seized by a hundred hands. He fought like a fiend against the innumerable
grips that clasped his hands, his arms, his feet. But they were too many.
He stopped his struggling, panting, and stared raging at Stephan.
“We give you a gift,” said Stephan quietly. “Gold, my son. Much gold.
Because if Vladimir tells our secrets we will all be killed, and he
threatens to tell.”
“I don’t want your money,” panted Cunningham savagely. “I want this silly
mystery ended! I want Maria! I want----”
“Go in peace,” said Stephan drearily.
Cunningham was laid upon the ground and tied fast. He struggled with every
ounce of his strength, but in vain. The Strange People were too many and
too resolute. But they seemed to take pains not to injure him. Indeed,
when they put him in a litter and started off with him, there seemed to be
a consistent effort by the bearers not to make him even uncomfortable.
Cunningham raged and tore at his bonds. Then he subsided into a savage
silence. His lips were set into a grim firmness. Maria sobbing upon the
grass ... this abominable sympathy for him....
The litter stopped. They took him out and cut his bonds. They offered him
the bags of hammered gold-pieces again.
“I don’t want them,” he said with grim politeness. “I warn you, I’m coming
back.”
The leader of his escort was the young man who had first come out of the
woods the first time Cunningham had seen the Strangers. He nodded gravely.
“I know,” he said quietly. “I loved a girl not of our people, last year.”
The litter-bearers had vanished into the woods. Cunningham matched at a
straw of hope. Perhaps here was a friend, or even a source of help.
“You understand,” he said in a hurried, eager undertone. “Perhaps we
can----”
“I gave her up,” said the young Stranger quietly. “My people would have
killed her if I had married her. You see, I might have told her.”
He shrugged and pointed off through the woods.
“Coulters is there,” he said gravely. “You would not take gold. I am
sorry. But we think you are a man.”
“I’m coming back,” said Cunningham grimly.
The Stranger nodded and touched the hilt of his knife regretfully. He
swung away and vanished in the underbrush.
Cunningham started toward Coulters. He knew they would be watching him.
But perhaps a quarter of a mile on the way he stopped. He heard nothing
and saw nothing. He slipped aside into the woods. And he had gone no more
than a dozen paces before there was a little golden glitter in a ray of
the dying sun. A knife had flashed past his face not two feet away. He
turned back, raging.
Later he tried again. And again a warning knife swept across the path
before him.
11
Cunningham had nearly reached the valley in which the hotel was built when
he saw Gray below him, climbing sturdily up into the eyrie of the Strange
People. Gray had a rifle slung over his shoulder.
“Gray!” shouted Cunningham.
Gray stared and abruptly sat down and mopped his forehead. He waited for
Cunningham to reach him.
“Damn you, Cunningham,” he said expressionlessly, “I like you, you know,
for all I think we may be working against each other. And word’s just gone
in to Bendale that you’ve been killed by the Strangers. I was going up in
hopes of getting to you before they wiped you out. And I already had cold
chills down my back, thinking of the knife that nearly went into it
yesterday.”
“I’m safe enough,” said Cunningham bitterly, “but I’m run out of the
hills.”
“Best thing, maybe,” said Gray. “I’m hoping, but I think there’ll be
fighting there tonight. A posse’s going to raid the Strangers after dark.”
“_I’m_ going to raid the hills tonight,” said Cunningham fiercely, “and
bring Maria away with me. I’ll marry her in spite of all the Strangers in
creation.”
Gray grunted as he heaved to his feet. “You’re a fool, Cunningham, and I’m
another. If you go, I go too. I might learn something, anyhow.”
Cunningham poured out the story of what had happened to him during the
day, as they made their way down to the hotel. The sole objection to him
lay in the fact that if Maria loved him, some day she would tell him who
the Strangers were. And she did love him. Vladimir was the only outsider
who knew their secret and he was threatening to disclose it, on what
penalty Cunningham did not know.
“Maybe,” said Gray quietly, “it would be a good thing if Vladimir did tell
what he knows