess.

He guided her through the terminal building, pausing beside a clattering teletype machine to ask the busy dispatcher: "Is that the Mondrick plane?"

"In the pattern, Barbee." The dispatcher nodded, frowning at a wind indicator. "Landing on instruments."

Still he couldn't see the plane, however, when they came outside again to the edge of the taxiway, and the drum of it seemed fainter in the gloomy murk.

"Well, Barbee." The girl nodded hopefully toward the people waiting. "Who are they?"

Barbee wondered what made his voice unsteady.

"The tall woman with the dog," he began. "The one standing there alone, with the black glasses and the lonely face. She's Dr. Mondrick's wife. A lovely, gracious person. A gifted pianist, even though she's blind. She has been a friend of mine ever since the two years Sam Quain and I lived in her house when we were in the university. I'll introduce you."

"So that's Rowena Mondrick?" Her voice seemed hushed, oddly intense. "She wears strange jewelry."

Puzzled, Barbee glanced back at the blind woman who stood very straight, silent and lonely and aloof. As always, she wore plain black. It took him a moment to see her jewels, simply because he knew them so well. Smiling, he turned to April Bell. "That silver, you mean?"

The girl nodded, her eyes fixed on the old silver combs in Rowena Mondrick's thick white hair, the silver brooch at the throat of the black dress, the heavy silver bracelets, and the worn silver rings on the white and youthful-seeming hands that held the dog. Even the dog's leather collar was heavy with massive silver studs.

"It's odd, perhaps," Barbee agreed. "Though it never struck me that way, because Rowena loves silver. She says she likes the cool feel of it. Touch, you know, is important to her." He looked at the girl's set face. "What's the matter? Don't you like it?"

Her burnished head shook slightly.

"No," she whispered solemnly, "I don't like silver." She smiled at him quickly as if in apology for her long stare. "Forgive me. I've heard of Rowena Mondrick. Will you tell me about her?"

"I think she was a psychiatric nurse at Glennhaven when she met Dr. Mondrick," Barbee said. "That was probably thirty years ago. She was a brilliant girl and she must have been beautiful then. Mondrick rescued her from some unhappy love affair—I never heard the details of that—and got her interested in his work."

Watching the blind woman again, the girl listened silently.

"She went to Mondrick's classes and became an able ethnologist herself," Barbee went on. "She used to go with him on all his expeditions until she lost her sight. Since, for the last twenty years or so, she has lived very quietly here in Clarendon. She has her music, and a few close friends. I don't think she takes any more part in her husband's researches. Most people consider her a little odd—and I suppose that was a dreadful experience."

"Tell me about it," the girl commanded.

"They were in West Africa," Barbee said slowly, thinking wistfully of the other days when he had been on expeditions to search for lost fragments of the puzzle of the past. "I think Dr. Mondrick was hunting proof of a notion that modern man first evolved in Africa—that was long before he found those sites in the Ala-shan. Rowena was taking the chance to gather some ethnological data on the Nigerian tribal societies of human alligators and human leopards."

"Human leopards?" The girl's greenish eyes seemed to narrow and turn darker. "What are they?"

"Only the members of a secret cannibalistic cult, who are supposed to be able to turn themselves into leopards." Barbee smiled at her taut intentness. "You see, Rowena was preparing to write a paper on lycan-thropy—that's the common belief among primitive tribes that certain individuals are able to transform themselves into carnivorous animals."

"Is that so?" the girl whispered breathlessly. "Tell me!"

"The animals are usually the most dangerous ones found in the locality," Barbee went on, eager to keep her interested and glad to find some use at last for the dry facts he had learned in Mondrick's classes. "Bears in the north countries. Jaguars in the Amazon basin. Wolves in Europe—the peasants of medieval France lived in terror of the loup-garou. Leopards or tigers in Africa and Asia. I don't know how the belief could have spread so widely."

"Very interesting." The girl smiled obliquely, as if to a secret satisfaction. "But what happened to Rowena Mondrick's eyes?"

"She would never talk about it." Barbee lowered his voice, afraid the blind woman might hear. "Dr. Mondrick told me all I know—once we were talking in his study, before he fell out with me."

"Well, what did he say?"

"They were camped deep in Nigeria," Barbee said.

"I believe Rowena was looking for data to connect the human leopards of the cannibal tribes with the leopard familiars of the Lhota Naga medicine men of Assam and the 'bush soul' of certain American tribes." "Yes," the girl whispered.

"Anyhow, Rowena had been trying to get the confidence of the natives and asking questions about their rituals—too many questions, Mondrick said, because their bearers got uneasy and one of them warned her to look out for the leopard men. She kept on, and her investigations led her to a valley that was taboo. She found artifacts there that interested Mondrick—he didn't say what they were—and they were moving camp into that valley when it happened."

"How?"

"They were on the trail at night, when a black leopard jumped on Rowena out of a tree—it was actually a leopard, Mondrick said, and not a native in a leopard skin. But I guess the coincidence was a little too much for native bearers. They all lit out, and the beast had Rowena down before Mondrick's shots frightened it away. Her wounds were infected, of course, and I think she very nearly died before he got her back to any sort of hospital.

"That was her last expedition with him, and he never went back to Africa—I believe he gave up the idea that Homo sapiens originated there. After that, do you think it's any wonder if she seems a little strange? The leopard's attack was so tragically ironic— huh?"

Glancing at the taut white face of April Bell, he had caught an expression that shocked him—a look of burning, cruel elation. Or had the gray dusk and the harsh light from the building merely played an unkind trick with her unusual features? She smiled at his startled grunt.

"It does seem ironic," she whispered lightly, as if not much concerned about Rowena Mondrick's old disaster. "Life plays queer tricks sometimes." Her voice turned grave. "It must have been a dreadful blow."

"It was, I know." Barbee felt relieved at her solicitude. "But it didn't break Rowena. She's a charming person, really. No self-pity. She has a sense of humor, and you soon forget she's blind."

He caught the girl's arm, feeling the sleek softness of that snowy fur. The black kitten blinked at him with huge blue eyes from the snakeskin bag.

"Come along," he urged. "You'll like Rowena."

April Bell hung back.

"No, Barbee!" she whispered desperately. "Please don't—"

But he was already calling heartily: "Rowena! It's Will Barbee. The paper sent me down to get a story on your husband's expedition, and now I want you to meet my newest friend—a very charming redhead—Miss April Bell."

The blind woman turned eagerly at the sound of his voice. Nearing sixty, Mondrick's wife preserved a youthful slenderness. The thick coils of her hair had been entirely white since Barbee first knew her; but her face, flushed now with excitement and the cold, seemed firm and pink as a girl's. Used to them, Barbee scarcely saw her opaque black glasses.

"Why, hello, Will." Her musical voice was warm with pleasure. "It's good to know your friends." Shifting the dog's short leash to her left hand, she held out the right. "How do you do, Miss April Bell?"

"Very well." The girl's voice was sweetly remote, and she made no move to take the blind woman's extended hand. "Thank you."

Flushed with embarrassment for Rowena, Barbee tugged sharply at the girl's fur sleeve. She jerked stiffly away. He peered at her face and saw that her cheeks had drained colorless, leaving her lips a wide red slash. Narrowed and darkened, her greenish eyes were staring at Rowena's thick silver bracelets. Nervously, Barbee tried to save the situation.

"Careful what you say," he warned Rowena with attempted lightness. "Because Miss Bell is working for the Call, and she'll put every word down in shorthand."

The blind woman smiled, to Barbee's relief, as if unaware of April Bell's puzzling rudeness. Tilting her head to listen again at the whispering sky, she asked anxiously: "Aren't they down?"

"Not yet," Barbee told her. "But the dispatcher says they're in the landing pattern."

"I'll be so glad when they're down safe." she told him uneasily. "I've been so dreadfully worried, ever since Marck went away. He isn't well, and he insists on taking such frightful risks."

Her thin hands quivered, Barbee noticed, and clutched the dog's short leash with a desperate tenseness that turned the knuckles white.

"Some buried things ought to stay buried," she whispered. "I tried to get Marck not to go back to those digs in the Ala-shan. I was afraid of what he would find."

April Bell was listening intently, and Barbee heard the catch of her breath.

"You," she whispered, "afraid?" Her pen shuddered above the tiny notebook. "What did you expect your famous husband to find?"

"Nothing!" The blind woman gasped the word, as if alarmed. "Nothing, really."

"Tell me," the girl insisted sharply. "You may as well, because I believe I can already guess—"

Her low voice broke into a stifled scream, and she stumbled backward. For the shepherd's leash had slipped out of the blind woman's fingers. Silently, the huge dog lunged at the cowering girl. Barbee kicked desperately, but it rushed past him, fangs bared viciously.

Barbee spun, snatching for the dragging leash. The girl had thrown up her arms instinctively. Her snake-skin bag, flung out in an accidental arc, fended the slashing jaws from her throat. Savagely silent, the animal tried to spring again, but Barbee had caught the leash.

"Turk!" Rowena called. "Turk, to heel."

Obediently, still without a growl or bark, the big dog trotted toward her. Barbee put the leash back in her groping hand, and she drew the bristling animal to her side.

"Thank you, Will," she said quietly. "I hope Turk didn't hurt your Miss Bell. Please tell her that I'm extremely sorry."

But she didn't scold the dog, Barbee noticed. The huge tawny beast stood close against her black skirt, snarling silently, watching April Bell with baleful eyes. Pale and shaken, the girl was retreating toward the terminal building.

"That nasty dog!" A sallow, sharp-featured little woman came back from the group ahead, scolding in a plaintive nasal whine. "Now remember, Mrs. Mondrick, I begged you not to bring him. He's getting ugly, and he'll hurt somebody."

Calmly, the blind woman stroked the dog's head. She caught the wide collar with a small deft hand, gently fingering the heavy silver studs. Rowena, Barbee recalled, had always loved silver.

"No, Miss Ulford," she murmured softly. "Turk was trained to guard me, and I want him with me always. He'll not attack anybody, unless they're trying to harm me." She listened to the throbbing sky again. "Isn't the plane down yet?"

Barbee had seen no threatening gesture from April Bell. Shocked and puzzled by Rowena's behavior, he hurried back to the red-haired girl. Standing beside the glass door of the bright-lit waiting room, she was caressing the black kitten, murmuring softly: "Be still, darling. That big, bad dog doesn't like us, but we needn't be afraid—"

"I'm sorry, Miss Bell," Barbee said awkwardly. "I didn't know that would happen."

"My fault, Barbee." She smiled at him contritely. "I shouldn't have taken poor little Fifi so near that evil brute of a dog." Her greenish eyes glowed. "Thank you so much for pulling him off me."

"Turk never acted that way before," he said. "Mrs. Mondrick wants to apologize—"

"Does she?" April Bell glanced obliquely at the blind woman, her long eyes quite expressionless. "Let's forget the incident," she said briskly. "The plane's coming in, and I want you to tell me about those others waiting."

She nodded eagerly at the little group beyond the blind woman, all hopefully watching the low, ragged cloud bases that now began to glow with a soiled pink from the reflected lights of the city.

"Okay." Barbee was glad to ignore that awkward and somewhat baffling occurrence. "The sharp-nosed little woman who came back to Rowena is her nurse, Miss Ulford. She's the one that's usually ailing, though, and Rowena actually does most of the nursing."

"And the others?"

"See the old gent just lighting his pipe—only he's too excited to get the match struck? That's old Ben Chittum. Rex's granddad, and the only relative he has. Runs a newsstand down on Center Street, just across from the Star building. He put Rex through school, until Mondrick got him that scholarship."

"And the rest?"

"The little fellow in the long overcoat is Nick Spivak's father. The proud-looking, dark-haired woman is Mrs. Spivak. They have a tailor shop in Brooklyn, on Flatbush Avenue. Nick's the only son. He's got over saying 'woik' and 'goil,' but he still thinks the world of them. They've been awfully upset ever since Nick went back with the expedition. They must have written me a dozen letters, wanting to know if I had heard anything. They came down to meet Nick on the morning plane. I suppose he wired them from the coast.

"Most of the others are friends, and people from the Foundation. There's Professor Fisher, from the anthropology department at the university. And Dr. Bennett, who has been in charge out at the Foundation—"

"Who's the blonde?" interrupted April Bell. "Smiling at you."

"Nora," Barbee said softly. "Sam Quain's wife."

He had first met Nora the same night Sam did—at the freshman mixer during registration week at Clarendon. Fourteen years hadn't dimmed the friendly sparkle of her eyes; the smiling matron now, he thought, waiting for her husband, looked as happily breathless as that slim girl had been, excited over the bright new world of the university.

Barbee started toward her with April Bell, circling cautiously wide of Rowena Mondrick's watchful dog. Nora glanced hopefully again at the murmuring clouds and came to meet them, leading little Pat.

Patricia Quain had just turned five years old and was very proud of that accomplishment. She had her mother's wide blue eyes and cornsilk hair, but her pink stubborn face showed a reflection of Sam's square chin. She was tugging back, peering hungrily into the darkening sky.

"Will Daddy be safe, up there in the cold night?"

"Of course, darling. Nothing could happen to them now." But Nora's warm voice was not so cheerful as she tried to make it, and she called anxiously: "Do you think they'll be much longer, Will? We can hardly wait. I made the mistake of looking up the Ala-shan country in Sam's library, and after that I could hardly sleep.

Two years is such a long time. I'm afraid Pat won't know her father."

"Yes, I will, Mother." The child's firm voice showed Sam's own determination. "I'll know my own Daddy."

"There!" Barbee heard the bark of wheels scuffing the runway. The anxious tension of those breathless watchers had got into him, and he smiled at Nora, sharing her glad relief. "They're down safe, and they'll taxi in now."

Holding the girl's fur sleeve, he glanced watchfully at Rowena Mondrick's great dog, standing against his mistress and glaring ominously at April and the blue-eyed kitten.

"Nora, this is Miss April Bell. She's learning to be a sob sister on the Call. Anything you tell her may be quoted against you."

"Really, Barbee!"

April made that protest with a charming little laugh. When the eyes of the two women met, however, Barbee sensed fire—something like the sudden shower of sparks when hard metal meets the grinding wheel. Smiling with angelic sweetness, they shook hands.

"Darling! I'm so happy to meet you."

They hated each other, Barbee knew, savagely.

"Mother!" little Pat cried eagerly. "May I touch the dear little kitten?"

"No, honey—please!"

Nora caught hastily at the child, but her small pink hand was already reaching eagerly. The black kitten blinked and spat and scratched. With a sob of pain, that she stubbornly tried to stifle, Pat drew back to her mother.

"Oh, Mrs. Quain," purred April Bell. "I'm so sorry."

"I don't like you," Pat declared defiantly.

"Look!" Old Ben Chittum limped past them, pointing with his pipe into the gloomy dusk, shrill with excitement. "There's the plane, rolling down the taxi-strip."

The Spivaks ran after him.

"It's our Nick, Mama! Our Nick—safe at home from that cruel desert across the sea."

"Come on, Mother." Pat tugged impatiently at Nora's hand. "Daddy's back—and I will too know him."

Rowena Mondrick followed that breathless group, proud and straight and silent. She seemed entirely alone, even though little Miss Ulford held her arm to guide her and the huge tawny dog stalked stiffly at her side. Barbee glimpsed her face under the opaque black lenses, and its white agony of hope and terror made him look hastily aside.

He was left with April Bell.

"Fifi, you were very naughty!" She patted the kitten reprovingly. "You spoiled our interview."

Barbee felt an impulse to follow Nora and explain that April Bell was a stranger. He still had a tender spot for Nora—sometimes he wondered, wistfully, how different life might have been if he and not Sam Quain had drawn her to be his partner at that freshman mixer. But April's long eyes smiled again, and her voice chimed contritely: "I'm sorry, Barbee—truly I am."

"That's all right," Barbee told her. "But how come the kitten?"

Her eyes turned greenish black again, strangely intense, as if some secret fear had dilated the pupils. For an instant he glimpsed a wary alertness, as if she were playing an obscurely difficult and dangerous game. He didn't understand that. A cub reporter, of course, might be jittery about her first big assignment. But April Bell seemed too briskly competent to suffer any such misgivings, and the thing he glimpsed was something more than mere timidity. It was desperate, deadly.

Barbee recoiled a little from that look of fearful searching. After the briefest instant, however, the girl's white, frozen face came alive again. She straightened the kitten's red ribbon, and smiled at him warmly.

"Fifi belongs to my Aunt Agatha," she cooed brightly. "I live with her, you know, and she came out with me today. Auntie went shopping with the car and left Fifi with me. She's to meet me in the waiting room. Excuse me, and I'll see if she's come—and get rid of the little beast before it makes another scene."

She hurried away from him, into the bright-lit building. Barbee looked after her, through the glass doors, with a puzzled and uneasy interest. Even the lithe free grace of her walk fascinated him. She seemed untamed.

Barbee tried to shrug off that vague conflict of attraction and formless apprehension, and followed Nora Quain to the little group watching the chartered transport roaring toward them on the taxi-strip, huge and ungainly in the gloom. He was tired, and probably he had been drinking more than was good for him. His nerves seemed on edge. It was only natural for him to feel a strong response to such a girl as April Bell. What man wouldn't? But he resolved to control that reaction.

Nora Quain turned her attention from the incoming plane long enough to ask him: "Is that girl important?"

"Just met her." Barbee hesitated, wondering. "She's ... unusual."

"Don't let her be important," Nora urged quickly. "She is—"

She paused as if to find a word for April Bell. The warm smile left her face, and her hand moved unconsciously to draw little Pat to her side. She didn't find the word.

"Don't, Will!" she whispered. "Please!" The engines of the taxiing transport drowned her voice.

CHAPTER TWO

The Kitten Killing

Two white-uniformed attendants were waiting with a wheeled gangway to land the incoming passengers. The big transport, however, looming dark and monstrous in the floodlights on the field, stopped a full hundred yards from the terminal building. The great motors died in a silence that seemed breathless.

"Marck!" In that sudden stillness the voice of Mondrick's blind wife was a thin, frantic cry. "Can anybody see Marck?"

Old Ben Chittum led the eager rush toward the transport, waving his pipe wildly and shouting unanswered greetings to his son. Papa and Mama Spivak ran behind him, calling for Nick, and burst into tears when their son didn't appear. Nora Quain picked up the toddling child and held her apprehensively tight.

Rowena Mondrick was left behind, with her huge dog and the bewildered-looking little nurse. The dog had ceased to bristle, with April Bell's departure. It glanced at Barbee with friendly golden eyes, and then ignored him.

"The plane stopped pretty far out," he told Rowena. "I don't know why. But Dr. Mondrick and the others should be out to meet us in a moment."

"Thank you, Will." She smiled toward him gratefully, her face turning smooth and youthful again for an instant under the blank lenses, before her bleak unease came back. "I'm so afraid for Marck!"

"I can understand that," Barbee murmured. "Sam Quain told me about the Ala-shan—a desert that makes Death Valley look like a green oasis, so I gather. And I know Dr. Mondrick's health isn't good—"

"No, Will, it's nothing like that." Her thin, straight shoulders shrugged uneasily. "Marck does have that trick heart, and his asthma seems worse every year. But he's still vigorous, and he knows his deserts. It isn't that at all."

Her small hands tightened on the shepherd's leash, and Barbee thought they shuddered. She drew the huge dog to her again. Her light fingers moved quickly over its fine tawny head, and then dwelt upon the polished silver studs that knobbed its collar, as if she found a sensuous pleasure in feeling the cold white metal.

"I used to work with Marck, you know," she whispered slowly. "Before I saw too much." Her thin left hand came quickly up, as if moved with an unforgotten horror, to cover for an instant her dark lenses and the empty scars behind them. "I know what his theory is, and what Sam Quain found for him under that old burial mound in the Ala-shan on the last expedition before the war. That's why I tried to persuade him not to go back."

She turned abruptly, listening.

"Now where are they, Will?" Apprehension breathed in her low voice. "Why don't they come?"

"I don't know," Barbee told her, himself uneasy. "I don't understand it. The plane's just standing, waiting. They've put the gangway against it, and now they're opening the door, but nobody comes out. There's Dr. Bennett, the Foundation man, going aboard."

"He'll find out." Holding fast to the dog, Rowena turned back toward the terminal building, listening again. "Where's that girl?" Alarm edged her whisper. "The one Turk chased away."

"Inside," Barbee said. "I'm sorry anything unpleasant happened. April's charming, and I hoped you'd like her. Really, Rowena, I couldn't see any reason—"

"But there is a reason." The blind woman stiffened, her face taut and pale. "Turk didn't like her." She was patting the huge dog's head; Barbee saw its intelligent yellow eyes look warily toward the building, as if alert against April Bell's return. "And Turk knows."

"Now, Rowena," Barbee protested. "Aren't you carrying your trust in Turk a little too far?"

Her blind lenses stared at him, somehow ominous.

"Marck trained Turk to guard me," she insisted solemnly. "He attacked that woman because he knows she's ... bad." Her taut fingers quivered on the silver-knobbed collar. "Remember that, Will!" she begged huskily. "I'm sure that girl would be charming —very. But Turk can tell."

Barbee stepped back uncomfortably. He wondered if the black leopard's claws, ripping out her sight, had left unhealed mental scars as well. Rowena's apprehensions seemed somewhat beyond the rational. He was glad to see the gangling figure of the Foundation manager coming back down the steps from the silent plane.

"There's Bennett," he said. "I suppose the others will come off with him."

Rowena caught her breath, and they waited silently. Barbee watched to see Sam Quain's bronzed head, his blue-eyed face. He looked for Nick Spivak, dark and slight, frowning wistfully through his glasses and moving always with a nervous haste, as if knowledge had almost eluded his zealous pursuit; and he pictured Rex Chittum, who for all his scholarship still appeared as robustly ignorant as another Li'l Abner. His mind saw old Mondrick himself, ruddy and stout and bald, chin massively aggressive and mild eyes distant with rapt preoccupations.

But they didn't come.

"Where's Marck?" Rowena whispered sharply. "And the others?"

"I don't see them." Barbee tried not to sound uneasy. "And Bennett seems to be shooing everybody away from the plane. Now he's coming this way."

"Dr. Bennett?" Her piercing call startled Barbee. "What's keeping Marck?"

Striding back toward the terminal building, the gaunt scientist paused. Barbee could see the lines of worry bitten into his frowning face, but his voice was reassuring.

"They're all safe, Mrs. Mondrick," he told her. "They're getting ready to come off the plane, but I'm afraid there'll be a little delay."

"Delay?" gasped Rowena. "Why?"

"Dr. Mondrick has this announcement, on the results of the expedition," Bennett said patiently. "I gather that his finds were extremely important, and he wishes to make them public before he leaves the field."

"Oh—no!" Rowena's pale left hand flashed fearfully to her throat, the light glowing cold on her paler silver rings and bracelets. "He mustn't!" she sobbed. "They won't let him."

Bennett frowned with momentary puzzlement.

"I can't see why there should be so much fuss about any research announcement," he said briskly. "But I assure you that you needn't worry over any possible danger, Mrs. Mondrick. The doctor appears rather unduly concerned about some trouble—precisely what, I didn't gather. He has asked me to send for a police escort to guard his person and his finds until the announcement is safely made."

Rowena shook her proud head, as if in fearful scorn of police protection.

"Don't you worry, Mrs. Mondrick," Bennett insisted. "Your husband told me what to do, and I'll take care of everything. I'll arrange for the press to meet him as he steps off the plane. All the reporters will be searched for weapons, and there'll be police enough to stop any possible attempt at interference."

"They can do nothing!" the blind woman snapped bitterly. "Please go back and tell Marck—"

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Mondrick," Bennett broke in with veiled impatience. "But the doctor told me what he wants, and the arrangements must be made at once. He asked me to hurry—as if he feels there is danger in delay."

"There is." She nodded bleakly, clutching the dog's collar. "Go on!"

The frowning Foundation man strode on toward the terminal building, and Barbee fell in step beside him, angling hopefully: "Clarendon's such a peaceful little city, Dr. Bennett —what sort of trouble do you suppose Mondrick could expect?"

"Don't ask me," Bennett rapped. "And don't you try to beat the gun. Dr. Mondrick doesn't want any premature leaks, or any fantastic journalistic guesses. He says this is a big thing, and he wants the people to get it straight. The Life photographers and the AP staffers should be here now, and I'm trying to get a radio reporter. Everybody will get an even break on the hottest story of the year."

"Maybe," Barbee murmured silently, for he had learned to be cynical about elaborate press releases. He would wait and see. Strolling through the terminal building, he glimpsed April Bell's vivid hair in a phone booth. Nobody in sight looked like her Aunt Agatha, and he reminded himself to be skeptical of women, too.

He drank two cups of hot coffee at the lunch counter in the waiting room; but the chill in him came from something colder than the raw east wind, and it was still unthawed when a croaking loudspeaker announced the arrival of the regular airliner. He hurried out to catch Walraven.

The airliner taxied on past the dark transport where Mondrick waited, to stop opposite the terminal building. Two or three businessmen got off, and a dreamily sedate honeymoon couple. Walraven strutted heavily down the steps at last, his brassy voice booming impressively as he told the pert little air hostess about his contacts in Washington.

Walraven struck an inflated pose for the Star photographer, but he wouldn't be quoted on anything when Barbee tried to interview him. Off the record, he was planning a strategy conference with his great good friend, Preston Troy. He asked Barbee to stop at his old law office for a drink just any time, but he had nothing for the record. He tried to push his weak chin out again for the photographer, and got into a taxi.

Preston Troy would supply the strategy, Barbee knew, and hire somebody to write suitable words for the record. The truth about Walraven, as the empty false front for Troy's own political ambitions, would make real news. But not for the Star. Barbee let him go and hurried back to Mondrick's transport.

"Mama, I'm afraid!" He heard the high voice of little Pat Quain from the uneasy waiting group, and saw her held close in Nora's arms. "What has happened to my Daddy?"

"Sam's all right." Nora didn't sound too sure. "Just wait, dear."

Three police cars had pulled up outside the steel fence. Half a dozen uniformed men were already escorting the impatient reporters and photographers toward the huge chartered plane, and two of them turned to herd back the anxious relatives and friends.

"Please, officer!" Rowena Mondrick sounded almost frantic. "You must let me stay. Marck's my husband, and he's in danger. I must be near, to help him."

"Sorry, Mrs. Mondrick." The police sergeant was professionally firm. "But we'll protect your husband— not that I see any cause for all this alarm. The Foundation has asked us to clear the field. Everybody except the press and radio people will have to move back."

"No!" she cried sharply. "Please—you can't understand!"

The officer took her arm.

"Sorry," he said. "Please come quietly."

"You don't know anything," she whispered bitterly. "You can't help—"

Firmly, the officer led her away.

"Please stay, Mother," little Pat was whispering stubbornly. "I want to see my Daddy—and I will too know him."

Herself as pale as the frightened child, Nora Quain carried her back toward the lights of the terminal building. Mama Spivak uttered a low wailing cry and began to sob on the little tailor's shoulder. Old Ben Chittum shook his black pipe in the other policeman's face, quavering hotly: "Look here, officer. I've been praying two years for my boy to get back alive from them dern deserts. And the Spivaks here have spent more than they could really afford to ride the planes all the way down from New York City. By golly, officer—"

Barbee caught his indignant arm.

"Better wait, Ben."

The old man limped after the others, muttering and scowling. Barbee showed his press credentials, submitted to a swift search for concealed arms, and joined the reporters gathered beneath the vast wing of the transport. He found April Bell beside him.

The black kitten must have been returned to Aunt Agatha, after all, for the snakeskin bag was closed now. Pale and breathless, the girl was watching the high door of the plane with a feverish-seeming intentness. She seemed to start when she became aware of Barbee's glance. Her flaming head had turned to him abruptly. For an instant, he thought he could feel the tense, desperate readiness of some feral thing, crouched to leap. Then she smiled, her long, greenish eyes turning warm and gay.

"Hi, reporter." Her soft voice was comradely. "Looks like we've got ourselves a page-one story. Here they come!"

Sam Quain led the way down the gangway. Even in that first breathless instant, Barbee saw that he had changed. His square-jawed face was burned dark, his blond hair bleached almost white. He must have shaved aboard, but his worn khakis were wrinkled and soiled. He looked tired and somewhat more than two years older.

And there was something else.

That something else was stamped also upon the three men who followed him down the wheeled steps. Barbee wondered if they had all been ill. Dr. Mondrick's pale heavy face, under the stained and battered tropical helmet, sagged shockingly. Perhaps that old asthma was troubling him again, or that trick heart.

Even very ill men might have been smiling, Barbee thought uneasily, upon the moment of this triumphant return to their country and their friends and their wives, with a great work accomplished. But all of these weary, haggard men looked grimly preoccupied. None of them spared a wave or a smile for those who met them.

Nick Spivak and Rex Chittum came down from the transport behind old Mondrick. They also wore wrinkled, sun-bleached khaki, and they were lean and brown and grave. Rex must have heard old Ben Chittum's quavering hail from the guarded group at the terminal building, but he gave no sign.

For he and Nick were burdened. They carried, between them, a green-painted rectangular wooden box, lifting it by two riveted leather handles. Barbee thought it showed the careful workmanship of some simple craftsman in a remote village bazaar. Thick iron straps bound it, and a heavy padlock secured the hand-forged hasp. The two weary men leaned against its weight.

"Careful!" Barbee heard Mondrick's warning voice. "We can't lose it now."

Nervously, the haggard-cheeked anthropologist reached to steady the box. His attention didn't leave it until the men carrying it were safely down the steps.

Even then, he kept his hand on it as he nodded for them to bring it on toward the waiting reporters. These men were afraid.

Every wary movement whispered out their abiding terror. They were not elated victors returning to announce a new conquest at the dark frontier of the known. They were tight-lipped veterans instead, Barbee felt, calmly disciplined, moving steadily into a desperate action.

"I wonder—?" whispered April Bell, her long eyes narrowed and dark. "I wonder what they really found?"

"Whatever it is," breathed Barbee, "the find doesn't seem to have made them very happy. A fundamentalist might think they had stumbled into hell."

"No," the girl said, "men aren't that much afraid of hell."

Barbee saw Sam Quain's eyes upon him. The curious tension of that moment checked his impulse to shout a greeting. He merely waved his hand. Sam nodded slightly. That desperate, hostile alertness didn't leave his dark, hard face.

Mondrick stopped before the waiting photographers, under the plane's long wing. Flashbulbs flickered in the windy gloom as he waited for the younger men to close in beside him and set down the heavy box. Barbee studied his face, revealed by the pitiless flashes.

Mondrick, he saw, was a shattered man. Sam and Nick and Rex were tough. That burden of dread, whatever its origin, had merely drawn and sobered and hardened them. But Mondrick was broken. His weary, unsteady gesture betrayed nerves worn beyond the point of failure, and his sagging face was haunted.

"Gentlemen, thank you for waiting."

His voice was low and hoarse, ragged. Dazzled from the flashbulbs, his sunken eyes roved fearfully across the faces before him and flickered apprehensively toward the waiting people beyond the two policemen, outside the terminal building. He must have seen his blind wife there, standing a little apart with her tawny dog, but he ignored her. He glanced back at his three companions around the heavy box, as if for reassurance.

"Your wait will prove worthwhile, because"—and it seemed to Barbee that his rasping voice was desperately hurried, as if he were somehow fearful of being stopped—"because we have something to tell mankind." He caught a gasping breath. "A dreadful warning, gentlemen, that has been hidden and buried and suppressed, for the most wicked ends."

He gestured, with the jerky stiffness of desperate tension.

"The world must be told—if the time for the telling is not already past. So get what I'm going to tell you. Please broadcast my statement, if you can. Film a record of the evidences we brought back." His worn boot touched the wooden box. "Get it on the air and into print tonight—if you can."

"Sure, doc." A radio announcer grinned, moving up his microphone. "That's our business. I'll make a wire recording, and rush it back to the studio—if your story is politically okay. I suppose you're going to give your angle on the Chinese situation?"

"We saw a great deal of the war in China," Mondrick told him solemnly, "but I'm not going to talk about it. What I have to say is more important than the news of any war—because it will help you understand why wars are fought. It will explain a good deal that men have never understood, and a good many things we've been taught to deny."

"Okay, doc." The radio man adjusted his equipment. "Shoot."

"I'm going to tell you—"

Mondrick coughed, and caught his breath again. Barbee heard his laborious wheezing, and saw the quick alarm on Sam Quain's drawn face. Quain offered a handkerchief and Mondrick wiped sweat off his forehead—while Barbee, hunched in his topcoat, stood shivering in the moist east wind.

"I'm going to tell you some stunning things, gentlemen." Mondrick stumbled hoarsely on. "I'm going to tell you about a masked and secret enemy, a black clan that plots and waits unsuspected among true men—a hidden enemy, far more insidious than any of your modem fifth columns that scheme the ruin of nations. I'm going to tell you of the expected coming of a Black Messiah—the Child of Night—whose appearance among true men will be the signal for a savage and hideous and incredible rebellion."

That weary, shattered man gasped painfully again.

"Prepare yourselves for a jolt, gentlemen. This is a terrible thing—and you may doubt it, at first, as I did. It is really too dreadful to believe. But you'll have to accept it, as I did, when you see the unpleasant things we have brought back from those pre-human burial mounds in the Ala-shan.

"My discoveries there—or, rather, ours—solve many enigmas." His haggard eyes moved gratefully toward the three men guarding the iron-strapped box, and he bowed a little to them. "We've found the answers to riddles that have baffled every science—and to other mysteries so obvious, so much a part of our daily lives, that most of us are never even conscious they exist "Why, gentlemen, is evil?"

His lead-hued face was a mask of pain.

"Have you ever sensed the malignant purpose behind misfortune? Are you ever puzzled by the world's discord, by the shadow of war abroad and the clamor of strife at home? Reading the daily news of crime, are you ever shocked and appalled at the monstrosity of man? Have some of you wondered, sometimes, at the tragic division in yourselves—at the realization that your unconscious minds hold wells of black horror?

"Have you wondered—"

Mondrick choked and bent. He labored to breathe again, pressing both quivering hands against his sides. An ominous blue touched his face. He coughed into a handkerchief, and mopped his face again. His voice, when he could speak again, was strained and shallow, pitched in a higher key.

"I've no time to catalog all the dark riddles in our lives," he gasped. "But—listen!"

Disturbed by a sense of a veiled and monstrous tension mounting, Barbee looked uneasily around him. A photographer was slipping a fresh film pack into his camera. The radio man was fussing with his tape recorder. Mechanically, the bewildered reporters were taking notes.

April Bell, beside him, stood in a frozen pose. White with pressure, both her hands gripped the top of her snakeskin bag. Dilated, greenish black, her long eyes were staring at Mondrick's sick face, fixed with a peculiar intensity.

Briefly, Barbee wondered about April Bell. Why did she frighten him? What was the key to her strong attraction for him—what stronger call than the flaming lure of her bright hair had overbalanced his vague alarm? How much of what Mondrick would call good was in her, and how much of evil, and what was the point of conflict?

Unconscious of Barbee, she kept staring at Mondrick. Her pale lips moved silently. Her white hands twisted the snakeskin bag with a kind of savagery—as if it were something alive, Barbee felt uneasily, and her fingers were rending claws.

The gasping old man seemed to win his fight for breath.

"Remember, gentlemen," he wheezed laboriously, "this is no whim of the moment. I first suspected the frightful facts thirty years ago—when a shocking incident made me see that all the work of Freud, with his revealing new psychology of the unconscious, was merely a penetrating description of the minds and behavior of men, not really an explanation of the evil we see.

"I was then a practicing psychiatrist, out at Glenn-haven. I gave up my medical career—because the truth I suspected made a mockery of all I had been taught and a cruel sham out of my efforts to aid the mentally ill. Unfortunately, I quarreled rather bitterly with old Dr. Glenn—father of the Glenn who heads Glennhaven now—because of that unfortunate incident.

"I turned to other fields—looking for evidence to disprove the thing I feared. It didn't exist. I studied abroad, and finally accepted a faculty position at Clarendon University. I tried to master anthropology, archeology, ethnology—every science bearing on the actual nature of mankind. Item by item, my research turned up facts to confirm the most dreadful thing a man has ever feared."

The sick man stooped and sobbed for breath again.

"For years," he whispered painfully, "I tried to work alone. You will presently understand just what that meant—and how extremely difficult it was for me to find aid. I even allowed my dear wife to help me, because she already shared my secret. She lost her eyes— and proved by her great sacrifice that all our fears were well founded.

"But I did, at last, find men whom I could trust." Mondrick's pallid face briefly tried to smile. His hollowed eyes glanced once more at the hard, taut faces of Sam Quain and Nick Spivak and Rex Chittum, warm with a deep affection. "And I trained them to share—"

The old man's voice sobbed and stopped. He bent double, livid-faced, laboring to breathe. Sam Quain held him to keep him from falling until that hard paroxysm ended.

"Forgive me, gentlemen—I'm subject to these attacks." His voice seemed fainter; he daubed weakly with the handkerchief at his sweat-drenched face. "Bear with me, please," he gasped. "I'll try to hurry on— through all this background that you must have—if you're to understand."

Sam Quain whispered something, and he nodded heavily.

"We had a theory," his shallow voice rasped hastily, as if racing with time. "We wanted proof—to warn and arm true mankind. The evidence we needed could exist only in the ashes of the past. Ten years ago I gave up my chair at the University to search the old cradles of the human and semihuman races—to find that convincing proof.

"You can guess a few of the difficulties and the perils we had to face—I've no time to list them. The Torgod Mongols raided our camps. We almost perished of thirst, and we all but froze to death. Then the war drove us out—just when we had located the first pre-human sites."

He toiled to breathe again.

"It used to appear that those dark huntsmen already knew that we suspected them and were trying to cut us down before we could expose them. The State Department didn't want us to go back. The Chinese government tried to keep us out. The Reds held us as spies— until we convinced them we were after something bigger than military information. Man and nature stood against us.

"But these are tough boys with me!"

The old man bent, heaving to another paroxysm.

"And we found what we were after," he whispered triumphantly. "Found it—and brought it safely home, from those prehuman sites." Once again his boot touched the green wooden box that his three companions guarded. "We brought it back—and here it is."

Once again he straightened, struggling to breathe, painfully searching the faces before him. Barbee met his dull, haggard eyes for an instant and saw in them the stark conflict of dreadful urgency and deadly fear. He understood that long preamble. He knew that Mondrick wanted desperately to speak—to blurt the bald facts out—and knew that a sick dread of disbelief restrained him.

"Gentlemen, don't condemn me yet," he croaked laboriously. "Please forgive me, if all these precautions appear unnecessary. You'll understand them when you know. And now that you're somewhat prepared, I must speak the rest abruptly. I must break the news, before I'm stopped."

His blotched face twitched and shivered.

"For there is danger, gentlemen. Every one of you— every person who hears this news—is himself in deadly danger. Yet I beg you to listen ... for I still hope ... by spreading the truth ... too far for them to kill enough to stamp it out entirely ... to defeat those secret clansmen."

Mondrick fought for breath again, doubled and shuddering.

"It was a hundred thousand years ago—"

He strangled. His own frantic hands came up to his throat, as if he strove to open a way for his breath. A bubbling sound rattled in his throat. His contorted face and clawing hands turned a cyanotic blue. He swayed to his knees, sagging in Sam Quain's arms, gagging on words he couldn't speak.

"That couldn't be!" Barbee caught Quain's shocked whisper. "No—there are no cats here!"

Blinking, Barbee shot a bewildered glance at April Bell. She stood stiffly motionless, staring at the gasping explorer. Dilated in the gloom, her eyes were strange and black. White as her white fur, her fixed face held no expression. Both her hands clutched her snakeskin bag, twisting savagely.

But where was any cat?

The bag was closed now, and he saw nothing of her happy black kitten. Anyhow, why should the stricken man be gasping anything about a cat? Shivering to the cold east wind, Barbee peered back at Mondrick.

Sam Quain and Nick Spivak had laid the struggling man on his back. Quain ripped off his own khaki shirt and folded it under Mondrick's head for a pillow. But Rex Chittum, Barbee noticed, stayed beside that heavy wooden box, his roving eyes warily alert—as if its contents were more important than the old explorer's last agony.

For Mondrick was dying. His wild hands fought for air again and fell. His mottled face turned lax and lividly pale. He kicked convulsively and lay still again. As surely as if the garroter's iron collar were being screwed down against his throat, he was strangling to death.

"Back!" Sam Quain shouted. "He's dying for air."

A flashbulb detonated blindingly. Policemen pushed back the news photographers, crowding nearer for a better shot. Somebody shouted for the crash truck, but Mondrick had already ceased to move.

"Marck!"

Barbee heard that piercing scream. He saw Mondrick's blind wife dart away from that guarded group by the terminal building, the huge dog beside her, running as surely as if she could see again. One of the officers tried to stop her and fell back from the dog's silent snarl. She reached the fallen man and knelt to dwell upon his splotched face and lax hands with her desperately searching fingers. Light shone cold on her silver rings and bracelets and burned in the tears streaming from the empty scars under her dark lenses.

"Marck, my poor blind darling!" Barbee heard her stricken whisper. "Why didn't you let me come with Turk to guard you? Couldn't you see them closing in?"

CHAPTER THREE

The White Jade Wolf

The man sprawled dead on the taxiway didn't answer that bitter whisper, and the huddled blind woman made no other sound. With a shaken gesture, Barbee beckoned the other newsmen back. His throat hurt and something cold had touched his spine. Silently, he turned to Sam Quain.

Quain's blue eyes were staring vacantly at the man on the ground. Beneath a thin undershirt, his goose-pimpled flesh was shuddering. He didn't seem aware of the clamoring reporters, and at first he made no sign when Barbee stripped off his own topcoat to fling around him.

"Thanks, Will," he murmured emptily at last. "I suppose it's cold."

He caught his breath, and turned to the newsmen.

"There's a story for you, gentlemen," he said quietly, his dry voice oddly flat and slow. "The death of Dr. Lamarck Mondrick, noted anthropologist and explorer. Be sure you get the spelling right—he was always particular about the c in Lamarck."

Barbee snatched at his taut arm.

"What killed him, Sam?"

"Natural causes, the coroner will say." His voice stayed flat and dull, but Barbee felt him stiffen. "He has had that asthma, you know, for a great many years. He told me out there in the Ala-shan that he knew he was suffering from a valvular heart disease—and knew it before we ever started. Our expedition was no picnic, you know. Not for a sick man, at his age. We're all pretty tired. When this attack struck, I guess his old pump just couldn't take the strain."

Barbee glanced at the still form on the ground and the woman in black sobbing silently.

"Tell me, Sam—what was Dr. Mondrick trying to say?"

Sam Quain swallowed hard. His blue eyes fled from Barbee's face into the cold gloom, and came back again. He shrugged in the borrowed topcoat, and it seemed to Barbee that he tried to shake off the horror that hung like a dark garment on him.

"Nothing," he muttered hoarsely. "Nothing, really."

"Huh, Quain?" rapped a hard voice over Barbee's shoulder. "You can't give us any runaround now."

Sam Quain gulped again, hesitant and visibly ill.

"Spill it, Quain!" demanded the radio reporter. "You can't tell us all that build-up was just for nothing."

But Sam Quain nodded his sun-bleached head, seeming to make up his mind.

"Nothing worth big headlines, I'm afraid." Pity touched and softened the horror lingering on his square-jawed face. "Dr. Mondrick had been ill for some time, you see, and I'm afraid his splendid mind had lost its old acuity. Nobody can question the accuracy and originality of his work, but we had tried to restrain him from this rather melodramatic manner of making it public."

"You mean," the radio man snarled indignantly, "that all this talk about your discoveries in Mongolia is just a crazy gag?"

"On the contrary," Sam Quain assured him, "Dr. Mondrick's work is both sound and important. His theories, and the evidences we have gathered to support them, are worth the attention of every professional scientist in the anthropological fields."

Sam Quain kept his haunted eyes away from the old man's body and the silent woman. His taut, dry voice was carefully calm.

"Dr. Mondrick's discoveries are quite important," he insisted flatly. "The rest of us tried to persuade him, however, to make the announcement in the usual way— in a formal paper, presented before some recognized scientific body. And that, since this tragedy, is what we shall doubtless do in time."

"But the old man kept hinting about some danger," rapped a photographer. "About somebody that didn't want him to talk. And then he conked off, right in the middle of what he had to say. That's pretty damn funny. You aren't just possibly frightened out, Quain?"

Sam Quain gulped nervously.

"Naturally, we're upset," he admitted huskily. "But where's any tangible proof that Dr. Mondrick had any enemy here?" His own haggard eyes peered away into the thick dusk, narrowing as if to hunted fear. "There's none," he insisted. "Dr. Mondrick's death at this moment can be nothing more than a tragic coincidence. Perhaps it was less. The fatal attack was doubtless brought on by his own excitement."

"But what about his 'Child of Night'?" the radio reporter broke in. "His 'Black Messiah'?"

Sam Quain's bleak face tried to smile.

"Dr. Mondrick read detective stories. His Child of Night, I believe, is merely a figure of speech—a personification of human ignorance, perhaps. He was given to figurative language, and he wanted to make his announcement dramatic."

Sam Quain nodded toward the wooden box.

"There lies your story, gentlemen. I'm afraid Dr. Mondrick chose an unfortunate publicity device. After all, the theory of human evolution is no longer frontpage news. Every known detail of the origin of mankind is extremely important to such a specialist as Dr. Mondrick, but it doesn't interest the man in the street —unless it's dramatized."

"Hell!" The radio man turned away. "That old buzzard sure took me for a ride." An ambulance drew up beside the plane, and he watched the blind woman bidding her husband a final farewell. Barbee was glad she couldn't see the flashbulbs flickering.

"What are your plans now, Mr. Quain?" demanded a hawk-faced man in black—a science reporter, as Barbee knew him, for one of the press associations. "When are you going to give us the rest of this interrupted announcement?"

"Not soon." Sam Quain patiently turned his head for a photographer and blinked at the cruel flashbulbs. "We all felt, you see, that Dr. Mondrick was speaking prematurely. I think all my associates in the Foundation will agree with me that the objects we brought back from the Ala-shan must be studied carefully in our own laboratory, along with all Dr. Mondrick's notes and papers, before we have any statement for the public. In due time, the Foundation will publish a monograph to present his work. That may take a year. Perhaps two."

Somebody in the impatient group made an impolite sound through his lips.

"We've got a story, anyhow." The science reporter grinned at him cheerfully. "If that's the way you want it, we'll use what we have. I can see the tabloid heads already—'Prehistoric Curse Clips Grave Robber.'"

"Print what you like." Sam Quain peered around him in the windy gloom, and Barbee could see his veiled unease. "But we have no further statement now —except that I want to offer our apologies, on behalf of the Foundation, for this tragic anticlimax. I do hope you will be generous in anything you write about Dr. Mondrick. He was truly great—if sometimes a trifle eccentric. His work, when fully published, will place him securely among the honored few of the humane sciences, along with Freud and Darwin."

His weary jaw set stubbornly.

"That's all that I—or any of us—will have to say."

The photographers flashed a final bulb at his set face, and began packing their equipment. The radio man coiled up his cable and took down his microphone. The newsmen scattered reluctantly, to file their stories of an obscure and unresolved event.

Barbee looked for April Bell and glimpsed her entering the terminal building. She had slipped away, he supposed, to telephone her story to a rewrite man on the Call. But Barbee's own deadline was midnight, for the early edition of the Star. He still had time to try to solve the riddle he felt in Mondrick's death.

He pushed impulsively forward to seize Sam Quain's arm. The tall explorer recoiled from his unexpected touch with a little gasping cry, and then manufactured a tortured grimace of a smile. Naturally he was nervous after that tragic ordeal. Barbee led him aside, toward the tail of the huge silent plane.

"What's the matter, Sam?" he demanded huskily. "Your deflation of the suspense was good—but not good enough. Old Mondrick's build-up rang true. I know you were all scared spitless. What is it you're afraid of?"

Dark and wild, Sam Quain's blue eyes looked into his. They searched him, Barbee thought, as penetratingly as if to discover and unveil some monstrous enemy. Sam Quain shivered, hunching his wide shoulders in the tight borrowed coat, yet his patient, weary voice seemed calm enough.

"We were all afraid of exactly what happened," he insisted. "We all knew Dr. Mondrick was ill. We had to climb over a cold front on the flight here from the coast, and the altitude must have strained his bad heart. He insisted on making his statement here and now— probably just because he knew his time was nearly up."

Barbee shook his head.

"That makes sense—almost," he said slowly. "But asthmatic attacks aren't commonly fatal, nor heart attacks predictable. I can't help believing you were all afraid of something else." He caught Quain's arm. "Can't you trust me, Sam? Aren't we still friends?"

"Don't be a fool, Will." A quivering urgency began to mar Quain's forced calm. I don't think Dr. Mondrick quite trusted you. There were few he did trust. But of course we're still friends."

He shrugged uneasily, and his hunted eyes fled to the locked box with Spivak and Chittum tautly alert beside it.

"Now I must go, Will. Too many things to do. We must arrange about Dr. Mondrick's body, and take care of the box, and get the rest of our freight hauled out to the Foundation." He shucked off the tight coat, shivering. "Thanks, Will. You need it, and I had a coat on the plane. Excuse me now."

Barbee accepted the topcoat, urging: "Take time to see Nora—you know she's here to meet you, with little Pat." He nodded toward the lights of the terminal building. "Old Ben's over there, to see Rex, and the Spivaks came all the way from Brooklyn to meet Nick." Bewilderment echoed in his voice. "What's the matter, Sam? Can't you take a moment to meet your own families?"

Quain's eyes turned dark, as if with agony.

"We'll see them when we can, Will." He paused to find a worn leather coat in the pile of battered luggage and stout wooden crates unloaded from the transport. "My God, Will!" he whispered hoarsely. "Don't you think we're human? It's two years since I've seen my wife and baby—but we must take care of Dr. Mondrick's box."

Nervously impatient, he started to turn.

"Hold on, Sam." Barbee caught his arm again. "Just one more question." He dropped his voice, too low for the group about the ambulance to hear, or the men unloading the plane. "What has a cat to do with Mondrick's death?"

"Huh?" He felt Quain's arm jerk. "What cat?"

"That's what I want to know."

Quain's sick face turned very pale.

"I heard him whisper—when he was dying—but I saw no cat.

"But why, Sam?" Barbee insisted. "What would a cat matter?"

Quain's eyes searched him, narrowed and strange.

"Dr. Mondrick's asthma was due to an allergy," Quain muttered huskily. "An allergy to cat fur—he took sensitivity tests which proved that. He couldn't go in a room where a cat had been kept without getting an attack."

The frightened man caught his breath.

"Will, have you seen a cat here?"

"Yes." Barbee nodded. "A black kitten—"

He felt Sam Quain stiffen and saw April Bell coming back from the terminal building. The lights caught her red hair, and she looked strong and quick and graceful as some prowling jungle cat—he wondered why that comparison struck his mind. Her dark warm eyes found Barbee, and she smiled gaily.

"Where?" Sam Quain was whispering urgently. "Where was any kitten?"

Barbee looked at April Bell's long eyes, and something decided him not to tell Sam Quain that she had brought the kitten. Something about her stirred and changed him, in ways he didn't want to define. In a lowered, hasty voice, he finished lamely: "Somewhere about the building yonder, just before the planes came in. I didn't notice where it went."

Quain's narrowed eyes seemed hard with suspicion. He opened his mouth as if to ask some other question, and closed it with a gulp when he saw April Bell beside them. It seemed to Barbee that he crouched a little, like a fighting man ready for a dreaded opponent.

"So you're Mr. Quain!" the girl cooed softly. "I want to ask you just one thing, if you please—for the Clarendon Call. What have you got in that green box?" Her long eyes glanced eagerly at the iron-strapped chest and the two wary men on guard beside it. "A bushel of diamonds? Blueprints for an atom bomb?"

Poised like a boxer on the balls of his feet, Sam Quain said softly: "Nothing so exciting, I'm afraid. Nothing that would interest newspaper readers, I'm sure. Nothing you'd bother picking up on the street. Just a few old bones. A few odds and ends of rubbish, broken and thrown away before man's history dawned."

She laughed at him gently.

"Please, Mr. Quain," she protested. "If your box has no value, then why—"

"Excuse me," Sam Quain rapped abruptly. The girl caught his arm, but he shrugged himself free and strode away, without looking back, to join the two men beside the wooden strongbox.

Quain murmured something to one of the officers, gesturing at the anxious people still waiting by the terminal building. Barbee stood aside with April Bell, watching as old Ben Chittum and the Spivaks and Nora Quain came back to the transport. The spry old man shook his handsome grandson's hand. Stout Mama Spivak sobbed in the arms of her thin, spectacled Nick, and Papa Spivak hugged them both.

Sam Quain waited for Nora by the wooden chest. He kissed her hungrily and lifted little Pat in his arms. The child was laughing now. She called for her father's handkerchief and scrubbed furiously at the tearstains under her eyes. Nora tried to draw her husband away, but he sat down firmly on the green box and took the child on his knee.

Mama Spivak, with both arms around her son, abruptly began wailing piercingly.

"Maybe there's nothing in that box, except what he said," April Bell purred in Barbee's ear. "But they would all of them give their own lives, along with old Mondrick's, just to protect it." Her long eyes peered off into the gloom above the field lights. "Wouldn't it be funny," she whispered faintly, "if they did?"

"But not very amusing," Barbee muttered.

Something made him shiver again. Perhaps he had got chilled, while Quain had his coat. He drew a little away from the girl because suddenly he didn't want to touch that sleek white fur. He couldn't help wondering about the kitten. There was a slight, uncomfortable possibility that this red-haired girl was an extremely adroit murderess.

Barbee didn't like that word. He had seen female criminals enough, on the police court beat, and none had ever looked quite so fresh and bright as April Bell. But now a man was dead, killed by the airborne protein molecules from a kitten's fur as efficiently as if a strangler's cord had done it; and this tall, alluring redhead was responsible for the presence of the kitten.

Barbee was startled, when he looked automatically for the snakeskin bag in which she had carried the kitten, to see that it was gone. The girl seemed to follow his eyes. Her own turned dark again, and her face seemed pale as the fur she wore.

"My bag!" She spread her empty, graceful hands. "Must have mislaid it, in all the excitement of filing my story. It's one that Aunt Agatha gave me, and I simply must find it. There's a family heirloom in it—a white jade pin. Will you help me look, Barbee?"

Barbee went with her to look where the departing ambulance had stood, and then about the telephone booths in the waiting room. He wasn't very much surprised, somehow, when they found no trace of the lost bag. April Bell was simply too efficient and intensely awake to mislay anything. At last she glanced at a diamond-crusted watch.

"Let's give it up, Barbee," she cooed, without visible regret. "Thanks awfully, but perhaps I didn't have it anyhow—Aunt Agatha probably picked it up without thinking when I gave little Fifi back to her."

Barbee tried not to lift his eyebrows, but he still suspected Aunt Agatha to be entirely imaginary. He remembered seeing the bag, savagely twisted in the girl's long fingers as old Mondrick lay struggling on the ground, but he didn't say so. He didn't understand April Bell.

"Thanks, Barbee," she said. "Now I've got to phone the desk again. Forgive me if I scoop you."

"'For the whole truth, read the Star.'" Barbee quoted his paper's slogan, grinning. "I still have till midnight to find out what they brought back in that green box, and why old Mondrick died when he did." His grin sobered, and something made him gulp. "Shall I—may I see you again?"

He waited painfully for her to answer, staring at her sleek white coat. He wanted desperately to see her again—was it because he was a little afraid she had murdered Mondrick, he wondered, or because he hoped very much that she hadn't? For a moment, a little frown of puzzlement creased her smooth forehead. He breathed again when she smiled.

"If you like, Barbee." Her voice was all velvet and moonbeams. "When?"

"For dinner—tonight?" Barbee tried not to seem too breathless. "Would nine be too late? Right now I want to find out what Sam Quain and Company are going to do with that mysterious box, and then I must write my story."

"Nine isn't late," she cooed. "I love the night. And I too must watch that box."

Dark again, her long greenish eyes stared at the three weary men, carefully loading the heavy wooden chest into Dr. Bennett's car. The little group of relatives stood back to watch, puzzled and distressed. Barbee touched April Bell's white fur, and shivered in the icy wind.

"At nine?" he said huskily. "Where shall I meet you?"

April Bell smiled abruptly, with a quizzical lift of her penciled brows.

"Tonight, Barbee?" she purred. "Nora will think you've lost your head."

"Perhaps I have." He touched the snowy fur, and tried not to shiver again. "All this is quite a jolt to me —Rowena Mondrick is still a friend of mine, even since her husband fell out with me. I do feel upset, but Sam Quain will take care of everything. I hope you'll decide to dine with me, April."

I hope you'll tell me, he added silently, why you brought that black kitten here, and why you felt it necessary to invent Aunt Agatha, and whether you had any reason to desire Dr. Mondrick's death. Something made him gulp again, and he waited hopefully.

"If I can manage." Her white teeth smiled. "Now I must run—I have to call the city desk, and then I'll ask Aunt Agatha."

She did run—as gracefully, he thought, as some creature never tamed. He watched her to the phone booth, aware of a vague surprise that any woman could stir him so. The caress of her liquid voice lingered in his mind. He filled his lungs and drew down his chin and flexed his fingers. Suddenly he wished he had drunk less whisky and kept himself more fit. He could see the gleam of her white fur inside the lighted booth. He shivered again; perhaps he was taking cold. Resolutely, he turned away. How would it make him feel, he wondered, if he should discover that April Bell really were a murderess?

Quain and his companions had taken the wooden box away in Dr. Bennett's car. Nora and the others, left behind, were trailing despondently back through the terminal building. Mama Spivak was still wailing thinly, with Papa trying clumsily to console her.

"It's all right, Mama." The little tailor patted the quivering bulges of her shoulder. "Nickie should come back to Brooklyn with us, when he has such great things to do for the Foundation? He surely knows how you cleaned and cooked for him till the whole flat is shining and rich with good smells. He knows his round-trip fare is paid already, but the love is what matters. Don't cry, Mama."

"I should mind the food?" she sobbed. "The cleaning? Even the fare to Brooklyn? No, Papa. It's that awful thing that was buried in that desert. That old, bad thing they brought back in that green box—the thing my Nickie won't whisper its name, even!"

Her shuddering arms clung to the tiny tailor.

"I'm afraid yet, Papa!" she wailed. "That thing they took to Sam's house in the box, it killed poor Dr. Mondrick. I'm afraid it will get Sam and Nora yet. I'm afraid it will take our own little Nickie, too!"

"Please, Mama." Papa Spivak tried to laugh at her. "Nickie says you're just an old silly."

His laugh wasn't successful.

Nora Quain carried little Pat, holding the child against her with a frightened-seeming tightness. Nora's face looked empty with distress, and she didn't see Barbee. Blinking, Pat was trying to smooth Nora's yellow hair. Barbee heard the child urge softly: "Now, Mother—don't you cry!"

The hurt on old Ben Chittum's dried-up face moved Barbee to call impulsively: "Come along with me, Ben —I'll drive you back to town."

"Thanks, Will, but I'm okay." The old man managed a stiff little grin. "Don't you worry about me. I know Rex will come on out to see me when they get that box safe to Sam's place. Of course I'm disappointed, but I'll be okay. Hell, I'm spry as a spring lamb!"

Barbee glanced back to be sure that April Bell was still in the telephone booth, and followed a hunch. He walked quickly to the big trash can behind the terminal building and fumbled under discarded newspapers and candy wrappers and a crushed straw hat.

It was the same sort of hunch that had led him to a hundred news stories—the sort of intuition, arising from nowhere and yet oddly certain, which Preston Troy called the essential equipment of the good reporter. The nose for news. Once he had mentioned it to Dr. Glenn, and that suave psychiatrist told him that the faculty was nothing more than logical reasoning, working below the level of his conscious mind. Glenn's glib explanation didn't quite satisfy him, but he had come to trust his hunches.

Under the broken hat, he found the snakeskin bag.

Two ends of red ribbon fluttered beside the clasp, crushed and twisted as if they had been wrapped around straining fingers. Barbee snapped open the bag. Inside was the small, limp body of Aunt Agatha's black kitten.

The red ribbon, tied in a slip knot, was drawn into a noose so tight it had almost cut off the little swollen head. The pink mouth was open, the tiny tongue exposed, the blue eyes glazed and bulging. The kitten had been expertly garroted. A single drop of blood on the white silk lining of the bag led Barbee to something else.

Stirring the lax little body with his forefinger, he found something hard and white buried in the tangled black fur. He pulled it carefully away and whistled silently as he turned it under the light from the building. It was April Bell's lost heirloom—that white jade pin. The ornamental part was carved into a little running wolf, set with a polished eye of green malachite. The work was very delicate and true—the tiny wolf looked as slim and graceful, he thought, as April Bell herself.

The clasp behind it was open, and the strong steel pin had been thrust into the kitten's body. A drop of dark blood followed when he drew it out. The point, he thought, must have pierced the kitten's heart.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Witch Child

Barbee remembered a little he had learned long ago in Dr. Mondrick's classes about the theory and practice of magic among primitive mankind, but he was no student of what are termed the occult sciences. That wasn't necessary. The black kitten and the aged scholar had both died at the same time, in precisely the same way. April Bell must have killed the kitten. Had she thereby —ignoring whatever part in Dr. Mondrick's death might be due to that fashionable new biochemical magic called allergy—intended murder? Barbee believed she had.

But what was he to do about it? His first impulse was to carry the snakeskin bag and its disquieting contents out to Sam Quain's house—perhaps he could use it for a wedge, to get a glimpse inside that guarded wooden coffer. But he dropped the idea. Witchcraft might be a fruitful subject for the technical monographs of such scholars as Mondrick, but Sam Quain would only laugh, he felt, at any suggestion of a chic modern witch with penciled brows and enameled nails practicing her black arts in a live American town. Sam's distant curtness had annoyed him, besides—and he felt a curious reluctance to get April Bell involved.

Perhaps she hadn't killed little Fifi, after all—one of the small boys he had seen watching the airliner come in would be a more likely assassin. Perhaps her Aunt Agatha actually existed. Anyhow, if she decided to dine with him, he might learn a little more about her. Somehow, he knew he had to end the shocked uncertainty that tortured him.

His mind was made up. He wiped the blood from that steel point on the lining of the bag and dropped the little jade wolf in his coat pocket. He closed the snakeskin bag again and buried it once more under the broken straw hat. Briefly he wondered what the refuse collectors would think if they happened to salvage the bag, and supposed they were used to such minor mysteries.

The bitter wind, as he hurried back around the bright-lit building, set him to shivering again. The cloudy night seemed suddenly darker. He mopped his sweaty hands, and heard a ripping sound and looked down to see that he had torn his handkerchief across.

He strode eagerly to meet April Bell in the waiting room when she came out of the telephone booth. Her face looked flushed—perhaps only from the excitement of completing her first big assignment for the Call. Certainly she didn't look like a murderess. Yet he still had to find out why she had brought the black kitten here, and whether she had really stabbed and strangled it in a magical effort to stop the heart and breath of Dr. Mondrick.

"Ready?" he called. Her greenish eyes were bright, and she met him with a smile of what seemed to be warm comradeship. He nodded hopefully toward the parking space where his shabby coupe waited. "May I drive you back to town?"

"Sorry, but my car's here." She seemed to catch her breath. "Aunt Agatha had a bridge party, and she went back to town on the bus."

"Oh." He tried not to show his disappointment, or his doubt of Aunt Agatha's reality. "Then how about our date for dinner?"

"I called Auntie, and she says I may go." Her gay smile warmed him.

"Wonderful!" he whispered. "Where do you live?"

"The Trojan Arms," she told him. "Apartment 2-C."

"Huh!" He couldn't help blinking. That swank apartment-hotel was another business enterprise of Preston Troy, and Barbee had written puffs about it for the Star. The cheapest suite in it, he knew, would cost two hundred a month. April Bell was doing very nicely for a cub reporter—unless, of course, Aunt Agatha should happen to be both real and wealthy.

"But I'll meet you." The tall redhead didn't seem to see his bleak astonishment, and something in her soft, husky voice made him forget it. "Where shall we go?"

"The Knob Hill?" he suggested hopefully—although that suburban night spot was really too expensive for reporters on the Star's scale of pay.

"I'd love it," she purred.

He walked with her out through the windy night to her own parked car. It was a long maroon convertible, worth four thousand, he estimated uncomfortably, on the black market. Not many cub reporters drove such opulent machines. Perhaps, he hoped, it belonged to Aunt Agatha.

He opened the door and she stepped in quickly, as graceful in her white fur as the tiny jade carving in his pocket. She took his hand for an instant, and the touch of her strong cool fingers was exciting as her voice. He put down the impulse to kiss her, afraid that would spoil everything. His breath hastened. Murderess or not, April Bell was going to be a fascinating girl to know.

"Bye, Barbee," she whispered. "Till nine."

Barbee drove back to town in his prewar coupe, and stopped at his desk in the long city room to hammer out his stories for the Star. Writing, he was glad of the terse, stereotyped objectivity of modern journalese.

Dr. Lamarck Mondrick, famed anthropologist and founder of the Humane Research Foundation, just returned from two years of excavating prehistoric sites in the remote Ala-shan desert, fell dead last night at the municipal airport, dramatically cut off as he attempted to tell newsmen what his expedition had discovered.

That was the lead. He went on with the simple facts of the tragedy, filled out with his own knowledge and biographical facts culled from the file in the morgue. He was glad that a formal obituary had no space for anything about April Bell, or the assassinated kitten in the trash can.

Eagerness hurried him back to the battered old coupe. Sliding under the wheel, he found himself empty-handed, and realized he had forgotten to buy a bottle. It was months since he had passed the Mint Bar, he thought, without stopping for a shot and maybe a bottle to take along. April Bell might be good for him.

His own apartment was two shabby rooms, with kitchenette and bath, in a run-down two-story building on Bread Street. The decayed neighborhood was too close to the mills, but the rent wasn't too high for his pay and the landlady didn't seem to care how much he drank.

He bathed and shaved, and discovered himself whistling happily as he looked for a clean shirt and a suit that wouldn't be too shabby for the Knob Hill. April Bell might be what he needed. He had closed the door behind him at eight forty when he heard the telephone ring inside. He hurried back to answer it, shaken with a sudden apprehension that she had decided not to see him.

"Will?" The voice was a woman's, calm and yet intense. "I want to talk to you."

It wasn't April Bell, and that quick dread relaxed its grasp. In a moment he recognized the clear, gracious voice of Mondrick's blind wife, serenely sweet, reflecting nothing of the shock he knew she must feel.

"Can you drive out to see me, Will?" she asked. "Right away?"

He frowned at his watch. The Knob Hill was forty blocks out Center Street, beyond the river and outside the city limits. The old Mondrick house, just off the university campus, was forty blocks in the other direction.

"Not right now, Rowena," he stammered awkwardly. "Of course I want to do everything I can to make things easy for you. I can come out in the morning, or maybe later tonight if you need me. But right now I have an engagement that I can't break—"

"Oh!" The sound seemed almost a cry of pain. The receiver was silent for a moment, and then Rowena Mondrick's calm sweet voice asked very softly: "With that Bell woman?"

"With April Bell," Barbee said.

"Will, who is she?"

"Huh!" Barbee caught his breath. You had to hand it to Rowena. She certainly kept up with the world, in spite of all her tragedies. "Just a fresh girl reporter," he said, "on the evening paper. I had never met her before tonight. Turk didn't seem to like her, but I thought she was pretty slick."

"You didn't!" the blind woman protested, and then begged urgently: "Break your date, Will! Or put her off, until you have time to come and talk with me. Won't you? Please!"

"Sorry," he muttered awkwardly. "But I really can't, Rowena." A faint resentment edged his tone, in spite of him. "I know you don't like her—and your dog doesn't. But I find her very interesting."

"I'm sure you do," Rowena Mondrick said quietly. "It's true I don't like her—for an excellent reason, that I want to tell you whenever you have time to listen. So please drive out when you can."

He couldn't speak of all the reasons behind his interest in April Bell—he wasn't even sure that he fully understood them. Yet a flood of pity for the blind woman in her bereavement made him regret his impatience, and he said clumsily: "Sorry, Rowena. I'll come to see you as soon as I can."

"Watch yourself, Will!" cried that sweetly urgent voice. "Watch yourself with her tonight. Because that woman plans to injure you—dreadfully!"

"Injure me?" he whispered unbelievingly. "How?"

"Come out tomorrow," Rowena said, "I'll tell you."

"Please explain—" Barbee gasped before he heard her hang up. He put the receiver back, and stood a moment wondering what she could have meant. He could see no possible reason behind her words—unless she had turned her dog's savage lunge at April's kitten into a personal antagonism.

Rowena Mondrick, he remembered, had been given to spells of moody strangeness ever since he knew her. Usually serene and normal as any seeing person, keenly alive with her friends and her music, often even gay—sometimes she left her piano and ignored her friends, seeming to care only for the company of her huge dog and the caress of the odd silver jewelry she wore.

Her strangeness must be a natural aftermath of that ghastly event in Africa, Barbee supposed, and Mondrick's sudden death had awakened her old terrors. He'd see her in the morning, and do what he could to soothe her irrational fears. He'd try to remember to take her a couple of new records for the automatic phonograph Sam and Nora Quain had given her.

But now he was going to meet April Bell.

The bar at the Knob Hill was a semicircular glass-walled room, indirectly lit with a baleful, dim red glare. The seats were green leather and chromium, too angular for comfort. The whole effect was sleek and hard and disturbing—perhaps it was intended, Barbee thought, to goad unsuspecting patrons into buying drinks enough so they wouldn't be aware of it April Bell flashed her scarlet smile at him from a tiny black table under an arch of red-lit glass. The white fur was tossed carelessly over the back of another chair, and she somehow looked utterly relaxed in the angular seat, as if this deliberately jarring atmosphere didn't disturb her. Indeed, her long oval face reflected a satisfaction that seemed almost feline.

Her rather daring evening gown was a deep green that accented the eager green of her slightly oblique eyes. Barbee hadn't even thought of wearing dinner jacket or tails, and for a moment he was uncomfortably aware of his gray year-old business suit, a little too loose on his lank frame. But April didn't seem to mind and he forgot, in his instant appreciation of all the white-wolf coat had hidden. The white, well-groomed flesh of her seemed infinitely desirable, yet something made him think of the blind woman's warning.

"May I have a daiquiri?" she asked.

Barbee ordered two daiquiris.

He sat looking at her across the little table, so close he caught her clean perfume. Almost drunk before the drinks came with the sheen of her red hair and the dark intensity of her long eyes, the warm charm of her eager-seeming smile and the lithe vitality of her perfect body —he found it hard to recall his plan of action.

The velvet caress of her slightly husky voice made him want to forget that he suspected her of murder— yet he knew he could never forget, until he learned the truth. The frantic unrest in him, the sharp conflict of bright hope and vaguely dreadful terror, would not be stilled.

He had tried, driving across the long river bridge, to plan his inquiry. Motivation, it seemed to him, was the essential point. If it were true that she knew nothing of Mondrick, and had no reason to wish him harm, then the whole thing became fantastic nonsense. Even if the kitten's accidental presence had actually caused the fatal attack, that unfortunate coincidence should trouble neither him nor the law.

Barbee didn't like to consider the other alternative. This tall redhead, smiling with her intoxicating hint of special comradeship through a foot or so of smoke-hazed air, seemed to offer him more than a lonely, faintly embittered newspaperman could quite dare dream of, and he didn't want to knock her gift into the dust. He wanted her to like him.

He didn't want to find a motive; he shrank from trying to discover why she might have desired Mondrick's death. Yet a score of unsolved riddles came crowding to haunt him, each casting its sinister shadow across the girl's gay smile. Who had been Mondrick's "secret enemy," awaiting the coming of a "Child of Night"?

Suppose April Bell were a member of some desperate conspiracy? In this seething postwar world, when nations and races and hostile philosophies still battled to survive, when scientists fashioned another more shocking agency of death each day, it wasn't hard to picture that.

Suppose Mondrick and his party, on their long trip home across the battlegrounds of Asia, had secured evidence about the identity and aims of those conspirators—and brought it back in that wooden box? Taking extreme precautions—fully aware of some danger they couldn't avoid—they had attempted to broadcast their warning. But Mondrick, before he could name the menace, had fallen dead.

April Bell had killed him—he couldn't quite escape the cold finality of that. Whether it was freakish accident or premeditated homicide, the black kitten she had brought to the plane in her snakeskin bag must have been the fatal instrument. He didn't like the implication, yet there it was.

Their daiquiris came, and her white teeth smiled over the glass. She was warm and real and near, and he tried desperately to shake off the hard constraint of his suspicion. After all, he told himself, it was utterly fantastic. In a world which afforded such efficient instruments of homicide as knives and cyanide and tommy guns, no serious murderer would think of depending on the protein dust from the fur of a black kitten carried across the victim's path. No efficient modern killer, he assured himself, would place any reliance on a strangling ribbon knotted around a kitten's throat and a pin thrust through its tiny heart. That is, unless—

Barbee shook his head and raised his glass, with an awkward little smile, to clink against April Bell's. The longer he let himself brood over those vague improbabilities surrounding Dr. Mondrick's death, the less pleasant they appeared. He determined to devote himself entirely to the more attractive business of an evening with the most fascinating woman he had ever met.

What if she were a witch?

That is, he amended the phrase, what if she had wished to bring about Mondrick's death and expected to accomplish it by garroting little Fifi? After all, he was fully fed up with his life as it had been. Eighty hours a week on Preston Troy's dirty yellow rag for a wage that hardly paid for his rent and meals and whisky. He had been drinking nearly a fifth of cheap bourbon a day. April Bell, even if she believed herself a witch, might prove to be a more exciting escape.

She looked at him as their glasses chimed, and her long dark eyes held a cool, smiling challenge.

"Well ... Barbee?"

He leaned across the tiny octagonal table.

"To ... our evening!" Her vital nearness took his breath. "Please, April—I want to know about you—everything. Everywhere you've been, and everything you've done. Your family and your friends. What you dream about, and what you like for breakfast."

Her red lips curved in a slow feline smile.

"You ought to know better, Barbee—a woman's mystery is her charm."

He couldn't help noticing again the even white strength of her perfect teeth. They reminded him of Poe's weird story—something about a man haunted by a dreadful compulsion to pull his sweetheart's teeth. He tried to shake off that untimely association, and started to lift his glass. A shudder made it tremble in his hand, and the pale drink splashed on his fingers.

"Too much mystery is alarming." He set the glass down carefully. "I'm really afraid of you."

"So?" She watched him wipe the cold stickiness of the spilled drink off his fingers, the smile on her white mobile face seeming faintly malicious, as if she were laughing at him secretly. "Really, Barbee, you're the dangerous one."

Barbee looked down uncomfortably, and sipped his drink. Until tonight, he had thought he knew about women—far too much about them. But April Bell baffled him.

"You see, Barbee, I've tried to build an illusion." Her cool voice mocked him with that secret laughter. "You've made me very happy, accepting it. Surely you wouldn't want me to shatter it now?"

"I do," he said soberly. "Please, April."

She nodded, and red lights burned in her sleek hair.

"Very well, Barbee," she purred. "For you, I'll drop my painted veil."

She set down her glass, and leaned toward him with her round arms crossed on the tiny black table. The white curves of her shoulders and her breasts were near him. Faintly, he thought he caught the natural odor of her body, a light, dry, clean fragrance—he was glad it had escaped the advertising crusades of the soap manufacturers. Her husky voice dropped to match his own soberness.

"I'm just a simple farmer's daughter, really," she told him. "I was born here in Clarendon county-—my parents had a little dairy up the river, just beyond the railroad bridge. I used to walk half a mile every morning to catch the school bus."

Her lips made a quick half smile.

"Well, Barbee—does that shatter my precious illusion enough to suit you?"

Barbee shook his head.

"That hardly dents it. Please go on."

Her white expressive face looked troubled.

"Please, Will," she begged softly. "I'd rather not tell you any more about me—not tonight, anyhow. That illusion is my shell. I'd be helpless without it, and not very pretty. Don't make me break it. You might not like me without it."

"No danger." His voice turned almost grim. "But I do want you to go on. You see, I'm still afraid."

She sipped her daiquiri, and her cool green eyes studied his face. That secret laughter had left them. She frowned a little, and then smiled again with that air of warm accord.

"I warn you—it gets a little sordid."

"I can take it," he promised her. "I want to know you—so that I can like you more."

"I hope so." She smiled. "Here goes."

Her mobile face made a quick grimace of distaste.

"My parents didn't get on together—that's all the trouble, really." Her low voice was forced and uneven. "My father—but there's no use digging up the unpleasant details. The year I was nine, Mother took me to California. Father kept the other children. It's that cheap, ugly background that I built my illusion to hide."

She drained her glass nervously.

"You see, there wasn't any alimony." Her flat voice turned bitter. "Mother took her own name back. She worked to keep us. Hash-slinger. Salesgirl, stenographer, carhop. Movie extra. Finally she got a few character bits, but it was pretty rough sledding for her.

She lived for me, and tried to bring me up to play the game a little shrewder.

"Mother had a poor opinion of men—with reason enough, I'm afraid. She tried to fit me to protect myself. She made me—well, call me a she-wolf." Her fine teeth flashed through an uneasy little smile. "And here I am, Barbee. Mother managed to put me through school. Somehow, all those years, she kept her insurance paid up. I had a few thousand dollars when she died. By the time that's gone, if I do as she taught me—"

She made a wry little face, and tried to smile.

"That's the picture, Will. I'm a ruthless beast of prey." She pushed her empty glass aside abruptly—the gesture seemed nervous, somehow defiant. "How do you like me now?"

Shifting uncomfortably before the penetrating keenness of her faintly Oriental eyes, Barbee was grateful for the waiter's approach. He ordered two more daiquiris.

In a lower voice that seemed to hold a faint bitter mockery—perhaps of herself—April Bell asked, "Does the ugly truth behind my poor, torn illusion make you any less afraid of me?"

Barbee contrived to grin.

"As a beast of prey," he said as lightly as he could, "your equipment is splendid. I only wish that reporters on the Star's payroll were fair financial game." A hard earnestness came back into his uneasy voice. "But it's something else that I'm afraid of."

He stared at her. For he thought her white, perfect body had imperceptibly tensed. He thought her long greenish eyes had narrowed alertly. Even the faint, fragrant scent of her now carried a subtle warning, it seemed to him—as if she had been an actual thing of prey, crouching beyond that tiny black table, wary and deadly. Her instant smile didn't quite erase that startled impression.

"Well?" Her voice seemed hoarse with tension. "What are you afraid of?"

Barbee gulped the rest of his own drink. His fingers drummed nervously on the table—he noticed how large and gnarled and hairy his hand seemed, beside hers. His mind had rebelled against the intolerable conflict of frantic hope and desperate doubt, and a reckless impulse told him to blurt out the truth.

"April—"

He checked himself, and caught his breath. Because her white oval face had turned remote and cold. Her long greenish eyes had narrowed alertly—almost as if she had already heard what he was going to say. He made himself go on.

"April—it's about what happened at the airport." He leaned across the little table. Something made him shiver. His voice turned suddenly hard, accusing. "You killed that black kitten—I found the body. You did it to cause the death of Dr. Mondrick."

Barbee had expected a violent denial. He had prepared himself to face her slashing anger. A bewildered lack of comprehension was what he had hoped for—if some youthful assassins had really kidnapped and destroyed little Fifi. He was completely at a loss when the girl covered her face with her hands, elbows propped on the little table, and began sobbing silently.

He stared at the red splendor of her hair, and bit his lip. Her despair and pain were terribly real, and a sharp knife of contrition twisted in his breast. He couldn't endure tears. All his cruel suspicions became utterly fantastic. He had been a complete fool, even to mention Aunt Agatha's kitten.

"April—really—" he floundered. "I didn't mean—"

He subsided while the stony-faced waiter set down two fresh daiquiris and went away with his two dollar bills and the empty glasses. He wanted desperately to touch April Bell's white trembling shoulder, somehow to soothe her hurt. Suddenly he didn't care what she was or what she had done. Instead, a tremendous excited curiosity to know how and why she had done it rose in him.

"Please, April," he begged faintly. "I'm very sorry."

She lifted her head, and looked silently at him out of her wet, slightly slanted eyes—or was it only that her thin brows had been artfully plucked to make them look oblique? Her eyes were huge and dark and solemn, and tears had smeared the smooth makeup on her cheeks. Her red head nodded slightly—in a hopeless little bow of tired defeat.

"So you know." It was a statement, bitterly final.

Barbee reached impulsively to take her slender hands, but she drew them back and dropped them wearily in her lap. She sat looking at him, waiting, defiantly submissive, almost haggard with her ruined makeup, for once not building any illusions—or was this just a new one?

"I don't know anything." His hurried voice was anxious and bewildered. "This is all a nightmare—too many things I can't believe, or understand. I—" He blinked, and swallowed hard. "I didn't mean to hurt you so. Please, April—believe that. I like you ... a very great deal. But ... well, you know how Mondrick died."

Her wet eyes dropped wearily. She found a handkerchief in the green leather bag that matched the gown and lent its color to her eyes. She dabbed away her tears, and unobtrusively flicked powder on her cheeks again. She sipped deliberately at her cocktail, and he saw the glass quivering in her long, slender fingers. At last she looked up solemnly.

"Yes, Will." Her voice was low and grave. "You've found me out—I guess it's no use trying to fool you any longer. The truth is hard to say, and I know it will upset you.

"But I'm a witch, Barbee."

Barbee half rose, sat down again, and nervously tossed off his daiquiri. He blinked at her hurt, earnest face and shook his head savagely. He caught his breath and opened his mouth and shut it again. At last he demanded breathlessly: "What the devil do you mean?"

"Just what I said," she told him soberly. "I didn't tell you what my parents quarreled about—I couldn't. But that was the cause. I was a witch child, and my father found it out. My mother had always known, and she stood by me—he'd have killed me if she hadn't. So he drove us both away."

CHAPTER FIVE

The Thing Behind the Veil

April Bell leaned across the little eight-sided table, her strained white face floating close to his in the thick haze of hot blue smoke and alcohol that the Knob Hill's patrons paid so well to breathe. Her husky voice was very low, and her long eyes watched his startled expression with a painful intensity, as if to estimate the impact of her words.

Barbee had a queer, numbed feeling in the pit of his stomach; it was amazingly like the effect of a tremendous slug of whisky—he was numbed, yet with a foreknowledge of warmth to come. He gulped and breathed again and nodded anxiously. He didn't quite dare speak—he didn't want to challenge the girl's confession, nor could he yet accept it.

Her white, troubled face smiled slightly, relaxing to a faint relief.

"You see," she told him slowly, "Mother was my father's second wife. Young enough to have been his daughter. I know she never loved him—I never really understood why she married him. Such a disagreeable brute, and he never had any money. Certainly she wasn't following the rules she laid down for me."

Barbee reached for a cigarette. He didn't want to interrupt the girl, and he thought she would stop if she knew the agonized intensity of his own interest. He needed something to do with his nervous hands. She shook her head when he offered the worn case to her, and her slow, hushed voice went on.

"But Mother had been in love with some other man —she never told me his name. Maybe that explains her marriage and the way she felt about men. My father never did much to make her love him. Perhaps he knew something about that other man. I know he suspected that I wasn't really his."

Careful not to let his fingers tremble, Barbee lit his cigarette.

"Father was a stern man," the girl went on. "A Puritan, really—he belonged back in old Salem. He was never actually ordained—he couldn't quite agree with any denomination—but he used to preach his own harsh faith on street corners here in town on market Saturdays, whenever he could get a few idlers to listen. He considered himself a righteous man, trying to warn the world away from sin. Actually, he could be monstrously cruel.

"He was cruel to me."

Old pain made a shadow on the girl's pale face.

"You see, I was a precocious child. Father had older children, by his first marriage, who were not. I could read a little by the time I was three. I understood people. Somehow, I could just sense what people would do, and things that would happen. My father wasn't pleased to see me more clever than my older brothers and sisters—the ones he knew were his own."

She smiled faintly.

"I think I was pretty, too—my mother always told me so. No doubt I was spoiled and vain, and sometimes nasty to the others. Anyhow, I was always in some quarrel with the older children, with my mother taking sides with me against them and my father. Of course they were all much bigger, but even then I think I was pretty clever in finding ways to hurt them."

Her oval face turned very white.

"And Father, too," she whispered. "I used to flaunt my red hair at him—it was lighter then, and my mother kept it in long curls. It happened that he and Mother were both dark-haired, and now I'm sure that other man, the one he suspected, must have been a redhead. Then I only knew that the color of my hair goaded him to fury. I was just five years old the first time he called me a witch child—and snatched me out of Mother's arms to whip me."

Her greenish eyes were dark and dry. To Barbee they seemed hard as emeralds, ruthless with an old and unforgotten hate. Her face, except for the scarlet bows of her lips, seemed white as the wolf fur flung over the chair beside her. Her hushed, hurried voice was bitter and dry—as cruel, he thought, as the parching winds of the Ala-shan must be.

"My father always hated me," she told him. "His children did—no, I never believed that I was really his. They hated me because I was different. Because I was prettier than any of the girls, and quicker than any of the boys. Because I could do things none of them could. Yes—because I was already a witch!"

She made a savage little nod.

"They all stood against me—all except Mother. I had to defend myself and strike back when I could. I knew about witches from the Bible—Father used to read a chapter at every mealtime, and then chant an endless grace before he would let us eat. I asked questions about what witches could do. Mother told me some things, and I learned a lot from the old midwife who came when my married sister had a child—she was a queer old woman! By the time I was seven years old, I had started to practice the things I had learned."

Barbee sat listening, half incredulous and yet fascinated. The girl's taut face swam close to him in the thick blue haze, mirroring all she said, a white enigma of old pain and hate and occasional glee, sullen-lipped and yet strangely lovely.

"I began with small things," she whispered. "As a child would. The first serious incident came later, when I was nearly nine. My half brother Harry had a dog named Tige. For some reason Tige always hated me. He would growl when I tried to touch him—like that Mondrick woman's ugly dog did today. Another sign, my father said, that I was a witch child sent to visit the wrath of God upon his house.

"One day Tige bit me. Harry laughed at me and called me a wicked little witch. He was going to let Tige chase me—that was what he said. Maybe he was just teasing. I don't know—but I said I'd show him that I really was a witch. I told him I'd put a spell on Tige and kill him. I did my best."

Her long eyes narrowed, and her nostrils seemed to pinch.

"I remembered all the old midwife had told me. I made up a little chant about Tige dying, and whispered it during family prayers. I gathered hairs out of his blanket and spit on them and burned them in the kitchen stove. And I waited for Tige to die."

Barbee tried to ease her painful intensity.

"You were just a child," he murmured. "Just playing."

"Tige went mad the very next week," she said quietly. "Father had to shoot him."

Her quiet seemed more startling than a scream. Barbee moved uneasily and caught his breath.

"Coincidence," he muttered.

"Maybe." A brief amusement lit the girl's face, as if she had seen his apprehensive start. "I don't think so." That shadow of old bitterness came back. "I believed in my power. Harry did. So did my father, when Harry told him. I ran to Mother, where she was sewing. Father dragged me outside, and whipped me again."

Her long trembling fingers lifted her glass, but she set it back untasted, absorbed in her narrative.

"Father hurt me cruelly, and I felt that he was savagely unjust. While he was whipping me, I screamed that I would get even. As soon as he let me go, I tried to. I slipped out to the dairy and pulled hairs out of the three best cows and the bull my father had just bought for the herd. I spat on the hairs and burned them with a match and buried them behind the barn. I made another chant."

Her long dark eyes peered somberly through the smoke.

"Probably a week afterward, the bull dropped dead."

"Coincidence," Barbee whispered faintly. "It must have been coincidence."

Her scarlet lips twisted to a wry, slight smile.

"The veterinarian said it was hemorrhagic septicemia," she said softly. "The three cows died, too, as well as the best yearling heifer and two steer calves. My father remembered the threats I had screamed, and Harry had watched me digging behind the barn. Harry tattled, and Father whipped me until I confessed that I had tried to kill the cattle."

Abruptly, with a swift, catlike grace of motion, she tossed off her drink. Her greenish eyes looked straight at Barbee, glazed and hard as if she didn't see anything. Nervously, her tense fingers started twirling the glass. The thin stem snapped, and the bowl splintered on the floor. Without seeming to notice, she went on huskily: "That was a dreadful night, Barbee. Father sent all the other children to stay at my married sister's house —to escape the taint of witchcraft, he ranted, and avoid the dreadful wrath of God. Just he and Mother and I were left, to pray it out together, Father said, and let me suffer the just retribution for my sin."

Nervously, her red-nailed fingers spun the stem of the shattered glass.

"I'll never forget that night. Mother cried and tried to make excuses for me and begged for mercy—I remember her down on her knees, on the splintered pine floor before my father, as if he had been another angry deity. But he didn't pay much attention to her prayers. He stamped up and down that gloomy little room, and shouted his questions and his cruel accusations at Mother and me, and read from the Bible by the light of a smelly coal-oil lamp. Again and again he read that terrible line: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

Afraid she might cut her trembling hand on the daggerpoint of the broken glass, Barbee lifted it out of her fingers. She didn't seem to notice.

"It went on all night," she whispered. "Father would make us kneel and pray. He would walk the floor and sob, and curse my mother and me. He would jerk her up when she knelt at his feet and cuff her about the room and warn her not to shelter a witch child in her bosom. Finally he would snatch me out of her arms, and whip me again, until he nearly killed me. And then he would read out of the Bible.

"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

She paused, her long eyes staring at his hands. Barbee looked down and saw a bright red drop on his finger. Carefully, he set the broken glass stem in the ash tray. He wiped the blood on his handkerchief, and lit another cigarette.

"He would have killed me, too," the girl's hoarse, bitter voice went on. "Mother fought him, the last time, to make him let me go. She broke a chair over his head, but that didn't seem to hurt him much. He dropped me on the floor, and started for his shotgun leaning by the door. I knew he meant to kill us both, and I screamed out a chant to stop him."

Her husky voice caught, and she swallowed hard.

"It worked. He fell on the floor, just as he reached the gun. The doctors said later that it was a cerebral hemorrhage. They told him he had better learn to control his temper. I don't suppose he ever did, because he dropped dead the day he got out of the hospital and heard that Mother had taken me and run away to California."

Barbee was a little startled to discover that the waiter had swept up the shattered glass and set two fresh daiquiris on the tiny table. April Bell lifted her drink thirstily. Barbee found two more dollars in his flat pocketbook, and wondered briefly what the dinner check would come to. He sipped at his own drink, and carefully held himself from interrupting.

"I never knew exactly what Mother believed." That answered the question he hadn't dared to ask. "She loved me. I think she could have forgiven me anything. She only made me promise, when we were safe out of Father's house, that I would never try to make another spell. I didn't—so long as she lived."

She set back her empty glass, her white fingers steady again.

"Mother was all right—you'd have liked her, Barbee. You couldn't really blame her for not trusting men, and she did all she could for me. As the years went by, I think she almost forgot all that had happened back here at Clarendon. I know she wanted to. She would never talk of coming back, even to visit her old friends here. I know it would have shocked her horribly to know what I was—what I really am."

That hardness had melted from the girl's greenish eyes; they seemed liquid now, huge and dark and queerly eager. "I kept my promise not to work any more spells," she told him softly. "But nothing could stop my knowledge of the powers awakening and growing within me. Nothing could keep me from feeling what other people thought and foreseeing things that were going to happen."

"I know." Barbee nodded. "That's what we call the nose for news."

She shook her bright head gravely.

"It's more than that," she insisted quietly. "Other things happened. I didn't work any more spells—not on purpose. But things happened that I couldn't help."

He listened, and tried not to let her see him shiver.

"There was a girl at school," she said. "I didn't like her, anyhow—she was too nasty-nice, always quoting the Bible and meddling in other people's lives like those half sisters I hated. Once she won a journalism scholarship that I had set my heart on. I knew she had cheated to get it. I couldn't help wishing something would happen to her."

"And," Barbee breathed, "did it?"

"It did," April told him gently. "The day that girl was supposed to accept the scholarship, she woke up ill. She tried to go to the auditorium anyhow and fainted on the way. It was acute appendicitis—the doctors said. She nearly died. If she had—"

Nearly black, her long eyes stared straight at Barbee. He saw the bleak memories in them, of dread and pain. He saw her white body shudder in the daring gown.

"Another coincidence, you can say. That's what I wanted to think, Barbee. Because I didn't really hate that girl. I thought I'd lose my mind until the doctors said she would pull through. But that wasn't the only incident. Other things kept happening, almost as serious. I grew to be afraid of myself."

Her voice sank.

"Don't you see, Barbee?" Her dark eyes begged him to understand. "I didn't make any conscious spells, but still that power was working in me. When such seeming accidents always follow the acts and wishes of a person, it gets to be beyond the realm of coincidence. Can't you see?"

Barbee nodded. After a while he remembered to breathe again. At last he muttered huskily, "I guess so."

"Please try to see my side of it," the girl urged softly. "I didn't ask to be a witch—I was born this way."

Barbee drummed nervously on the table with his knuckles. He saw the waiter coming back and impatiently waved him away. He gulped, and said uneasily: "Look here, April—do you mind if I ask a few more questions?"

Her white shoulders shrugged with a mute and weary bitterness.

"Please," he said. "Perhaps I can help—I do want to."

"Now that I've told you," she whispered faintly, "what does anything matter?"

"There are things that still might matter a good deal—to you and me." Her white face seemed dull and sad, but this time she let him take her hand across the tiny table. Earnestly he asked: "Have you ever talked about this thing to anybody who might understand—a psychiatrist, I mean, or a scientist like old Mondrick was?"

Her bright head nodded apathetically.

"I have a friend who knows about me—he knew my mother and I think he used to help us, back when times were hard. Two years ago, he persuaded me to go to Dr. Glenn. Young Dr. Archer Glenn, you know, here at Clarendon."

Barbee tried to smother an instant jealous desire to know more about that friend. His fingers tightened on the girl's limp, cool hand, but he managed to nod calmly.

"I know Glenn," he said. "Interviewed him once, while his father was still working with him—I was writing up Glennhaven for a special medical edition of the Star. Glennhaven is supposed to be about the best private mental hospital in the country. What—?"

Anxiety caught his voice, and he had to swallow.

"What did Glenn tell you?"

Her pale face reflected a faint, defiant amusement.

"Dr. Glenn doesn't believe in witches," she purred gently. "He tried to psychoanalyze me. I spent an hour a day for nearly a year, lying on a couch in his office at Glennhaven and telling him all about me. I tried to cooperate—you have to, at forty dollars an hour. I told him everything—and still he doesn't believe in witches."

She chuckled softly.

"Glenn thinks everything in the universe can be explained on the basis that two and two make four. If you put any kind of spell on anything, he always insisted, then wait long enough, some accident is sure to happen to it. He used big words to tell me that I was unconsciously kidding myself. He thought I was a little bit insane—a paranoiac. He wouldn't believe that I was a witch."

A faint malice curved her crimson lips.

"Not even when I showed him!"

"Showed him?" Barbee echoed. "How?"

"Dogs don't like me," she said. "Glennhaven's out in the country, you know, and the dogs off the farms across the road used to come and bark at me when I got off the bus, and chase me into the building. One day I got tired of that—and I wanted to show Glenn.

"So I brought a little modeling clay. I mixed it with dust from around a bench at the corner, where the dogs used to stop. When I got to Glenn's office, I molded it into rough little figures of five of the dogs. I whispered a little chant and spat on them and smashed them on the floor. Then I told Glenn to look out the window."

Glee danced in the girl's long eyes.

"We waited ten minutes. I pointed out the dogs. They had followed me to the building. They hung around a little while, barking at the window. Then they all started away after a little terrier bitch—she must have been in heat. They ran out into the highway, all together, just as a speeding car came around the curve. The driver tried to swerve but he didn't have time. The car hit them and turned over as it skidded off the road. All the dogs were killed—I'm glad the driver wasn't."

Barbee shook himself uneasily, and caught his breath.

"What did Glenn say?"

"He seemed to be delighted." April Bell smiled enigmatically. "It turned out the bitch belonged to a chiropractor who lives down the road, and he said the dogs had been digging up the grounds. He doesn't like either dogs or chiropractors—but still he wouldn't believe in witches."

The girl shook her burnished head.

"The dogs had died because the chiropractor's bitch happened to slip her leash, he said, and not because of any spell of mine. He went on to say that I didn't really want to give up my psychosis and we couldn't make any progress until I changed my attitude. He said my gift was just a paranoid delusion. He charged me another forty dollars for that hour, and we went ahead with the analysis."

Barbee exhaled blue smoke into the thick blue air, and moved uncomfortably in the angular seat. He saw the waiter watching imperatively, but he didn't want another drink. He looked uncertainly back at April Bell. Her brief amusement had vanished; her face seemed tired and sad. Slowly she drew her cold hands out of his fingers.

"And you think he was right, Barbee."

He gripped the edges of the little table.

"My God!" he whispered explosively. "It would be no great wonder if you showed some tendencies of insanity, after all you've lived through!"

A warm surge of pity rose in him, and turned to burning anger against all her old misfortunes, against the ignorance and the cruel fanatacism of her stern father who had forced her to accept such pitiful delusions. He felt an imperative urge to shelter her, to help her back toward complete sanity. The hot, foul atmosphere of the crowded bar began to choke him. He coughed to hide his feelings. Too much show of pity would only offend her.

Quietly she said: "I know I'm not insane."

So, Barbee understood, did all lunatics. He didn't know what to say next. He wanted time to think—to analyze her curious confession and check all these evasive uncertainties against the ruthless fact of Mondrick's death. He looked at his watch, and nodded toward the dining room. "Shall we eat?"

She nodded eagerly. "I'm hungry as a wolf!"

That word checked Barbee—reminding him of Aunt Agatha's odd jade pin. She was already reaching, with her swift feline felicity of action, for the white fur beside her, but Barbee sat heavily back in the angular chair.

"Let's have another drink." He signalled the waiter and ordered two more daiquiris before he turned to face her slight frown of puzzlement. "It's late," he said, "but there's one more thing I've got to ask about." He hesitated and saw that wary, dangerous alertness come back to her white, taut face. Reluctantly, he demanded: "You did kill that kitten?"

"I did."

His hands gripped the table until the knuckles snapped.

"And you did it to cause the death of Dr. Mondrick?"

In the haze of smoke, her bright head nodded slightly. "And he died."

The calm matter-of-factness of her tone sent a shiver down Barbee's spine. Darkly greenish, her watchful eyes seemed flatly opaque. Her oval face was a lifeless, waxen mask. He couldn't guess what she thought or what she felt. The bridge of confidence was swept away, and it left a chasm of peril between them.

"Please, April—"

Quick sympathy quivered in his voice. He wanted urgently to reach and comfort the defiant loneliness he knew she felt, but his impulsive effort failed to penetrate her hostile citadel. Barbee dropped to a note as cool and gravely impersonal as hers had been, asking: "Why did you want to kill him?"

Across that tiny table her low and toneless voice was as distant as if it called from within a far-off fortress tower.

"Because I was afraid."

Barbee's brows went up.

"Afraid of what?" he demanded. "You said you didn't even know him. And how could he have harmed you? I did have an old grudge against him, of course— for dropping me from his little circle of disciples when he organized the Foundation. But he was harmless— just a scientist, digging for knowledge."

"I know what he was doing." The girl's voice was hard and cold and still remote. "You see, Barbee, I always wanted to know about myself—and the power born in me. I didn't study psychology in college, because all the professors seemed stupidly wrong. But I've read nearly everything that has been published on such unusual cases as mine."

Her eyes were hard as polished malachite.

"Did you know Mondrick was an outstanding authority on witchcraft? Well, he was. He knew all the history of the witch persecutions, and a great deal more besides. He had studied the beliefs of every primitive race—and those beliefs were something more to him than strange fairy stories.

"You know the myths of Greece, for instance—full of illicit love affairs between the gods and human girls. Nearly all the Greek heroes—Hercules and Perseus and the rest—were supposed to have illegitimate immortal blood. They all had remarkable powers and gifts. Well, years ago Mondrick wrote a monograph analyzing those legends as racial memories of conflict and occasional interbreeding between two prehistoric races—the tall Cro-Magnons, perhaps, he suggested in that first paper, and the brutish Neanderthalers.

"But you worked under him, Barbee—you must know the range of his interests. He dug up graves and measured skulls and fitted broken pots together and deciphered old inscriptions. He looked for differences in the people of today—tested their blood and measured their reactions and analyzed their dreams. He had an open mind for everything that most scientists throw out because it doesn't fit their own preconceptions. He was an authority on extrasensory perception and psychokinesis before anybody else thought of the words. He tried every avenue to find what he wanted."

"That's true," Barbee said. "So what?"

"Mondrick was always cautious in what he wrote," the girl's far, cold voice went on. "He covered up his real meaning with harmless scientific words-—to keep from exciting too many people, I suppose, before his proofs were ready. Finally, a dozen years ago, he quit publishing anything at all—he even bought up and burned the copies of his early monographs. But he had already written too much. I knew what he was doing."

April Bell paused while the slow waiter brought the change out of Barbee's lone twenty, automatically sipping at her drink. That made three, he thought—no, it must be four. She held them well enough. When the waiter was gone, she resumed in the same flat voice: "Mondrick believed in witches."

"Nonsense!" Barbee started. "He was a scientist."

"And he still believed in witches," she insisted. "That's what frightened me today. Most scientists, so-called, reject the evidence without a look, but Mondrick had spent his whole life trying to put witchcraft on a scientific basis. He went to the Ala-shan to find new evidence. And I knew today—from the way everything happened, from the fear on those men's faces and Mondrick's cautious first remarks—that he had found what he wanted."

"But—not that!"

"You don't believe, Barbee." Her dry voice was edged again with a veiled mockery. "Most people don't. That fact is our chief protection—for we are the enemies of people." Her red lips curved at his incredulous amazement. "You can see why men must always hate us—because we are different. Because we have inborn powers greater than are given men—and yet not great enough!"

A savage spark of wild hostility lit her greenish eyes, as she half whispered that. In a moment they were dark again, expressionless and hard, but Barbee had glimpsed a naked, stark ferocity that he couldn't forget. His own glance dropped uneasily, and he deliberately drained his cocktail.

"Mondrick was trying to expose us—so that men could destroy us," her hard voice rapped. "That's what frightened me tonight. Perhaps he had invented a scientific test to identify witches. Years ago, I remember, he wrote a scientific paper on the correlation of blood groups and introversion—and introvert is one of the harmless scientific terms he used to use when he was really writing about witches.

"Can't you understand, Barbee?"

Her low, husky voice was suddenly pleading, and that hard blankness had gone from her eyes. Perhaps the alcohol had affected her, after all, to dissolve the barriers of normal reserve. Now her eyes seemed warm, as intimately appealing as her voice.

"Don't you see, Will, that I was fighting tonight for my life? Can you blame me for using all my own poor weapons against such a great and cunning enemy as old Mondrick? For he was my enemy—as that stupid dairy man was, and all true men must be. Men aren't to blame. I know that, Barbee. But then—am I?"

Tears wet her limpid eyes.

"I can't help it, Barbee. The trouble began when the first witch was hounded and stoned to death by the first savage man. It will go on till the last witch is dead. Always, everywhere, men must follow that old Biblical law: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

Her naked shoulders shrugged hopelessly.

"That's me, Will," she whispered bitterly. "You wanted to break the pretty little shell of my illusion. You weren't satisfied with my performance as a human woman—though I can't believe it's really so bad. You had to see the thing beyond my veil."

Wearily, she reached for her white fur again.

"So here I am," she told him quietly. "A hunted enemy of all the human breed. Old Mondrick was the ruthless human hunter—cunningly seizing every resource of science to track down and wipe out me and my kind. Can you blame me if I made a feeble little spell to save myself? Can you blame me if it worked?"

Barbee moved to rise, and sat back abruptly. He shook himself, as if to break the fascination of her liquid eyes and shining hair and softly pleading voice.

"Your kind?" he echoed sharply. "Then you aren't alone?"

The warmth left her long eyes; again they narrowed, flat and cruel and wary, the eyes of a pursued and desperate animal. Her face went whiter, and her voice turned coldly toneless.

"I'm quite alone."

Barbee leaned forward, grimly intent. "Mondrick spoke of a 'secret enemy.' Do you think he meant—witches?" "He did."

"Do you know any others?"

Her answer, he thought, was a fractional second delayed. Her eyes were screens for thought, opaque and hard. Her tense white face showed nothing.

"No." Suddenly her whole body trembled, so that he knew she was fighting back tears. In the same flat and lifeless voice, she asked: "Must you persecute me?"

"I'm sorry," Barbee whispered. "But now, when you have told me so much, you must go on and tell me everything. How else can I judge?" His hands closed hard on the edges of the little table. "Do you know what Mondrick meant when he spoke of a leader coming—the Child of Night?"

He half glimpsed, for a tiny instant, a queer little smile—too swiftly come and gone for him to be sure she had smiled at all. Her fine shoulders lifted above the strapless gown.

"How could I know?" she said. "Is that all?"

"One more question—and then we'll eat." Barbee's gray eyes strove to pierce those hard screens of unfeeling malachite. "Do you know what proteins Dr. Mondrick was allergic to?"

Her wary hostility gave way to a genuine bewilderment.

"Allergic?" Her voice was puzzled. "That has something to do with hay fever and indigestion, hasn't it? Why no, of course I don't. Really, Will, I didn't know Mondrick personally—only his work. I don't think I ever saw him before tonight."

"Thank God!" breathed Will Barbee.

He stood up and filled his lungs gratefully with the heavy bar fumes, smiling down at her.

"That was a pretty cruel grilling," he said. "Forgive me, April—but I just had to know those things."

She remained seated, and her tired face failed to reflect his eager smile.

"Forgiven," she said wearily. "And we'll skip the dinner. You may go when you wish."

"Go?" he protested quickly. "Lady, you have promised me the evening. You said you were hungry as a wolf, and the Knob Hill chef is famous for his steaks. We can dance after dinner—or maybe take a drive in the moonlight. You don't want me to go?"

The hard screens vanished from her eyes, and he saw a tender delight.

"You mean, Barbee," she whispered softly, "even after you've seen the strange, poor thing behind my veil—"

Barbee grinned, and suddenly laughed. His tension had somehow evaporated completely. "If you're a witch, I'm completely under your spells."

She rose with a smile that grew slowly radiant.

"Thank you, Will." She let him take her fur coat, and they started toward the dining room. "But, please," she whispered huskily, "just for tonight— won't you try to help me forget that I'm—what I am?"

Barbee nodded happily.

"I'll try, angel."

CHAPTER SIX

As a Wolf Runs—

They stayed at the Knob Hill until closing time. The steaks were perfect. The dance band played, he felt, for the two of them alone; and April Bell moved in his arms with a light, smooth grace that made him think of some wild creature. They spoke of nothing graver than the music and the wine, and she seemed to forget that she might be anything more dangerous than a very gorgeous redhead. So did Barbee—most of the time.

The white flash of her perfect teeth, however, reminded him now and then of the white jade pin he had brought in his pocket—he knew it must be hers, but still he didn't quite dare return it. The greenish mystery of her long eyes shocked him more than once with a disquieting awareness that the haunting riddle of Mondrick's death was still not really solved, that her own strange confession had only added another new enigma.

He wanted to drive her home, but her own maroon convertible was parked on the lot behind the nightclub. He walked her to it, opened the door for her, and then caught her arm impulsively as she started to slide under the wheel.

"You know April—" He hesitated, not quite certain what he meant to say, but the bright expectancy on her face made him go on. "I've a feeling about you that I don't understand. A funny feeling—I can't explain—"

He paused again, awkwardly. Her white face was lifted to him; he wanted to kiss her, but that sudden preemptory emotion demanded expression.

"An odd feeling that I've known you somewhere, before tonight." His voice was bewildered, groping. "That you are part of something—old and somehow very important—that belongs to us both. A feeling that you wake something sleeping in me." He shrugged, helpless.

"I want to tell you," he whispered. "But I can't quite pin it down."

She smiled in the darkness, and her velvet voice hummed a bit of a song to which they had danced: "Maybe It's Love."

Maybe it was. Years had passed since the last time Barbee had really thought himself in love, but as he recalled the experience it had never seemed quite so disturbing as this. He was still afraid—not of the dark-lipped girl who seemed to be waiting for his kiss, not even of the twentieth-century sorceress she pretended to be, but rather of that vague and strangely terrifying feeling she aroused, of awakening senses and powers and old half memories in himself. There was nothing he could actually put into words, but he couldn't help shivering again.

"This wind's still cold!" He didn't try to kiss her. Abruptly, almost roughly, he pushed her into the car and shut the door. "Thanks for a wonderful time." He was trying to cover the unresolved conflict of his emotions, and his voice turned brisk and cool. "I'll call you tomorrow at the Trojan Arms."

She looked at him from the wheel. The slow, tantalizing smile on her dark lips suggested an amused and pleased awareness of all the disturbed emotion she aroused in him.

"Night, Barbee," she purred gently, and bent to start the motor. Barbee stood watching as she drove away, fingering the white jade wolf in his pocket. He wondered why he hadn't dared return it. The bitter wind struck him, and he turned uneasily toward his own shabby car.

Barbee covered Mondrick's funeral for the Star. The simple services were held at two, next day. Although the wind had shifted toward the south, the day was blustering and raw, and only the blind widow and a few close friends from the university and the Foundation braved it to watch the graveside ceremony.

Nick Spivak and Rex Chittum were among the pallbearers, looking very taut and grim. Surprisingly, Sam Quain was absent. Barbee walked up to Nora, who stood alone near where Rowena Mondrick waited with her nurse and her great tawny dog, to ask concernedly: "Is Sam ill, Nora?" He saw her start, as if from grave preoccupation. "I thought he'd be here."

"Hello, Will." She gave him a little wan smile; Nora had always seemed friendly, even since Sam and Mondrick changed. "No, Sam's all right," she said. "He just stayed at the house to watch that green box they brought back from Asia. Can you imagine what they have in it?"

Barbee shook his head; he couldn't imagine.

Rowena Mondrick must have heard their voices, for she turned quickly toward them—her attitude, Barbee thought, oddly alarmed. Her taut face was colorless beneath her opaque black glasses; the grasp of her thin fingers on the huge dog's leash and its silver-studded collar seemed somehow almost frantic.

"Will Barbee?" she called sharply. "Is it you?"

"Yes, Rowena," he said, and paused to fumble for some word of consolation that wouldn't merely mock her grief. She didn't wait for that.

"I still want to see you, Will," she said urgently. "I hope I'm not too late to help you. Can you come to the house this afternoon—say, at four?"

Barbee caught his breath, staring uncertainly at the stern purpose which had almost erased even the grief from her thin white face, turning its sad, patient sweetness into something almost terrible. He recalled her telephoned warning against April Bell, and wondered again what Mondrick's death had done to her mind.

"At four," he promised. "I'll come, Rowena."

At five minutes of four, he parked in front of the rambling old red-brick house on University Avenue. It looked rundown and shabby—the Foundation had taken most of Mondrick's own fortune, besides the sums he raised from others. The shutters needed repair and naked spots showed through the unraked lawns. He rang the doorbell and Rowena herself came to let him in.

"Thank you for coming, Will." Her low, gracious voice seemed entirely composed. Tears had stained her face, but her grief had not overwhelmed her. Moving as confidently as if she could see, she closed the door and pointed to a chair.

He stood a moment looking around the gloomy, old-fashioned front room that he had known ever since he and Sam Quain boarded here as students. The room was faintly perfumed from a huge bowl of roses set on her grand piano—he saw the names on the card beside them, Sam and Nora Quain. A gas fire glowed in the dark cavern of the old fireplace. The huge dog Turk lay before it, regarding Barbee with alert yellow eyes.

"Sit down," Rowena Mondrick urged softly. "I've sent Miss Ulford out to do some shopping, because we must talk alone, Will."

Puzzled and rather uncomfortable, he took the chair she indicated.

"I want you to know that I'm terribly sorry, Rowena," he said awkwardly. "It seems so awfully ironic that Dr. Mondrick should die just at the moment of what must have been his greatest triumph—"

"He didn't die," she said softly. "He was murdered—I imagined you knew that, Will."

Barbee gulped. He didn't intend to discuss his suspicions and perplexities with anybody else—not until he had managed to make up his own mind about April Bell.

"I wondered," he admitted. "I didn't know."

"But you saw April Bell last night?"

"We had dinner," Barbee said. He watched the blind woman as she came with her almost disconcerting certainty of motion to stand before him, tall and straight in her severely cut black suit, resting one thin hand on the piano. A faint resentment stirred him to say defensively: "I know Turk didn't seem to like April Bell, but I think she's something pretty special."

"I was afraid you would." Rowena's voice seemed gravely sad. "But I talked to Nora Quain, and she doesn't like the woman. Turk doesn't, and I don't. There's a reason, Will, that you should know."

Barbee sat erect, uncomfortable in his chair. Mondrick's widow and Sam Quain's wife weren't picking girl friends for him, but he didn't say so. Turk stirred before the fire, keeping baleful yellow eyes on Barbee.

"That woman's bad," Rowena whispered. "And bad for you!" She leaned a little toward him, cold lights glowing on her old silver necklace and her heavy silver brooch. "I want you to promise me, Will, that you won't see her any more."

"Why, Rowena!" Barbee tried to laugh—and tried not to think of April Bell's queer confession. "Don't you know I'm a big boy now?"

His attempted lightness brought no smile.

"I'm blind, Will." Rowena Mondrick's white head tilted slightly, almost as if her black glasses could see him. "But not to everything. I've shared my husband's work since we were young. I had my small part in the strange, lonely, terrible war he fought. Now he's dead—murdered, I believe."

The blind woman stiffened.

"And your charming new friend April Bell," she said very softly, "must be the secret enemy who murdered him!"

Barbee caught his breath to protest—and knew there was nothing he could say. A frightened impulse urged him to defend April Bell. But he remembered Mondrick's gasping death and that strangled kitten with the needle in its heart. He remembered her own confession. He swallowed hard and murmured uneasily: "I can't believe she did that."

Rowena Mondrick stood taut and straight.

"That woman killed my husband." Her voice turned sharp, and the big dog rose uneasily behind her. "But Marck's dead. We can't help that. You're the one in danger now."

She came slowly toward Barbee, holding Out both her thin hands. He stood up and took them silently. They felt tense and cold, and they clung to his fingers with a sudden desperate pressure.

"Please, Will!" she whispered. "Let me warn you!"

"Really, Rowena!" He tried to laugh. "April's a very charming girl, and I'm not allergic."

Her cold fingers quivered.

"April Bell won't try to kill you, Will," she told him quietly. "Your danger is something other than death, and uglier. Because she will try to change you—to arouse something in you that should never be awakened."

The big dog came bristling, to stand close against her black skirt.

"She's bad, Will." The blind lenses peered at him disquietingly. "I can see the evil in her, and I know she means to try to claim you for her own wicked breed. You had better die like poor Marck, than follow the dreadful path where she will try to lead you. Believe me, Will!"

He dropped her cold hands, trying not to shudder.

"No, Rowena," he protested uncomfortably, "I'm afraid I can't believe you. I think your husband's death was probably just the unfortunate result of too much excitement and fatigue for a man seventy and ill. I'm afraid you're dwelling too much on it."

He crossed hopefully to the piano.

"Do you feel like playing something? That might help."

"I've no time for music now." She patted the dog's great tawny head, nervously. "Because I'm going to join Sam and Nick and Rex in poor Marck's unfinished battle. Now won't you think about my warning—and stay away from April Bell?"

"I can't do that." In spite of him, resentment edged his voice. "She's a charming girl, and I can't believe she's up to any ugly business."

He tried to warm his tone.

"But I'm truly sorry for you, Rowena. It seems to me that you've just been brooding too much. I don't suppose there's much I can do, since you feel this way, but you do need help. Why don't you call Dr. Glenn?"

She stepped back from him, indignantly.

"No, Will," she whispered. "I'm entirely sane." Her thin fingers clung fiercely to the dog's collar; and the huge beast pressed close to her, watching Barbee with unfriendly yellow eyes. "I need no psychiatrist," she told him softly. "But I'm afraid you may—before you're through with April Bell."

"Sorry, Rowena," he said abruptly. "I'm going."

"Don't, Will!" she called sharply. "Don't trust—"

That was all he heard.

He drove back to town, but it was hard to keep his mind on his reportorial chores. He took no stock in Rowena Mondrick's crazy warning. He really meant to call April Bell's apartment, but somehow he kept putting it off. He wanted to see her, yet daylight had failed to dispel any of his tortured uncertainties about her. Finally, as he left the city room, he decided with an uneasy relief that now it was obviously too late to make the call.

He stopped for a drink at the bar across the street, and had more than one, and took a bottle with him when he drove back to his lonely apartment in the dilapidated old house on Bread Street. A hot shower, he thought, might help the alcohol relax him. He was taking off his clothing when he found the white jade pin in his pocket. He stood a long time, absently turning the tiny object on his sweaty palm, staring at it— Wondering—

The tiny malachite eye was the same color as the eyes of April Bell—when she was in her most wary and alarming mood. The fine detail of the running wolf's limbs and snarling head had been cut with careful skill. From the worn sleekness of the white jade, he knew it must be very old. A very odd trinket, it was cut in a wiry, lean-lined style of workmanship he had never seen before.

Remembering the white wolf coat, he wondered suddenly what the wolf, as a symbol, meant to April Bell. Dr. Glenn must have found her, he thought, a remarkably interesting analytic subject—he wished for an instant that it were possible to get a look at Glenn's private records of her case.

He started and blinked, trying to rid himself of a disconcerting impression that the malachite eye had winked at him maliciously. He was almost asleep, standing half undressed in his narrow bedroom beside the ramshackle chiffonier. The damned pin had almost hypnotized him. He resisted a sudden, savage impulse to flush it down the commode.

That would be insane. Of course, he admitted to himself, he was afraid of April Bell. But then he had always been a little afraid of women—perhaps Dr. Glenn could tell him why. Even the most approachable female made him a little uneasy. The more they mattered, the more afraid he was.

His hunch about the pin couldn't mean anything, he assured himself. The damned thing got on his nerves just because it stood for April Bell. He'd have to taper off the whisky—that was all his trouble, as Glenn would surely tell him. If he obeyed that panicky impulse to dispose of the pin, it would only be an admission that he believed April Bell to be—actually— just what she said she was. He couldn't accept that.

He put the pin carefully in a cigar box on the chiffonier, along with a thimble and his old pocket watch and a discarded fountain pen and a number of used razor blades. His uneasy thoughts of April Bell were not so easy to put away. He couldn't escape considering the faint but infinitely disturbing possibility that she really was—he felt reluctant even to think the word—a witch.

A being born a little different, he preferred to phrase it. He remembered reading something about the Rhine experiments at Duke University. Some people, those sober scientists had proved, perceived the world with something beyond the ordinary physical senses. Some people, they had demonstrated, displayed a direct control over probability, without the use of any physical agency. Some did, some didn't. Had April Bell been born with that same difference, manifest in a more extreme degree?

Probability—he recalled a classroom digression of Mondrick's on that word, back in Anthropology 413. Probability, the bright-eyed old scholar said, was the key concept of modern physics. The laws of nature, he insisted, were not absolute, but merely established statistical averages. The paperweight on his desk— it was an odd little terra-cotta lamp which he must have dug out of some Roman ruin, the black-glazed relief on the circular top of it showing the she-wolf suckling the founders of Rome—the lamp was supported, Mondrick said, only by the chance collisions of vibrating atoms. At any instant, there was a slight but definite probability that it might fall through the seemingly solid desk.

And the modern physicists, Barbee knew, interpreted the whole universe in terms of probability. The stability of atoms was a matter of probability—and the instability, in the atomic bomb. The direct mental control of probability would surely open terrifying avenues of power—and the Rhine experiments had seemingly established that control. Had April Bell, he wondered uneasily, just been born with a unique and dangerous mental power to govern the operation of probability?

Unlikely, he told himself. But nothing at all, old Mondrick himself had insisted, was completely impossible in this statistical universe. The remotest impossibility became merely remotely improbable. Barbee shrugged impatiently, and turned on the shower—the new physics, with its law of uncertainty and its denial of all the comfortable old concepts of matter and space and time, and its atom bombs, became suddenly as disquieting as the dark riddle of Mondrick's death.

In the shower, he fell to wondering what that terracotta lamp had meant to Mondrick. What racial memory could be represented in the legend of those Roman heroes mothered by the wolf bitch? Barbee couldn't quite imagine.

He toweled himself wearily, poured himself a generous nightcap and went to bed with a magazine. His mind refused to be diverted, however, from those disquieting channels. Why had Mondrick and his obviously frightened companions taken such elaborate precautions at the airport and yet failed to take enough? That must indicate, he thought, a peril even greater than those four fearful men had believed.

Something far more alarming than one exotic redhead.

If April Bell were indeed a witch, his unwilling speculations ran on, there might very reasonably be others —more powerful and less charming to go dancing with. There might be other parapsychological experimenters, to phrase it differently, busy discovering their inborn gifts and developing scientific techniques for the mental control of probability. If so, they might be organized, preparing for the time to test their power, awaiting the appearance of an expected leader —the Child of Night—to lead their Saturnalian rebellion.

Barbee's aching eyes had closed, and he pictured that coming dark Messiah. A tall, lean, commanding figure, standing amid shattered rocks, terrible and black in a long hooded robe. He wondered what manner of being it could be—and why April Bell had smiled. Breathlessly, he peered under the black hood to see if he could recognize the face—and a white skull grinned at him.

He awoke with a start—yet it wasn't the shock of that ghastly dream that roused him, but rather the quivering intensity of some vague eagerness that he couldn't quite define. A thin little pain shuddered in the back of his head, and he took a second nightcap to ease it. He turned on the radio, heard the oily beginning of a singing commercial and turned it off again. He was suddenly desperately sleepy—

And afraid to sleep.

He couldn't understand that dim terror of his bed. It was a slow, creeping apprehension, as if he knew that the vague unease which haunted him now would possess him entirely when he slept. But it wasn't completely—fear. Mingled with it was that unresolved eager yearning which had roused him, the breathless expectancy of some obscure and triumphant escape from all he hated.

Neither could he quite understand the way he felt about April Bell—and that feeling was somehow a part of the other. He thought he ought to have a shocked horror of her. After all, she was either the witch she claimed to be, or else more likely a lunatic. In one way or another she had almost certainly caused Mondrick's death. But the thing that haunted him was his puzzled dread of that frightful, chained and yet dangerous something she awakened in himself.

Desperately, he tried to put her out of his mind. Certainly it was too late to telephone her now. He wasn't sure he wanted to see her—though that dimly dreadful yearning insisted that he did. He wound up his alarm clock, and went to bed again. Sleep pressed upon him with an urgency that became resistless.

And April Bell was calling to him.

Her voice came clearly to him, above all the subdued murmur of traffic noises. It was a ringing golden chime, more penetrating than an occasional beep of a driver's horn or the far clamor of a streetcar. It shimmered out of the dark, in waves of pure light as green as her malachite eyes. Then he thought he could see her, somehow, far across the slumberous town.

Only she wasn't a woman.

Her urgent velvet voice was human, still. Her long, dark eyes were changed, with that same exotic hint of a slant. Her white wolf coat was evidently part of her now. For she had become a white she-wolf, sleek and wary and powerful. Her clear woman-voice called to him, distinct in the dark.

"Come, Barbee. I need you."

He was aware of the cracked, dingy plaster of his narrow bedroom, of the steady tick of his alarm clock and the comfortable hardness of the mattress beneath him and the sulphurous odor of the mills that came through his open window. Surely he wasn't actually asleep, yet that calling voice was so real that he tried to answer.

"Hello, April," he murmured drowsily. "I'll really call you tomorrow. Maybe we can go dancing again."

Strangely, the she-wolf seemed to hear.

"I need you now, Barbee," her clear voice replied. "Because we've a job to do together—something that can't wait. You must come out to me right away. I'll show you how to change."

"Change?" he muttered heavily. "I don't want to change."

"You will," she said. "I believe you have my lost heirloom—that white jade pin?"

"I have it," he whispered. "I found it with that murdered kitten."

"Then take it in your hand."

In a numbed, groping, sleep-drugged way, Barbee thought he got up and went to the chiffonier and fumbled in that box of odds and ends for the tiny jade pin. Dimly, he wondered how she knew he had it. He carried it back, and sprawled heavily on the bed again.

"Now, Will!" Her vibrant voice called across the shadowy void between them. "Listen, and I'll tell you what to do. You must change, as I have changed. It should be easy for you, Will. You can run as the wolf runs, trail as the wolf trails, kill as the wolf kills!"

She seemed nearer in the misty dark.

"Just let go," she urged. "I'll help you, Will. You are a wolf, and your pattern is the jade pin in your hand. Just turn loose, and let your body flow—"

He wondered dimly how the mental control of probability could mold a man into the four-footed kind of wolf she clearly meant, but his brain seemed too numb and slow for thought. He clutched the pin and made a groping effort to obey. There was a curious, painful flux of his body—as if he had twisted into positions never assumed, had called on muscles never used. Sudden pain smothered him in darkness.

"Keep trying, Will." Her urgent voice stabbed through that choking blackness. "If you give up now, halfway changed, it may kill you. But you can do it. Just let me help, till you break free. Just let go, and follow the pattern, and let your body change. That's it—you're flowing—"

And suddenly he was free.

Those painful bonds, that he had worn a whole lifetime, were abruptly snapped. He sprang lightly off the bed, and stood a moment sniffing the odors that clotted the air in the little apartment—the burning reek of whisky from that empty glass on the chiffonier, the soapy dampness of the bathroom, and the stale, sweaty pungence of his soiled laundry in the hamper. The place was too close; he wanted fresh air.

He trotted quickly to the open window and scratched impatiently at the catch on the screen. It yielded after a moment, and he dropped to the damp, hard earth of Mrs. Sadowski's abandoned flower bed. He shook himself, gratefully sniffing the clean smell of that tiny bit of soil, and crossed the sidewalk into the heavy reek of burned oil and hot rubber that rose up from the pavement. He listened again for the white she-wolf's call, and ran fleetly down the street.

Free—

No longer was he imprisoned, as he had always been, in that slow, clumsy, insensitive bipedal body. His old human form seemed utterly foreign to him now, and somehow monstrous. Surely four nimble feet were better than two, and a smothering cloak had been lifted from his senses.

Free, and swift, and strong!

"Here I am, Barbee!" the white bitch was calling across the sleeping town. "Here by the campus—and please hurry!"

He heard her, and he had already started toward the campus, when a sudden impulse of perversity made him turn back south, on Commercial Street, toward the railroad yards and the open country beyond. He had to escape the chemical fumes from the mills that lay in a burning pall over the city, suffocating and intolerable. And he wanted to explore this new existence, to find his powers and their bounds, before he came face to face with that sleek she-wolf.

Loping easily along the pavement in the silent warehouse district, he paused to sniff the rich perfumes of coffee and spices that floated from a wholesale grocery, and checked himself abruptly as a sleepy policeman met him at the corner. Caught full in the street light, he turned to run for the nearest alley—the bored cop would doubtless welcome a bit of diversion and a chance to try his gun, and an unmuzzled gray wolf would certainly be fair game.

The officer merely yawned, however, staring straight at him, and flung a foul-smelling cigarette butt before him on the street, and shuffled wearily on his beat, pausing to try the warehouse door. Barbee trotted back ahead of him, just to be sure. Still the cop didn't see him. He ran on out the odorous street, too elated to wonder why.

He crossed the railroad yards ahead of a smelly, pounding locomotive, and loped west along the highway beyond, to escape the reek of wet steam and cinders and hot metal. He dropped into the ditch beside the acrid asphalt, and the earth felt cool and damp beneath his springy pads.

"Barbee! Why don't you come on?"

He heard the she-wolf's call behind him, but he wasn't ready to heed her yet. The night refreshed him with the clean chill of autumn. A breath of wind swept away all the sharp traffic odors of the road and brought him a delicious symphony of farmyard and woodland scents.

He rejoiced in the aroma of wet weeds and the redolence of decaying leaves. He liked even the cold dew that splashed his shaggy gray fur. Far from the too-loud clank and wheeze of the locomotive, he paused to listen to the tiny rustlings of field mice, and he caught a cricket with a flash of his lean forepaw.

April called, but he still ignored her.

Elation lifted him: a clean, vibrant joy that he had never known. He raised his muzzle toward the setting half moon and uttered a quavering, long-drawn howl of pure delight. Somewhere beyond a dark row of trees a dog began to bark in a frightened and breathless way. He sniffed the cold air and caught the noisome scent of that ancient enemy, faint and yet sickeningly unpleasant. His hackles lifted. Dogs would learn not to bark at him.

But the white wolf's call came again, suddenly more urgent: "Don't waste time on a stray dog, Barbee—we've more deadly enemies to deal with tonight. I'm waiting on the campus, and I need you, now."

Reluctantly, he turned back north. The dark world flowed, and the furious barking of that angered dog was lost behind him. In a moment, he was passing Trojan Hills—as Preston Troy had named his baronial country place southwest of Clarendon, on the rolling uplands above the river valley that held the town and Troy's mills. The lights were out in the big house beyond the trees; but a lantern was bobbing about the stables, where perhaps the grooms were tending a sick horse. He heard a soft, uneasy whicker and paused a moment to sniff the strong, pleasant pungence of the horses.

"Hurry, Barbee!" begged April Bell.

He loped on, unwillingly, toward the uneasy murmuring and the clashing, violent odors of the city. Presently, however, he caught the she-wolf's scent, clean and fragrant as pine. His reluctance faded, and he ran eagerly along the deserted streets toward the campus, searching for her.

Somewhere among the dark, crowded houses, a dog made one thin yelp of alarm, but he ignored it. Her scent guided him, and she came trotting out of the fragrant evergreens on the campus to meet him on the wet grass. Her long greenish eyes were bright with welcome. He sniffed the clean, sweet redolence of her, and she touched his muzzle with a tingling cold kiss.

"You're late, Barbee!" She sprang away from him.

"You've wasted too much of the night already, and we've enemies to meet. Let's go!"

"Enemies?" He stared at her lean white sleekness, puzzled. Somewhere to the south, the way he had come, a dog was barking nervously. He snarled toward the south. "That, you mean?" he whispered. "Dogs?"

Her greenish eyes glittered wickedly.

"Who's afraid of those curs?" Her white fangs flashed in scorn. "Our enemies are men."

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Trap in the Study

The white bitch ran, and Barbee followed. He hadn't realized how late it was, but much of the night had fled. The streets were empty, save for a few late motorists who seemed to drive with an apprehensive speed. Most of the traffic signals were out; only the one at the corner of the campus, where Center Street crossed the highway, was blinking a warning yellow. Loping after the fleet white wolf, Barbee called uneasily: "Hold on, here—I want to know where we're going."

She leapt gracefully out of the path of a drumming car—the driver didn't seem to see them. Running on with an easy feral lightness, she looked back at Barbee. Her long red tongue was hanging out of her mouth, and her clean fangs shone.

"We're going to call on some old friends of yours." He thought she grinned maliciously. "Sam and Nora Quain."

"We can't harm them," he protested sharply. "Why should they be—enemies?"

"They are enemies because they are human," the white bitch told him. "Deadly enemies, because of what is in that wooden box that Quain and old Mondrick brought back from Asia."

"They're my friends," Barbee insisted, and whispered uneasily: "What's in that box?"

Her long eyes narrowed warily as she ran.

"Something deadly to our kind—that's all we have been able to discover," she said. "But the box is still at Sam Quain's house, though he's ready to move it to the Foundation tomorrow—he had been clearing out the top-floor rooms for it, and hiring guards, and arranging his defenses against us there. That's why we must strike right now. We must have a look inside tonight—and destroy whatever weapons they brought back from those prehuman mounds to turn against us."

Barbee shivered a little as he ran.

"What sort of weapons?" he whispered uneasily. "What can hurt us?"

"Silver can," the white bitch said. "Silver blades and silver bullets—I'll tell you why when we have a little time. But the contents of that box must be something more lethal than silver—and the night's going fast!"

They passed the yellow-blinking signal, and ran on through solid walls of odor—the sulphurous bite of settling fumes from the industrial district and a piercing reek of garbage smouldering in some incinerator, the crisp fragrance of a bakery, and a thin bitter stench trailing from the packing plant across the river, and the stale unpleasant human fetors seeping out of the silent houses.

She turned off the highway, crossing a corner of the campus toward the broad grounds of the Research Foundation and Sam Quain's little house beyond. The leaf-strewn grass made a cool, pleasant cushion for Barbee's pads, rustling very faintly, and his sniffing nostrils found a new orchestra of odors so intriguing that he almost forgot the task and the peril before them.

The grass and the walks still reeked of the students who had thronged them during the day, the human body smells rank and rancid, very different from the clean, friendly fragrance of the racing wolf beside him. An explosive purple malodor of hydrogen sulphide burst from the chemistry lab, and a pleasant pungence of manure drifted from the model dairy barn of the agriculture department beyond the highway.

The Foundation building was a slender tower of white concrete, aloof beyond its lawns and hedges, nine stories tall. Barbee wondered for a moment at the dogged intensity of old Mondrick's secret purpose— at the tireless drive that had overcome his age and illness to build this stern citadel and then ransack the cradlespots of mankind for the archeological treasures he had hoarded and studied here.

The white, graceful spire was enveloped in the turpentine-and-linseed-oil smells of new paint, mingled with a faint, jarringly unpleasant scent that Barbee couldn't identify. Light shone from the top-floor windows, and he flinched from a sudden blue flicker, painfully intense, that must come from a welding arc. The snarl of a power saw came down to him, and the muffled thudding of a carpenter's hammer.

Racing on beside him, the white wolf pricked up her ears.

"They're at work tonight," she said. "It's too bad we had to strike so openly against old Mondrick, but he gave us no time for the niceties we prefer. Now I'm afraid we've tipped our hand too far—Quain must know about what we expect, because he's having that top floor rebuilt into a fortress against us. We must get at that box, tonight!"

Down the wind, Professor Schnitzler's collie began to howl.

"Why is it?" Barbee asked apprehensively. "Men don't seem to see us, but dogs are always frightened."

April Bell snarled toward the howling.

"Most men can't see us," she told him. "No true man can, I think. But dogs have a special sense for us—and a special hatred. The savage man who domesticated the first dog must have been an enemy of our people, as cunning and terrible as old Mondrick or Sam Quain."

They came to the little white bungalow on Pine Street that Sam Quain had built for Nora the year they married—Barbee remembered drinking too much at their house-warming party, perhaps to dull his own unspoken disappointment. The she-wolf led him warily around the silent house and the garage, listening, sniffing uneasily. Barbee heard soft breath sounds from a lifted window, and then he caught the scent of little Pat from the sand pile in the back yard, where she had played.

He sprang before the white wolf with a growl in his throat.

"They mustn't be hurt!" he protested sharply. "I don't understand all of this—and it seems like fun. But these people are friends of mine—Sam and Nora and Pat. It's true Sam has acted a little funny, but still they're the best friends I have."

The bitch grinned redly over her hanging tongue.

"Both Sam and Nora?" Her greenish eyes mocked him. "But they're the dangerous ones." She crouched a little, fine ears lifted, sniffing the wind. "The thing in that box must be the key to some power more deadly than all our little spells—or they would never have dared defy us as they did."

Still he blocked her way.

"But I don't think we'll have to harm them now," she said. "They're both truly human—they won't be aware of us, unless we wish to make them so. The contents of the box are what we must reach and destroy."

"All right," Barbee yielded unwillingly. "So long as we don't injure them—"

Hot dog scent struck his nostrils. Inside the house there was a sudden small, shrill yelping. The she-wolf sprang back fearfully. Barbee shuddered to a deep, ungovernable alarm, and he felt his gray hackles rise.

"That's Pat's little dog," he said. "She calls it Jiminy Cricket."

The wolf bitch snarled. "She'll call it dead tomorrow."

"Not Jiminy!" Barbee cried. "Pat would be heartbroken."

A screen door banged. A fluff of white fur hurtled out into the back yard, barking furiously. The she-wolf sprang away from it apprehensively. It leaped at Barbee. He tried to cuff it away, and angry little teeth grazed his forepaw. The pain woke a latent savagery in him that drowned his regard for little Pat.

He crouched and sprang. His powerful jaws caught that bit of fur, and shook it until the thin yelping ceased. He tossed it upon the sand pile and licked the evil-tasting dog hair off his fangs.

The white wolf was trembling.

"I didn't know about the dog," she whispered uneasily. "Nora and the child were out when I came this evening to see what Sam was up to, and it must have been with them." Her lean shape quivered. "I don't like dogs. They aided men to conquer us once."

She slunk toward the back door.

"We must hurry now—the night is already too far gone."

Barbee tried to forget that little Pat would cry.

"The daylight?" he asked apprehensively. "Is it dangerous?"

The white wolf turned back quickly.

"I had forgotten to warn you," she whispered urgently. "But you must never try to change by day—or let dawn find you changed. Because any strong light is painful and likely to be injurious when we are changed; and the sun's rays are deadly."

"Why?" he asked uneasily. "How can light be harmful?"

"I used to wonder," she told him. "I talked about it once, to one of us who has quite a name in physics. He told me his theory. It sounds good—but we'd better look for that box."

Her deft, slender forepaw opened the screen, and Barbee led the way through the back door into the hot stuffiness of the little house. The air was heavy with cooking smells and the sharpness of an antiseptic Nora must have used to clean the bathroom and the warm body scents of Sam and Nora and the child, all overladen with the noisome, sickening rankness of the little dog he had killed.

They paused in the narrow hall beyond the little kitchen, listening. A clock ticked softly. The refrigerator motor started suddenly behind them, so loud they started. Above its steady drumming, he could hear Sam's strong, even breathing from their room and Nora's breath, slower and more quiet. Pat turned uneasily on her bed in the nursery and whimpered in her sleep: "Come back to me, Jiminy!"

The she-wolf sprang toward the nursery door, snarling silently, but the child didn't quite wake. Barbee had started after her, alarmed for Pat. She turned back to him, her white fangs smiling.

"So Quain's asleep!" A taut elation rang in her tone. "Quite exhausted, I imagine. It's lucky you got that nasty little cur outside—he must have counted on it to wake him if we came. Now for the green box—I think it's in his study."

Barbee trotted to the study door, and rose against it to try the knob with his supple forepaws. It didn't yield. He dropped back to the floor and turned uncertainly toward the white wolf.

She stood listening, snarling toward the nursery, and he heard little Pat whimpering in her sleep. A sharp pang of concern for the child struck Barbee; a surge of his old loyalty to Sam and Nora impelled him to abandon this queer project and get the wolf bitch out of the house before she could harm them. That brief humane impulse died, however, against the stronger urgencies of this exciting new existence.

"I'll look for Sam's keys," he offered. "He must have them in his trousers—"

"Wait, idiot!" He had started toward the bedroom; the she-wolf's fangs caught the scruff of his neck to stop him. "You'll wake him—or trip some trap. His keys are probably protected with a silver ring that it would poison us to touch. The padlock on that box is silver-plated, I saw. And I don't know what other weapons Quain has lying by his hand—deadly relics they dug up of that old war our people lost.

"But we don't need the keys."

Barbee blinked at the locked study door, bewildered.

"Stand still," she whispered. "I see I must tell you a little more of the theory of this change of state—if Quain stays asleep. Ours is a precious and useful power, but it has its limitations and penalties attached. If you fail to regard them, you can very easily destroy yourself—"

The sudden creak of bedsprings checked her. She whirled warily, greenish eyes blazing, silken ears lifted. Barbee heard Nora's sleepy voice—and a cold terror shook him, that he might be forced to injure her.

"Sam?" she said. "Where are you, Sam?" Then she must have found him beside her, for the bed creaked again, and she murmured faintly. " 'Night Sam."

When the breath sounds were regular again, Barbee whispered uneasily: "Why don't we need the keys?"

"I'll show you," the white wolf said. "But first I'm going to explain a little of the theory of our free state— to keep you from killing yourself. You must understand the dangers—"

"Silver?" he said. "And daylight?"

"The theory joins it all together," the wolf bitch told him. "I don't know physics enough to explain all the technical ramifications, but my friend made the main point seem simple enough. The link between mind and matter, he says, is probability."

Barbee started a little, remembering old Mondrick's lecture.

"Living things are more than matter alone," she continued. "The mind is an independent something—an energy complex, he called it—created by the vibrating atoms and electrons of the body, and yet controlling their vibrations through the linkage of atomic probability—my friend used more technical language, but that's the idea of it.

"That web of living energy is fed by the body; it's part of the body—usually. My friend is a pretty conservative scientist, and he wouldn't say whether he thinks it's really a soul, able to survive long after the body is dead. He says you can't prove anything about that."

Her greenish eyes smiled secretly, as if she knew more than she said.

"But that vital pattern, in us, is stronger than in true men—his experiments did prove that. More fluid, and less dependent on the material body. In this free state, he says, we simply separate that living web from the body, and use the probability link to attach it to other atoms, wherever we please—the atoms of the air are easiest to control, he says, because the oxygen and nitrogen and carbon are the same atoms that establish the linkage in our bodies.

"And that explains the dangers."

"Silver?" Barbee said. "And light? I don't quite see—"

"The vibrations of light can damage or destroy that mental web," she told him. "They interfere with its own vibration. The mass of the body protects it, of course, when we are in the normal state. But the transparent air, when we are free, gives no shelter at all. Never let the daylight find you free!"

"I won't." Barbee shivered. "But how does silver harm us?"

"Vibration, again," the white wolf whispered. "No common matter is any real barrier to us in this free state. That's why we don't need Quain's keys. Doors and walls still seem real enough, I know—but wood is mostly oxygen and carbon, and our mind webs can grasp the vibrating atoms and slip through them, nearly as easily as through the air. Many other substances we can possess for our vehicles, with a little more effort and difficulty. Silver is the deadly exception—as our enemies know."

"Huh?" Barbee gasped. "How is that?"

Yet he scarcely listened, for something made him think of blind Rowena Mondrick, with her heavy silver rings and bracelets, her quaint old silver brooches and her silver beads, and the silver-studded collar she kept on her great tawny dog. Something lifted the gray shaggy fur along his spine, and something made him shudder.

"Different elements have different atomic numbers and different periods of electronic vibration," the white wolf was saying. "My friend explained it all, but I don't remember the terms. Anyhow, silver has the wrong vibration. There is no probability linkage. We can't claim silver, to make it a path or a tool for our free minds. Instead, the electronic vibrations of silver clash with ours; they can shatter the free pattern. So silver's poison, Will. Silver weapons can kill us—don't forget!"

"I won't," Barbee whispered uneasily.

He shook out his gray fur, trying vainly to dislodge that clinging chill. The white she-wolf stood listening again to the breath-sounds in the house, poised alertly, one graceful forefoot lifted. He moved toward her quickly.

"I won't forget," he said. "But I want to know the name of your physicist friend."

She laughed at him suddenly, red tongue hanging.

"Jealous, Barbee?" she taunted softly.

"I want to know," he insisted grimly. "And I want to know the name of this expected Child of Night."

"Do you, Barbee?" Her red smile widened before it sobered. "You'll find out," she promised, "when you have proved yourself. But now I think you understand our free state and its dangers well enough. Let's get to work, before Quain wakes."

She trotted back to the study door.

"Now you understand," she whispered, "and I can help you pass. My friend taught me how to smooth the random vibrations from the heavier elements in the wood and the paint that otherwise would be something of a barrier."

Her greenish eyes fixed intently on the lower panels of the door—and Barbee remembered old Mondrick's lecture on probability. All matter was mostly empty space, he said; only the random collisions of vibrating atoms kept the little black lamp from falling through the seemingly substantial desk. Nothing in the universe was absolute; only probabilities were real. And the mind web, according to this theory of April's unknown friend, governed probability.

"Wait," the she-wolf whispered. "Follow me."

Before her greenish stare, the bottom half of the study door melted into misty unreality. For an instant Barbee could see the dark screws that held the hinges, and all the mechanism of the lock, as if in an X-ray view. Then the metal faded also, and the slender bitch glided silently through the door.

Uneasily, Barbee followed. He thought he felt a slight resistance, where the wooden panels were. He felt as if something brushed his gray fur lightly as he stepped carefully through. He stopped inside with a stifled growl. The white wolf cowered back against his shoulder.

For something in that room was—deadly.

He stood sniffing for the danger. The close air was thick with odors of paper and dried ink and decaying glue from the books on the shelves, strong with the mothball reek from a closet, perfumed with the fragrant tobacco in the humidor on Sam's desk. It was musky with the lingering scent of a mouse that once had dwelt behind the books. But the queer, powerful malodor that frightened him came from the battered, iron-strapped wooden chest on the floor beside the desk.

It was a piercing, musty reek, as if of something that had moldered for a very long time underground. It was alarming in a way he couldn't understand— though it reminded him of that undefinable evil scent about the Foundation tower. The white bitch stood taut beside him, frozen in her snarl, with hatred and stunned fear in her eyes.

"It's there in that box," she whispered faintly. "The thing old Mondrick dug from the graves of our race in the Ala-shan—the weapon that destroyed our people once, and Quain plans to use again. We must dispose of it—somehow—tonight."

But Barbee shook himself, retreating apprehensively.

"I don't feel good," he muttered uneasily. "I can't breathe. That stink must be poisonous. Let's get back to the open."

"You're no coward, Barbee." The bitch curled her lip, as if to stir him with a hint of scorn. "The thing in that box must be deadlier than dogs, or light, or even silver—our people could have dealt with all of them. We must get rid of it—or else our kind must die again."

Crouching, white fur bristled, she moved toward the massive coffer. Unwillingly, sick with that unknown fetor, Barbee followed her. That lethal reek seared his nostrils. He swayed, shivering to an insidious chill.

"Padlocked!" he gasped. "Sam must have expected—"

Then he saw the narrowed eyes of the crouching bitch fixed upon the carved side of the green-painted chest, and he remembered her control of atomic probability. The wooden planks turned misty, revealing all the iron screws that fastened them. The screws dissolved, and the wide iron bands, and the heavy hasp. The white wolf growled, quivering to a cold ferocity.

"Silver!" she gasped, cowering back against him.

For inside the vanished wood was a lining, of hammered white metal, which refused to dissolve. The atoms of silver had no linkage with the web of mind. The reeking contents of the chest were still concealed.

"Your old friends are clever, Barbee!" White fangs flashed through the she-wolf's snarl. "I knew the box was heavy, but I didn't guess it had a silver lining. Now, I suppose, we must look for the keys and try the padlock. If that fails, we must attempt to burn the house."

"No!" Barbee shuddered. "Not while they're all asleep!"

"Your poor Nora!" The white bitch mocked him. "Why did you let Sam take her?" Her red grin turned grave. "But fire is the last resort," she told him, "because the vibrations are so deadly to us. First we must search for the keys."

They were creeping back toward the door and the faint murmurings of sleep from the bedroom beyond, when Barbee started to a sudden drumming clamor. To his acute senses, it seemed as if the whole house shuddered. Whimpering with shock, the white bitch sprang back from him toward Sam Quain's cluttered desk. That preemptory clatter paused, and he realized that it had been the telephone.

"What fool is calling now?" the white bitch snarled, hoarse with urgency and terror. Barbee heard the bed groan again and the sleep-muffled sound of Sam Quain's voice. That silent room seemed suddenly a closing trap, and he was frantic to escape. The next ring of the phone, he knew, would finish waking Quain. He darted toward the dark opening in the locked door, calling back to his companion: "Let's get away—"

But the snarling bitch was already crouching. One clean leap carried her to the top of the desk. Silently, before the telephone could ring again, she caught the receiver in her deft forepaws, and lifted it carefully.

"Quiet!" she commanded softly. "Listen!"

A breathless hush filled the tiny house. A clock ticked on the desk, oddly loud. Barbee heard Sam Quain's sleep-dulled voice again, uncertainly interrogative, and then his even breathing. The refrigerator motor in the kitchen stopped its muffled whirring. He heard the thin voice in the receiver, calling frantically: "Sam?" It was Rowena Mondrick. "Sam Quain— can you hear me?"

Barbee heard an uneasy little groan from the bedroom, and then the heavy breathing of Sam Quain's tired, uneasy sleep.

"Nora, is it you?" Barbee heard that small voice from the receiver on the desk, shrill with fright. "Where is Sam? Have him call me, won't you, Nora? I've a warning for him—tell him it's about Barbee."

The white bitch crouched over the receiver, her long fangs bared as if to slash the instrument. Her silken ears were pricked up delicately to listen, and her slanted eyes were narrowed greenish slits of hate.

"Who—?" Terror seemed to choke that tiny voice. "Sam?" it gasped faintly. "Nora? Won't you— speak—"

A thin little scream came out of the instrument, so penetrating Barbee was afraid it would reach the bedroom. The receiver clicked as the frightened woman at the other end hung up. Leaving the receiver down, the white bitch sprang back to Barbee's side.

"That wicked widow of old Mondrick's!" she gasped faintly. "The woman knows too much about us—she saw too much, before she lost her eyes. Her knowledge, I'm afraid, could make the thing in that green box more deadly to us than it is already."

Her long ears flattened, and she snarled again.

"There's another job for us, Barbee," she said softly. "I think we had better dispose of Rowena Mondrick, before she ever talks to Sam Quain."

"We couldn't hurt an old blind woman!" Barbee protested sharply. "And Rowena is my friend."

"Your friend?" the white bitch whispered scornfully. "You've a lot to learn, Barbee." Something seemed to clot her whisper, to turn it thick and slow. "When you're the very one she's trying to betray—"

She swayed and sank down on the worn carpet.

"April?" Barbee touched her icy muzzle anxiously. "What's the trouble, April?"

The slender wolf shuddered where she lay.

"—trapped!" Barbee had to crouch to hear her faint whisper. "Now I see why your old friend Quain went on to bed and left the back door open so invitingly. That green box is the bait—he must have known we couldn't get in it. And that old, evil thing inside it is the deadfall."

Barbee had nearly forgotten that penetrating odor from the box, which at first had seemed so noxious. He raised his muzzle heavily to sniff for it again. It seemed fainter now, and it was almost pleasant. Drowsily, he sniffed again.

"Don't breathe it!" the she-wolf whispered frantically. "Poison. Quain left it—to kill us." She shivered on the floor, and he could scarcely hear her whisper. "We must leave the box—and pay our visit to your dear friend Rowena. If we ever get out of here—"

She lay limp and still.

"April!" yelped Barbee. "April!"

She didn't move.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Huntress in the Dark

Barbee swayed beside the flaccid form of the slim she-wolf and awkwardly spread his four legs to keep from falling. He sniffed the odor of the thing in the wooden coffer. That was a secret thing, older than remembered history, which had lain long-buried under the Ala-shan with the bones of the race it had killed. It was going to kill him too. Yet somehow the emanations of it were now fragrantly sweet; drowsily, he wondered why it had ever seemed so foul. He inhaled again.

He was going to sleep beside the sleeping bitch. He felt very tired, and that old, queer perfume seemed to ease away all his worry and strain and aching weariness. He breathed it deep, and prepared to lie down. But white wolf shivered on the floor, and he heard her tiny whisper: "Leave me, Barbee! Get out—before you die!"

That awoke a faint awareness of her peril. He liked that ancient, strange perfume from the box behind them, but it was killing April Bell. He must get her out, to the open air. Then he could come back, and breathe it, and sleep. He caught the loose fur at the back of her neck, and dragged her laboriously toward the opening she had made in the locked door.

A vague consternation took hold of him, and her limp body dropped from his relaxing jaws. For the way was closing. The dark screws and the metal of the lock appeared again, and then the ghostly outline of the wooden panels turned suddenly real. This quiet study room indeed had been a baited trap—his drowsy thoughts grasped that much. And the trap was sprung.

Weakly, he blundered against the door. It flung him back, solid as it seemed. He tried to remember old Mondrick's lecture and that theory of April's friend. All matter was mostly emptiness. Nothing was absolute; only probabilities were real. His mind was an energy web, and it could grasp the atoms and electrons of the door by the link of probability. It could smooth the random vibrations which made the door a barrier.

He pondered that, laboriously—but the door was still a barrier. The slender bitch lay still at his feet, and he braced himself to keep from going down beside her. The old, sweet fragrance of that thing in the box seemed to thicken in the air. He was breathing hard, his tongue hanging. That old perfume would end all his trouble and his pain—

Faintly, the she-wolf whimpered at his feet: "Look at the door. Open the wood—I'll try to help—"

Reeling, he stared at the solid-seeming panels. Gropingly, he tried to dissolve them again. Only probabilities were real, he remembered—but those were merely words. The door remained solid. He felt a faint quiver of effort in the she-wolf's body, and he tried to share her action. Slowly, in a fumbling way, he got hold of a curious, novel sense of extension and control.

A misty spot came in the wood. Uncertainly, he widened it. The she-wolf shuddered at his feet and seemed to stiffen—and still the opening was too small. He tried again, swaying to the sweet caress of that perfume. The space came wider. He caught her fur, stumbled at the door, and sprawled through it with her.

The effluvium of the box was left behind. For an instant Barbee wanted desperately to go back to it, and then a sick revulsion seized him. He lay on the floor in the narrow hallway, shaken with nausea. Faintly, in the locked room behind him, he heard a telephone operator's impatient tones in the dropped receiver on Sam Quain's desk. Then Nora's voice sobbed suddenly through the house, muffled with terror and sleep: "Sam—Sam!"

The bed groaned as Sam Quain turned uneasily, but neither quite awoke. Barbee staggered to his feet, panting gratefully for the clean air. Muzzling the still white wolf, he caught that foul malodor seeping under the door, and disgusted nausea staggered him once more.

He lifted the she-wolf again and flung her limp body over his gaunt, gray shoulders. Lurching and trembling under her slight burden, he stumbled back through Nora's clean-smelling kitchen and pushed out through the unlatched screen.

They were safely out of Sam's queer trap, he thought, uneasily shaking out his shaggy fur as he ran with the she-wolf on his back. He couldn't quite outrun the sickening memory of that lethal effluvium, but the clean chill of the night wind cleared it from his nostrils. His strength came back.

He carried the white bitch back down the street to the campus and laid her on the white-frosted grass. The zodiacal light was already lifting its warming pillar of pale silver in the east. On the farms beyond the town he could hear roosters crowing. A dog was howling somewhere. The peril of dawn was near—and he didn't know what to do for April Bell.

Helplessly, he started licking her white fur. Her slender body shivered, to his immense relief, and began heaving as she breathed again. Weakly, she swayed to her feet. She was panting, her red tongue drooping. Her eyes were dark with terror.

"Thank you, Barbee!" She shuddered. "That was horrible. I'd have died there in your old friend's cunning little trap if you hadn't brought me away." Her feral eyes narrowed. "That thing in the box is deadlier than I ever dreamed. I don't think we can ever destroy it, really. We can only strike at those who hope to use it—until it is buried again—and forgotten as it was under those mounds in the Ala-shan."

Barbee shook his pointed head reluctantly.

"At Sam?" he whispered. "And Nick? And Rex?"

The white panting bitch grinned at him wickedly.

"You're running with the black pack now, Barbee," she told him. "You have no human friends—for all men would kill us, if they knew. We must destroy the enemies of the Child of Night before we die. But Quain isn't first on the list—not since that phone rang. Now we must dispose of old Mondrick's widow, before she talks to him."

Barbee started back from her.

"Not—Rowena!" he breathed urgently. "She has always been a true friend to me—even since Mondrick changed. So generous, and always kind. You forget her blindness, because she's such a real human being—"

"But you aren't, Barbee!"

The white bitch grinned at him, and turned suddenly grave.

"I don't think the widow is, either," she added soberly. "She has just enough of our blood, I believe, to make her dangerous to us. That's why we must stop her, before she can tell—"

"No!" Barbee whispered violently. "Ill do no harm to a poor old woman."

"She won't be such easy game," the sleek bitch panted. "She learned too much from old Mondrick, and she saw too much in Africa. You've seen that silver she wears against us. She must have other weapons, besides that great ugly dog that Mondrick trained. She'll be tough, but we must try—"

"I won't!"

"You will," she told him. "You'll do what you must, Barbee, because you are what you are. You're free tonight, and all your human inhibitions are left behind with your body on the bed. You're running with me tonight, as our dead race used to run, and we've human game to hunt."

Her red laugh mocked at his restraint.

"Come along, Barbee—before the daylight."

The white bitch ran, and the feeble fetters of Barbee's human constraints fell from him. He raced after her across the grass, feeling the pleasant crispness of crunching frost beneath his pads, alert to every murmur and odor of the slumbering town—even the hot fumes from the motor of a passing milk truck seemed almost fragrant now, since he had smelled that poisonous thing from the mounds of the past.

West of the campus, on University Avenue, they came to the old brick house on the ill-kept lawn. Barbee hung back when he saw the black crepe on the front door, but the slender she-wolf trotted on ahead of him, and her clean scent swept away his lingering compunctions.

For his body lay far away, and his human bonds were broken. The sleek white bitch was near him, alive and exciting. He ran with her pack now, and they followed the Child of Night. He paused beside her on the stoop, waiting for the panels of the front door to dissolve.

"Rowena shouldn't suffer," he whispered uneasily. "She was always a gracious friend to me. I used to come and let her play the piano for me—usually pieces she had composed, weird and sad and beautiful. Surely she deserves some clean, easy end—"

The white wolf started beside him. His nostrils caught a faint pungence, penetrating and hateful—the odor of dog. The hair rose on his neck. Beside him the lean bitch bristled and snarled. Her greenish eyes were fixed on the door, and she made no reply to his interrupted plea.

Crouching beside her, Barbee saw the bottom of the door fade into misty unreality. Briefly, he glimpsed the familiar room beyond—the black cavern of the fireplace and the dark bulk of Rowena's grand piano. He heard the shuffle of hurried steps and saw vague shadows move. The latch clicked, and that ghostly shadow of a door was flung abruptly open.

The she-wolf cowered back beside him, snarling silently.

A flood of odors poured out of that open door, more immediate and real than anything he heard or saw. He caught the thin, bitter reek of gas burning in the old fireplace, and the thick sweetness of the roses Sam and Nora Quain had sent in the vase on the piano. There was the lavender perfume and the mothball sharpness of Rowena Mondrick's clothing, and the hot, acrid, frightened odor of her body. And there was the dog scent, overwhelming.

The dog reek was less evil than the emanations of that thing in Sam Quain's box, but still it sickened him again. It chilled him with a terror older than mankind, and it steeled him with a racial hatred. His hair stood up and his lips curled back. He gathered his feet and caught his breath and crouched to face an immemorial enemy.

Rowena Mondrick walked out past that ghostly door, her great leashed dog stalking close beside her, stiff-legged and growling softly. Wrapped in a long black silk robe, she stood tall and sternly straight. A distant street light gleamed pale on the silver brooch at her throat and on her massive silver rings and bracelets. It glittered cruelly on the point of a thin silver dagger in her hand.

"Help me!" whispered the crouching bitch. "Help me pull her down!"

That thin blind woman, clutching her dagger and her huge dog's leash, once had been his friend. But she was human, and Barbee crouched beside the snarling she-wolf. Bellies low, they crept upon their prey.

"I'll try to hold her arm," the white bitch breathed.

"You tear out her throat—before she can use that silver blade."

Rowena Mondrick waited in the dark doorway, the ghostly panels of the open door growing slowly real again beside her. Her growling dog was straining forward on the leash; she drew it firmly back and caught its silver-studded collar. Her thin white face looked tired and sad. Her head tilted, and Barbee shivered to a disconcerting impression that her opaque black lenses could see him.

"Will Barbee." She spoke his name softly, looking down as if she saw him. Still quietly gracious, her voice held a hurt reproach. "I knew your danger, and I tried to warn you away from that slick little witch—but I hardly expected you to forget your humanity so soon!"

Barbee felt hot with shame. He crouched back, turn-ins to whimper an uneasy protest to the creeping she-wolf. The ferocious scorn of her white snarl silenced him.

"I'm truly sorry this must be you. Will," the woman's wounded voice continued gently. "But I know you've surrendered to the dark blood in you—I had always hoped you would master it. All who have the black blood aren't witches, Will—I know that. But I see I was wrong about you."

She paused a moment, stiffly straight in her stern black.

"I know you're here, Will Barbee!" He thought she shuddered, clutching her thin silver blade—it had been hammered and filed, he saw, out of a sterling table knife. "And I know what you want."

Her tawny dog was straining forward against the silver-bossed collar, following every movement of the creeping wolf bitch with savage yellow eyes. Rowena clung with a taut white hand to its collar, her blind lenses watching.

"I know," she whispered bitterly. "But I won't be easy to kill!"

The crouching bitch grinned at Barbee, and crept closer.

"Ready, Barbee," she breathed. "When I get her elbow!"

Barbee gathered his pads and hugged the cold floor, measuring the space to Rowena's throat. He shook off a lingering reluctance, knowing he had to obey—because this was real, and the lithe bitch his companion, and his lost humanity a dim dream.

"Now!" the she-wolf called. "For the Child of Night!"

She sprang silently. Her slender body made a flowing gleam of white, her bared fangs slashing at the blind woman's arm. Waiting for her to drag down the dagger, Barbee felt a sudden black savagery mount in himself, and a hot thirst for the sweetness of blood.

"Will!" Rowena was sobbing. "You can't—"

He caught his breath to spring.

But the dog Turk had yelped a frightened warning. Rowena Mondrick let the collar go, swaying back and slashing with her silver dagger.

Twisting in the air, the leaping she-wolf evaded the blade. The heavy silver bracelets on the blind woman's arm, however, struck her sleek, narrow head. She fell, trembling from the blow, and the huge dog caught her throat. She twisted helplessly in its jaws, whimpered once, and went limp.

Her whimpered appeal freed Barbee from his last compassion for Rowena. His fangs ripped at the dog's tawny throat and struck the silver-studded collar. Numbing pain flashed through him from the cold metal. He staggered back, sick from the shock of silver.

"Hold her, Turk!" Rowena gasped.

But the great dog had already dropped the white wolf as it whirled to meet Barbee's charge. She lurched to her feet, and stumbled painfully off the stoop.

"Let's go, Barbee!" she cried apprehensively. "The woman has too much of our own dark blood—she's stronger than I thought. We can't beat her, and silver, and the dog!"

She fled across the lawn.

Barbee ran after her. And the blind woman followed, moving with a swift confidence that was terrible now. The far street light shone cold on the brooch and the beads and the bracelets that were her invulnerable armor and pale on her deadly blade.

"Take 'em, Turk!" she called fiercely to the dog. "Kill 'em!"

They fled together, gray wolf and white, back down the empty street toward the silent campus. Barbee felt numbed and ill from the shock of silver against his jaw, and he knew the tawny dog would overtake him. Its savage baying crept up close behind him, and he turned at the corner of the campus to make a desperate stand.

But the white bitch flashed back, past him. She ran in front of the dog and danced away as it followed. She mocked its angry baying with her own malicious yelping. Grinning redly, she lured it away from Barbee, toward the empty highway beyond the dark campus.

"Take 'em, Turk!" the blind woman was screaming behind him. "Keep 'em for me!"

Barbee shook himself and retreated uneasily from her. The racing wolf and the pursuing dog were already gone from his sight, but her clean scent and the dog's foul reek floated in the motionless cold air behind them. He could hear the dog's deep-throated baying far ahead, a dull note of frustration already marring its hot eagerness.

The blind woman followed Barbee, running recklessly. Glancing apprehensively back as he came to the highway, he saw her a full block behind. She came to a drive that curved across the frosty lawn as he watched her. Her black, staring lenses must not have seen the curb, for she stumbled on it and fell full length on the concrete.

Barbee felt a brief impulse of pity. The unexpected fall, he knew, must have bruised her painfully. In another moment she was up, however, limping after him desperately. He saw the glint of starlight on her bright blade and ran again, turning right down the highway on the hot mingled scent of the wolf and the dog.

The next time he paused to look back, under the blinking traffic signal where Center Street crossed the highway, the blind woman was far behind. A lone car was drumming down the road toward them. Barbee ran hard from the glare of its headlights until they became too painful, and then crouched in an alley until it roared past. When he rose to look back again, he couldn't see Rowena.

The doleful baying of the dog had drawn far ahead of him, and presently he lost it under the rumble of the mills and the steam-hiss and steel-clatter of the railroad yards. Still he could follow the trailing scents of the pursuit, and they led east through a maze of poor cross streets, until he came into the yards.

The odors of dog and wolf were thinned there with the hot stink of engine grease and the dry bite of cinders and the reek of creosoted ties, diluted with the sharp sulphurous acid of coal smoke. Yet he kept the trail until a switch engine came chuffing down the tracks to meet him, a brakeman standing on the step.

Barbee sprang aside, but an accidental blast of steam roared around him, sweeping away every scent except its own hot, wet reek of oil and metal. Blind to him, the brakeman spat accidentally near him, but even that sharp tobacco pungence was carried away by the steam. The trail was broken.

He trotted in a weary little circle on the parallel tracks, sniffing hopefully. His nostrils found nothing except steam and steel and creosote and the bitterness of half-burned diesel fuel, all overladen with the settling chemical stenches from the industrial district.

He cocked his shaggy ears, listening desperately. The clangor of the switch engine was diminishing down the tracks. Steam hissed and machines clattered in the roundhouse. The rumbling of the mills made a dull background of sound. Far in the east, beyond the river, he heard the whistle of a train coming in. But he couldn't find the voice of the dog.

Sharp pain struck his eyes as he looked at the east; warning pangs throbbed through his head. The tall mill stacks were long black fingers, spread against the first greenish glow of dawn. The white bitch was lost from him, and deadly day was near; it suddenly occurred to him that he didn't know how to go home to his body.

He was trotting aimlessly on across the bright cold rails when the baying came again, slow and hopeless now, from toward the mills. He ran down the yards toward the sound, keeping between two lines of standing boxcars that shut out part of the increasing, painful light.

He could see the white bitch at last, loping back toward him with a lithe and lazy-seeming grace. She had led the chase in a clever circle, but she must be exhausted now, or weakening before the lethal light, because the dog was gaining swiftly. The baying turned sharper, quicker in tempo. It became an eager yelping, triumphantly excited.

Barbee ran out from the standing cars to meet the bitch.

"You rest," he gasped. "I'll lead the dog."

He wasn't sure he could lead it far, because the dawn stung through him with its cruel, increasing radiation, and his weary body still felt stiff from that shock of silver. But the sleek she-wolf was his own kind, and he dropped back to draw the chase away from her.

"No, Barbee!" she called quickly. "It's late—we must stay together now."

He ran on beside her, too weary to ask what she meant to do. The glare of the east was mounting, and Barbee turned aside toward the river lowlands, when they came out of the yards, thinking to gain a little shelter from the light in the tangled thickets there.

"This way, Barbee!" The she-wolf stayed on the tall embankment. "Keep with me."

Frantically he scrambled back up the weed-grown slope, and raced to overtake her. The tawny dog was close behind, yipping breathlessly with each leap, the gray light glinting on its deadly collar. Barbee fled from it, straining to keep up with the white wolf's lazy fleetness.

The dark river was close ahead. The stale reek of its muddy banks caught his nostrils, and the sharpness of rotting leaves. The wind brought him a rank whiff of the city disposal plant, and he could smell the acrid unpleasantness of chemical wastes from the mills in the flat, black water.

Beyond the river, the white flame of dawn became terrible in the sky. His eyes dimmed and burned, and his body shrank from the driving light Grimly, he raced to overtake the lean white bitch. Somewhere far ahead, the train wailed again.

They came to the narrow bridge, and the white wolf trotted out across the ties with delicate, sure feet. Barbee hung back, filled with an old, vague terror of running water. The great yelping dog, however, was almost upon him. Shuddering, careful not to look down upon the black sleekness of the far water, he picked his way out across the bridge. The dog followed recklessly.

Barbee was midway of the span when the rails began to sing. The train's whistle screamed again, and its cruel headlamp burst around a curve, not a mile ahead. An impulse of panic checked him, but the plunging dog was close behind. Frantically, he raced on to beat the train.

All the seeming weariness of the white bitch had vanished, now. She drew far ahead, a fleet white shadow. He ran desperately after her, beside the purring, shivering steel. The air trembled, and the bridge shuddered. He saw her waiting for him, sitting on her haunches beside the pounding track, laughing at the dog.

He flung himself down beside her in the dusty wind of the thundering train. Faintly, he heard the dog's last howl of fear. The bitch smiled redly at the small splash of its tawny body in the black water, and shook the cinders out of her snowy fur.

"That will do for Mr. Turk," she murmured happily. "And I think we can take care of his wicked mistress just as neatly, when the time comes—in spite of all her silver weapons and her mongrel blood!"

Barbee shuddered, cowering down beside the embankment, away from the burning east. The steamy dust was thinning, and the humming of the rails began to fade. He thought of Rowena Mondrick falling on the drive and limping on again; and pity struck him, sharp for an instant as his fear of her silver dagger.

"We can't!" He shivered. "Poor Rowena—we've already hurt her enough."

"This is war, Will," the white bitch whispered. "A war of races, old as mankind and our own. We lost it once; we won't again. Nothing is too cruel for such mongrel traitors to our blood as that black widow. We've no more time tonight, but I imagine we've already upset her plan to warn Sam Quain."

She stood up gracefully.

"Now it's time to go home." She trotted away from him, along the tracks. " 'Night, Barbee!"

Barbee was left alone. The flame of the east was searing through him now, and a cold dread possessed him, for he didn't know how to go back. Uncertainly, he groped for his body.

He didn't know the way. Yet he was dimly aware of his body, somehow, lying stiff and a little chilled across the bed in his little place on Bread Street. He tried awkwardly to possess and move it, a little as if he sought to awake from a dream.

That first effort was feeble and fumbling as a child's first step. Somehow it was intolerably painful, as if he overtaxed some faculty never used before. But the very pain spurred him. He tried again, frantic to escape the greater pain of day. Once more he felt that curious change and flow—and he sat up painfully on the edge of his own bed.

The narrow little bedroom had grown cold, and he felt chilled and stiff. A queer, heavy numbness possessed him, and all his senses were strangely dulled.

He sniffed eagerly for all those odors that had been so richly revealing to the gray wolf, but his human nostrils, choked with cold, caught nothing at all. Even the whisky scent was gone from the empty glass on the chiffonier.

Aching with fatigue, he limped to the window and put up the blind. Gray daylight had dimmed the street lamps—he shrank back from the bright sky, as if it had been the dreadful face of death.

What a dream!

He mopped uncertainly at the cold film of terror-sweat on his forehead. A nagging ache throbbed in his right canine tooth—that was the fang, he recalled uncomfortably, that he had struck against the silver studs of Turk's collar. If a rum hangover did such things to him, he had better stick to whisky—and maybe less of that.

His throat felt raw and dry. He limped into the bathroom for a drink of water and found himself reaching awkwardly for the glass with his left hand. He opened his tight-closed right with a nervous start, and found himself still clutching Aunt Agatha's white jade pin.

Jaw sagging, he stood peering incredulously at his numbed hand and that odd trinket. Across the back of his lean fist was a long red scratch—precisely where Jiminy Cricket's sharp little tooth had grazed the gray wolf's forepaw in his dream. He tried to shake off an uncomfortable prickling sensation.

Nothing really strange about it, he tried to tell himself. He recalled some of old Mondrick's classroom discussions on the psychology of dreams; such phenomena of the unconscious, he recalled Mondrick saying, were always less extraordinary and instantaneous than they appeared to the dreamer.

His own troubled doubts about April Bell and her curious confession had caused him to get up in his sleep, the sane solution came to him, to fumble in that cigar box on the chiffonier for that odd pin. He must have scratched his hand on one of the used razor blades there, or perhaps on the pin itself. And all the rest could be nothing else than his own unconscious effort to explain that trifling accident with the material of his own buried desires and fears.

That must be! With a wan little grin of relief, he rinsed his dry mouth, and then reached eagerly for the whisky bottle to help himself to a hair of the dog—He grimaced at the phrase, remembering the disgusting taste of dog hair in the dream, and firmly set the bottle back.

CHAPTER NINE

Nightmare's Aftermath

Barbee wanted to forget that dream. He went shivering back to bed, and tried to sleep again. He couldn't sleep. Every detail of that long nightmare lingered to haunt him, horribly vivid and real. He couldn't rid his mind of the wolf bitch's crimson grin, or the flimsy feel of Jiminy Cricket's vertebrae snapping in his own powerful jaws, or the sight of Mondrick's widow stumbling in her frantic pursuit, pitiable in her blindness and yet terrible with that silver blade.

He got up again, and limped unthinkingly to pull the blinds against the cruel light of day. He poured antiseptic on that enigmatic scratch, and shaved carefully, and took an aspirin to dull that ache in his jaw.

Dreams were logical results of normal causes, he kept insisting to himself, and he didn't need Dr. Glenn to help him unraval this one. The obvious dislike of Nora Quain and Mrs. Mondrick for April Bell might very plausibly have planted the suggestion in his own unconscious that the charming redhead was a bitch, and his own indignant revolt against the suggestion seemed motive enough for the gray wolf's part. With all the bizarre details of the Mondrick tragedy for background, and his own nervous fatigue, the nightmare seemed natural enough.

Yet he wasn't quite satisfied with such efforts at rational self-analysis. He decided to call Rowena Mondrick. He wanted to assure himself that she was really safe in the old house on University Avenue, and her dog Turk with her.

He dialed her number with a numb forefinger. For a long time there was no answer—perhaps, he hoped, everybody was safely asleep. At last he heard the high-pitched voice of Mrs. Rye, the housekeeper, asking sharply what he wanted.

"I'd like to speak to Mrs. Mondrick, if she's up."

"She ain't here."

"Huh!" He gulped, trying to swallow his instant panic. "Then give me Miss Ulford, please." "She ain't, either."

"What—?" he croaked feebly. "Where—?" "Miss Ulford went in the ambulance, to see after poor Mrs. Mondrick."

He nearly dropped the receiver. "How's that?"

"Mrs. Mondrick—the poor old dear—she must have gone out of her head last night. The shock of her husband called so sudden, you know. And she has always had them funny spells, you know, ever since that varmit clawed out her eyes across the water."

Barbee swallowed hard.

"What happened?" he gasped impatiently.

"She got up in the night, and slipped out of the house with that ugly dog she insists on keeping. I guess she thought she was hunting something—that same varmit, might be, as got her eyes. Anyhow, she carried one of her good sterling table knives, that she had gone and sharpened like a dagger. Lucky thing the dog started barking. That woke Miss Ulford, and she got up and followed."

Barbee listened, mute and shivering.

"The dog must have run off and left her. Mrs. Mondrick was stumbling after it through the streets—poor blind thing—as hard as she could run. The nurse said she had to chase her nearly twenty blocks—I don't see how she ever got so far."

Mrs. Rye seemed to find a morbid satisfaction in her own narrative.

"Miss Ulford was all worn out herself, but she finally brought Mrs. Mondrick home in a cab. Dear blind thing—she was all skinned and bleeding from falling in the streets, and quite out of her head. She wouldn't let go that sharpened knife till we twisted it away, and she kept screaming something about the things Turk was after.

"Miss Ulford called the ambulance from Glennhaven, and woke me to pack a few of Mrs. Mondrick's things. They took her away, not an hour ago—she struggled with the keepers, poor old dear, till I was afraid she'd kill herself."

"I—I think Glenn has treated her before." Barbee tried desperately to make his voice sound calm. "Why didn't she want to go?"

"She kept begging us to take her to Mr. Sam Quain's house. She was so frantic about it, that I finally tried to telephone Mr. Quain for her—but the operator told me he had left his receiver off the hook. The men in the ambulance kept telling her they'd take care of everything, and they took her on to Glennhaven.

"So she ain't here," Mrs. Rye concluded. "Anything I can do?"

Barbee stood woodenly, too dazed to reply.

"Hello?" said Mrs. Rye. "Hello?"

He couldn't find his voice, and she hung up impatiently. He stumbled to the bathroom and poured himself half a tumbler of whisky—and dashed it untasted, on a terrified impulse, into the lavatory. If whisky had anything to do with such disturbing occurrences as this, it was high time to quit.

Little Miss Ulford was a smart nurse, he told himself stubbornly, to take her patient to Dr. Glenn. That queer tragedy at the airport had clearly been too much for Mrs. Mondrick, and his own fears for her sanity must have played a part in shaping that grotesque dream. Grimly, he resolved not to ponder the too-many coincidences between fact and dream—that road to madness Mrs. Mondrick herself must have travelled.

On abrupt impulse, he called the Trojan Arms.

He couldn't quite dare ask April Bell if she had got home safe from the railroad bridge. He knew very well that people didn't get hurt in other people's dreams. But he wanted to hear her voice, and know where she was. He could make his excuses for not calling yesterday and ask her for another date. His voice turned eager as he asked for Miss Bell.

"Sorry, sir," the clerk told him. "We can't disturb Miss Bell."

"I'm a friend," Barbee insisted. "I don't think she'd mind."

The clerk was firm, and Barbee asked for the manager. Publicity is important to hotels, and Gilkins was commonly cooperative with the working press. April Bell, however, appeared to be the uncommon case.

"Sorry, Mr. Barbee," he murmured politely, "but we really can't disturb her. Sorry, old man—but Miss Bell always sleeps till noon, and she has left strict orders not to be bothered for anything less than fire or bloody murder."

Barbee tried not to shiver at that last phrase. The tall redhead kept pretty luxurious hours, it seemed to him— for a cub reporter on an afternoon paper. Barbee left a message that he had called, and determined not to brood about his nightmare.

He dressed hastily, stopped for a cup of coffee at the Dainty Diner on the corner, and drove on downtown. He wanted people around him. Human people. He wanted familiar voices and the clatter of typewriters and the steady thump of teletypes and the jingle of mats in the composing machines and the deep rumble of the presses. He stopped across the street from the Star at old Ben Chittum's newsstand, and asked about Rex.

"He's all torn up." The lean old man seemed moodily depressed. "It must have hit him pretty hard, the way Dr. Mondrick went. He stopped to see me yesterday after the funeral, but he didn't have much to say. Had to get back to the Foundation."

He paused to straighten a rack of papers, and then peered sharply at Barbee.

"Why didn't the papers print more about it?" he wanted to know. "I know you were out there, and this girl from the Call. It seems important to me—when a man like Dr. Mondrick dies that way. But there's hardly anything."

"Huh?" Barbee was vaguely puzzled. "I thought it was a page-one story, and I turned in six hundred words. I guess I was too upset myself to notice what they used."

"See." The old man showed him a copy of yesterday's Star. Not a word of his story had been printed. On an inside page, he found the bare announcement of Mondrick's funeral at two in the afternoon.

"I don't get it," he said, and shrugged off his brief perplexity. He had more disquieting riddles than that to solve. He crossed the street, glad to get back to the ordered confusion of the newsroom.

On his desk was a familiar blue-paper memo requesting him to report to Preston Troy. The Star was not the greatest among Troy's enterprises—which included the mills and the Trojan Trust and the radio station and the baseball club. The newspaper was his favorite child, however, and he handled most of his affairs from his spacious corner office on the floor above the city room.

Barbee found the publisher dictating to a svelte titian-haired secretary—Troy was famous for the sophisticated good looks of his secretaries. He was a squat, florid man, with a thin fringe of reddish hair around the pink dome of his head. He looked up at Barbee with shrewd blue eyes, and rolled his thick cigar across his wide, aggressive mouth.

"Find me the Walraven file," he told the girl, and his cold eyes came to Barbee. "Grady says you're a good legman, Barbee. I want to give you a chance at some feature stuff—under your own by-line—to build up Colonel Walraven for the senate."

"Thanks, Chief," Barbee said without enthusiasm for Colonel Walraven. "I see Grady didn't run my story yesterday on Mondrick's death."

"I told him to kill it."

"Will you tell me why?" Barbee watched Troy's pink-jowled face. "I thought it was page-one stuff. Strong human interest, with a swell mystery angle. Old Mondrick died, you see, right in the middle of telling what they had brought back from Asia in that green box.

"And it's still a good story, Chief." Barbee curbed his eagerness, trying to sound sanely calm. "The coroner's verdict was death from natural causes, but the old man's associates act as if they don't believe a word of that. They're hiding whatever is inside that green box, and they're still afraid to talk."

Barbee gulped and tried to slow his voice.

"I want to follow up the story, Chief. Give me a photographer, and I'll file some features that will put Clarendon on the map. I want to find why Mondrick went to the Ala-shan. And what those men are afraid of. And what they're hiding in that box."

Troy's eyes were hard and blank.

"Too sensational for the Star." His rasping voice was abruptly dictatorial. "Forget it, Barbee. Get to work on the colonel."

"Too sensational, Chief?" Barbee echoed. "You always said murder was the cornerstone of the Star."

"I set our editorial policy," Troy snapped. "We're printing nothing about the Mondrick case. Neither, you will find, is any other large newspaper."

Barbee tried to swallow his puzzled unease.

"But I can't forget it, Chief," he protested. "I've got to find out what Sam Quain is hiding in that box. It haunts me. I dream about it"

"You'll have to work at that on your own time— and at your own risk." Troy's voice was flat and cold. "And not for publication." He studied Barbee with penetrating eyes, rolling the thick perfecto back across his mouth. "Another thing—just keep in mind you aren't a fish. Better lay off the booze."

He opened the desk humidor, and his hard face thawed.

"Have a cigar, Barbee." His voice turned easily genial. "Here's the Walraven file. I want a biographical series. His early hardships, his military heroism, his secret philanthropies, his happy domestic life, his public-spirited service in Washington. Play down anything the voters wouldn't like."

That would be plenty, Barbee thought.

"Okay, Chief."

He went back to his desk in the noisy city room, and began to finger through the pile of clippings. But he knew too much the clippings didn't say, about the sewer bonds and the highway department scandal and the reason the Colonel's first wife had left him. It was hard to keep his mind on the unsavory task of whitewashing such a man for the Senate, and he found himself staring over his typewriter at the picture of a lean wolf howling at the moon on a calendar, thinking wistfully of the splendid freedom and power he had enjoyed in that dream.

To hell with Walraven!

Barbee knew suddenly that he had to get the facts behind the bizarre riddles of Mondrick's death and Rowena's madness and April Bell's queer confession. If he were only building haunted castles out of whisky and coincidence, he wanted to be certain of it. If not— well, even insanity would break the monotonous grind of a legman on the Star.

He stuffed the Walraven papers into his desk, got his coupe out of the parking lot, and drove out Center Street toward the university. He still couldn't understand why the Mondrick case didn't fit the editorial policy of the Star—nothing had ever been too sensational for Preston Troy before. Anyhow, for print or not, he had to know what was in that box.

Sam Quain must have moved it already, he supposed, from his study to the place he was arranging on the top floor of the Foundation building. He wondered what those carpenters and welders had been doing there—and realized that once more he was accepting the dream as fact.

He turned right at the traffic light, and left on Pine Street, and parked in front of Sam Quain's little white bungalow. It looked exactly as it had in the nightmare —even to the same rusted tin bucket and toy spade on Pat's sand pile in the back yard. He knocked, trying to ignore an uneasy tingling sensation, and Nora came from the kitchen to open the door.

"Why, Will—come in!"

A mild astonishment widened her blue eyes—they looked dull, he thought, and the lids a little swollen, as if she hadn't slept well.

"Is Sam at home?" A sudden pang of icy dread halted him inside the door, as if this quiet and friendly seeming dwelling had concealed some deadly trap. He couldn't help sniffing, as that panic caught his breath, for the seeping, lethal malodor of the thing in Sam Quain's box. His nostrils found nothing more noxious, however, than the pleasant aroma of a roast in the oven; and he saw Nora's faintly puzzled expression.

"I'm looking for Sam, for another interview," he told her. "I want to ask more about the Foundation expeditions, and what they found at those sites in the Ala-shan."

Her tired face frowned.

"Better forget it, Will." Her hurried voice seemed dry and uneasy. "Sam won't talk about it, not even to me. I don't know what they brought back in that mysterious box, and there isn't a chance Sam would let you see it. He kept it here in his study the last two nights—and woke up this morning dreaming about it."

"Huh?" Barbee gulped. "He did?"

"He thought somebody was trying to take it." Nora shivered a little, and her blue eyes looked dark-shadowed with worry. "I guess the thing is getting on my nerves as well as Sam's because we both had a bad night. It seems I almost remember—"

She checked herself, looking sharply at Barbee.

"A funny thing," she added, without saying what she almost remembered. "The telephone receiver in Sam's study was off the hook this morning. I'm pretty sure it wasn't last night, and Sam had the door locked. I can't imagine how that happened."

Barbee offered no solution for that puzzle. He looked away from her troubled face, trying to swallow the sudden tightness in his throat, and asked abruptly: "Where is Sam now?"

"Down at the Foundation," she said. "He has had a crew of men working day and night there since he got back—installing the fixtures in a new lab, he told me. He telephoned them when he woke up this morning, and Nick and Rex came in a station wagon for him and the box. He didn't even have time for his breakfast."

Her tired eyes looked appealingly at Barbee.

"Sam told me not to worry," she said, "but I just can't help it. He telephoned just a few minutes ago that he won't be home tonight. I suppose it is a really big discovery, that will make them all famous when it's announced, but I don't quite understand the way they act. They all seem so—frightened!"

She shuddered a little, and added hopefully: "Maybe Rex will tell—"

She caught herself.

"Tell what?" Barbee demanded.

Her soap-reddened hands twisted uncertainly at the corner of her kitchen apron.

"Sam warned me not to say anything about it." Freckles stood out from the worried pallor of her round face. "I know I can trust you, Will—but I didn't mean to mention it. Please don't let your paper get hold of it." Her eyes were afraid. "Oh, Will—I'm so upset—I don't know what to do."

Barbee patted her plump shoulder.

"I won't print anything you tell me," he promised.

"It's nothing much, really." Her sleepy, uncertain voice seemed grateful. "Just that Sam sent Rex back, after they left this morning, to get our car. I was going to take it to have the brakes tightened this morning. But they were in such a hurry. Rex is going to take it, Sam told me on the phone, to drive to State College tonight to make a radio broadcast."

"What about?"

"I don't know—Sam just told me the Foundation is buying time for a special program tomorrow. He asked me to listen. But not to speak about it. I hope they explain some of this horrid mystery." Her voice turned anxious. "You won't say anything, Will?"

"I won't," he promised. "Good morning, Pat—how are you?"

Little Patricia Quain came slowly from the nursery and clung to Nora's soapy hand. Her blue eyes were redder than Nora's, and ringed with grime. Her pink, square-jawed face seemed stubbornly set against any more tears.

"I'm all right, thank you, Mr. Will." Her low voice struggled not to break. "The tragedy is poor little Jiminy Cricket. He was killed last night."

Barbee felt a frigid breath blow out of the darkness of his mind. He turned and coughed in an effort to cover his terrified start.

"That's mighty bad." His voice rasped huskily. "How did it happen?"

Pat's wet blue eyes blinked.

"Two big dogs came in the night," she told him soberly. "One was white and one was gray. They wanted to take Daddy's box out of the study. Little Jiminy ran out to stop them, and the big gray dog bit his back and killed him."

Mute and shaken, Barbee turned to Nora.

"That's what Pat says." Her own tired voice seemed bewildered. "Anyhow, her little dog is dead. We found it lying on the sand pile this morning—right where she told me to look, when she woke up crying."

Her plump shoulder shrugged vainly at the inexplicable.

"I really think a car struck the little dog," she insisted resolutely. "Some of those college boys drive so recklessly at night. Probably he crawled back to the sand pile before he died, and Pat must have heard him whining."

Pat set her pink, grimy jaw.

"Please, Mother—no!" she protested stubbornly. "That big gray dog did it with his long, ugly teeth. I did too see him, and the pretty white dog with him, like I do in dreams. Didn't I, Mother? Didn't Daddy believe me?"

"Maybe he did, darling." Nora turned her round, troubled face to Barbee. "It's true Sam turned white as a sheet when Pat told about her dream. He wouldn't go with us to look for Jiminy—just ran to see about his box in the study."

Her tired eyes were suddenly concerned.

"You look pale, Will—do you feel all right?"

"I had a funny dream myself." He tried to laugh. "Something I ate, maybe. I'm going to run on over to the Foundation now and talk to Sam." He put his hand around the child's small back. "That's too bad about Jiminy."

The child shrank from his hand, and hid her stained face in Nora's apron.

"I don't think Sam will tell you anything," Nora was saying. "If he does, Will—won't you let me know?" She walked outside the door with him, and dropped her voice below Pat's earshot. "Please, Will-I'm so afraid, and I don't know anything to do about it."

CHAPTER TEN

A Friend of April Bell

Autumn-fire still burned in the trees on the campus and the adjoining grounds of the Humane Research Foundation, and all the lawns were red and gold with fallen leaves. Barbee recalled the scents that had been so vivid in his dream and sniffed the cool air. All he could smell was a faint pungence of leaves burning in some back yard.

He met six freshmen marching down University Avenue, escorted by six sophomores with paddles and burdened with the cage that held the Clarendon tiger— this was homecoming week, he recalled, and the daily march of the tiger was part of the traditional preliminary ceremonies before the football game with State College.

That mascot was the life-size model of a saber-tooth, complete with tawny stripes and ferocious snarl, which had been merely an exhibit in the university museum until it was first abducted years ago by raiders from State College. The sight of it brought back wistful memories to Barbee.

For the Muleteers had been the four heroes who crossed the mountains west of Clarendon in Rex's ancient, stripped-down Cadillac on the eve of another homecoming game, disguised themselves successfully with the red war paint of the State College Indians, and snatched the stolen tiger out of the very midst of a State war dance.

But that was many years ago, before old Mondrick turned against him. Wistfully, for a moment, he wondered why—but the problems of the present were large enough without brooding over old slights. He parked around the corner, and strode firmly up the walk to the tall new Foundation building.

That lingering, nameless malodor of the night had fled, and the sounds of nighttime carpentry had ceased. The austere hush of the dim corridors seemed almost ominous. Instead of the girl he expected to see at the information desk, he found a thick-set man who looked many years too mature for his university sweater.

"Sorry, mister." The man scowled. "Library and museum not open today."

"That's all right," Barbee said pleasantly. "I only want to see Mr. Quain."

"Mr. Quain's busy."

"Then I'd like to speak to Mr. Spivak or Mr. Chittum."

"Busy." The man scowled harder. "No visitors today."

Barbee was reviewing his gate-crashing technique when he saw the two men idling in the automatic elevator. They also seemed too old to be wearing sweaters splashed with the yellow-and-black of the Clarendon tiger, and they looked back at him too sharply. He saw the bulges at their hips and remembered that Sam Quain had been hiring guards for the Foundation.

He scrawled on a card: "Sam, it will save us both trouble if you will talk to me now" and pushed the card and a dollar bill across the information desk. He smiled at the cold-eyed watchman.

"Please send that to Mr. Quain."

Silently, the bleak-faced man pushed back the dollar and carried the card to the elevator. He limped like a tired policeman, and Barbee found the bulge his gun made. Sam Quain evidently intended to protect that box.

Barbee waited ten uncomfortable minutes under the guard's cold stare before Sam Quain stepped abruptly out of the elevator. Barbee was appalled to see the stark intensity of his contained desperation—no wonder Nora had been upset. He was coatless; his shirt sleeves were rolled up and his big hands had a vague chemical odor, as if he had been interrupted in some laboratory task. His unshaven face was gray and harsh with strain. "This way, Will."

His haggard eyes recognized Barbee without friendship, and he led the way brusquely across the corridor to a long room which briefly puzzled Barbee. The walls were hung with huge maps of all the continents and others which bewildered him until he recognized them as restorations of the different coastlines and vanished land masses of the geologic past. A battery of card-punching and card-sorting machines occupied the end of the room, with long rows of gray steel filing cabinets beyond.

Barbee wondered for a moment what sort of data old Mondrick and his associates had assembled and analyzed here. The rivers and mountains of those lost continents older than legendary Atlantis and Lemuria were shown in convincing detail; colored boundaries across them puzzled him again. The work of the room had been either completed or suspended, because the sleek machines were silent today, the dim-lit aisles deserted.

Sam Quain shut the door behind them and turned beside a desk to face Barbee. There were chairs, but he didn't ask Barbee to sit. He knotted one gaunt fist in an unconscious gesture of restrained emotion.

"Better lay off, Will!" His quiet voice was vibrant with a controlled vehemence. "For your own sake."

"Tell me why," Barbee challenged.

A spasm as if of anguish twisted Quain's stiff face. His dark, tortured eyes looked up for a moment at those maps of the far past. He coughed, and his voice seemed to choke.

"Please, Will—don't ask me that!"

Barbee sat down on the corner of the desk.

"We're friends, Sam—or we used to be. That's why I came out here. You can tell me some things I've got to know—for very urgent reasons."

Quain's face set.

"I can't tell you anything."

"Listen, Sam!" A quivering urgency turned Barbee's voice imperative. "What was old Mondrick trying to say when he died? What did you find in the Ala-shan—and what have you got in that wooden box?" He studied Quain's bleak, gray face. "And who is the Child of Night?"

He paused, but Quain stood woodenly silent.

"You might as well answer, Sam," he rasped bitterly. "I'm in the newspaper game, remember. I know how to deal with unwilling sources. I'm going to find out what you're hiding—whether you like it or not."

Quain's blue eyes narrowed and his Adam's apple jerked to an uneasy gulp.

"You don't know what you're meddling into." His abrupt, low voice was harsh with pain. "Won't you just leave us alone with this—while there's something left of our old friendship? Can't you forget you're a snooping newshawk?"

"This isn't for the Star," Barbee protested huskily. "The paper isn't interested. But things are happening that I can't understand. I've got to solve some riddles, Sam, before they drive me nuts!"

His voice shuddered.

"I know you're afraid of something, Sam. Why else did you take all those useless precautions to guard old Mondrick at the airport? And why have you turned this building into a fortress?" He swallowed. "What's the danger, Sam?"

Stubbornly, Sam Quain shook his head.

"Better forget it, Will," he said. "The answers wouldn't make you any happier."

Barbee rose trembling from the edge of the desk.

"I know a little already," he said hoarsely. "Enough to drive me nearly out of my mind. I feel that you are putting up a terrific fight against—something. I'm involved in it—I don't know how. But I want to be on your side, Sam."

Sam Quain sat down heavily in the chair behind the desk. He fumbled nervously with a paperweight—it was that little Roman lamp of Mondrick's, Barbee saw, the one whose blackglazed design showed Romulus and Remus, twin sons of dark Mars and a human vestal, sucking at the dugs of a wolf bitch.

"Anything you know may be very unfortunate, Will —for both of us." He pushed the terra-cotta lamp away from him abruptly, and sat a long time motionless beyond the desk, searching Barbee with hollowed, pain-shadowed eyes.

"I think you're imaging things," he said softly at last. "Nora was telling me you've been working too hard, and drinking too much. She was worried about you, Will, and I'm afraid she's right. I think you need a rest."

He put his hand on the desk telephone.

"I think you ought to get out of town for a few days, Will—before you drive yourself into a complete breakdown. I'll arrange it for you—so nothing will cost you a cent—if you'll promise to catch the afternoon plane today for Albuquerque."

Barbee stood frowning and silent.

"You see," he explained, "the Foundation has a little party working in New Mexico—excavating a cave dwelling for remains that may tell us why Homo sapiens was extinct in the western hemisphere when the Amerinds arrived. But you needn't bother with their work."

A hopeful smile warmed his harsh face.

"Won't you take a week off, Will?" he urged. "I'll call Troy and fix it with the paper—you might even do a feature story on the trip. Get plenty of sunshine and a little exercise—and forget about Dr. Mondrick."

He started to lift the phone.

"Will you go—today—if we arrange the reservations?"

Barbee shook his head.

"I don't bribe, Sam." He saw Quain's angry flush. "I still don't know what you're trying to cover up, but you can't ship me out of town that way. No, I'm going to stick around and see the fun."

Quain stood up stiffly.

"Dr. Mondrick decided not to trust you, Will—a long time ago." His voice was flat and cold. "He never told us why. Maybe you're all right. Maybe you aren't. We simply can't afford to take chances."

His stubborn face was bleak and dangerous.

"I'm sorry you choose to be so unreasonable, Will. I wasn't trying to bribe you—but I have to warn you now. Lay off, Will. If you don't stop this presumptuous investigation of affairs that don't concern you—we'll have to stop you. I'm sorry, Will. But that's the way it is." He shook his raw-boned, sun-bronzed head regretfully. "Think it over, Will. Now I've got to go."

He strode to open the door.

"Wait, Sam!" Barbee protested sharply. "If you can only give me one sane reason—"

But Sam Quain shut the door of that enigmatic room behind them and turned abruptly away. Barbee attempted to follow, but the elevator doors shut in his face. Uneasily conscious of the cold-eyed guard at the reception desk, he retreated from that stern tower that had become a citadel of the inexplicable.

Beside his shabby car at the curb, he turned to look up at those high windows behind, where he had seen the blue glare of welding torches in that nightmare, as Quain's men prepared a strongroom for the box. He couldn't help shivering, or sniffing again for that peculiar fetor. His nostrils caught nothing now. Yet the perfect fit between dream and reality frightened him— and his very sanity, he felt, was locked inside that guarded wooden box.

A sudden, illogical panic swept him into the car. He raced the motor and clashed the gears and lurched around the turns getting back to the highway. Foolish, he told himself. But Sam Quain, with that curious mixture of desperate intensity and solemn regret and sheer terror, had somehow shaken him.

He drove around the campus until that irrational spasm of dread had passed, and then started back to town. He glanced hopefully at his watch, but it wasn't time to call April Bell. He was still supposed to be working for the Star, he recalled, and the Walraven file was waiting in his desk in the city room. His troubled brain, however, revolted at the unpleasant chore of renovating Walraven for the voters, and suddenly he knew that he had to see Rowena Mondrick.

Why did she wear those quaint old silver heirlooms —in reality and in his dream? What, precisely, had she and Dr. Mondrick been digging for in Nigeria—and what had been the exact circumstances of that black leopard's attack? What did she know of Mondrick's later work? Did she know of any enemies who might have conspired to murder him at the airport? Did she know the name of the Child of Night?

If she could answer even one of those restless questions that stalked the darkness of his thoughts, her answer might be the touchstone he needed to distinguish between fact and whisky-bred illusion.

Passing the office, he drove on to the foot of Center Street and north on the new river road. Glennhaven occupied a hundred well-kept acres on the hills above the river, four miles out of Clarendon. Trees still gaudy with autumn screened the hospital buildings and the occupational therapy shops away from the highway.

Barbee parked on the gravel lot behind the long main building, an impressive three-story prison of yellow brick. He walked around the building into the cool, dim-lit hush of a wide reception room. Austere and opulent as the foyer of a bank, it seemed a temple to the new god Freud. The slim girl sitting at a switchboard behind a massive mahogany desk was its virginal priestess. He gave her his card.

"I've come to see Mrs. Rowena Mondrick," he said.

Her fragile loveliness reminded him of a portrait of some princess of old Egypt that he had seen in the university museum. Her eyes and hair were very black; her skin was pale ivory, her brow very low, her skull oddly long. She leafed swiftly through a black-bound book, and gave him a dreamy smile.

"I'm sorry, sir, but I haven't your name." Her voice was a sleepy caress. "All visits to our patients must be arranged in advance, you see, through the doctor in charge of the case. If you wish to leave your request—"

"I want to see Mrs. Mondrick, now."

"I'm very sorry, sir." Her slow smile was hauntingly exotic. "I'm afraid that would be impossible to arrange, today. If you wish to return—"

"Who is her doctor?"

"One moment, sir." Her slender ivory fingers riffled gracefully through the black book. "Mrs. Rowena Mondrick was admitted at eight this morning, and she's under—" The girl's limpid voice quivered melodiously, intoning the name of a minor deity. "She's under Dr. Glenn."

"Then let me see him."

"Sorry, sir," she purred. "But Dr. Glenn never sees anyone without an appointment."

Barbee caught his breath, and stifled an angry impulse to stalk past the girl and see what happened. She was watching him with dark misty eyes, and he knew she could call enough husky attendants to preserve the temple's solemn sanctity.

He gulped uneasily, trying to swallow the dry apprehension in his throat. Glennhaven, he knew, was rated as one of the country's finest psychiatric hospitals. There was no good reason, he told himself, for his old dim terror of all mental institutions.

"Mrs. Mondrick is a friend of mine," he told the girl. "I only want to find out how she is."

"Any discussion of our patients is against the rules," that fragile priestess cooed. "With Dr. Glenn himself in charge of the case, however, you may be certain that Mrs. Mondrick is receiving the best care possible. If you wish to ask permission for a visit—"

"No," he muttered. "Thanks."

He fled from the girl's exotic smile and that well-ordered, ruthless hush. The blind woman was not a sacrificial victim imprisoned in this efficiently conducted twentieth-century temple, he tried to tell himself. Actually, Glenn was a distinguished psychiatrist; his treatment would surely be kind and skillful.

Barbee was glad to get outside again, however. He filled his lungs thankfully with the cold autumn air, and hurried back to his car. One more effort had failed, but there was still April Bell. Eagerness hurried his breathing when he thought of that vivid redhead. It was almost time to call her hotel. He was going to return the jade wolf and find out, somehow, whether April Bell had dreamed—

Sight of Miss Ulford broke his thought. A gray little wisp of a woman, the nurse was sitting on a bench at the bus stop on the corner. He pulled to the curb and offered to drive her home.

"Thank you so much, Mr. Barbee." Smiling gratefully with yellow false teeth, she got in the car beside him. "I just missed the bus," she said plaintively, "and I don't know when the next one is. I suppose I could have asked the girl to call a taxi—but I hardly know what I'm doing, I'm so upset about poor Rowena."

"How is she?" Barbee whispered huskily.

"Acutely disturbed—that's what Dr. Glenn wrote on her chart." Worry rasped in the nurse's dry nasal voice. "She's still hysterical—she didn't want me to leave, but Glenn said I must—and they're giving her sedatives to calm her."

"What—" Barbee's hoarse voice caught. "What seems to be the trouble?"

"She has this obsessive dread, as Glenn calls it, and this queer compulsion."

"Huh?" Barbee frowned uneasily. "About what?"

"You know how she always was about silver? Glenn calls that an obsession, and it's worse after last night. You see, we took off that quaint old silver jewelry this morning when we were dressing her scratches and bruises from falling on the pavement, and she was perfectly frantic, poor dear, when she found she didn't have it. Dr. Glenn let me go back to the house and bring her beads and bracelets, and she thanked me like I had saved her life."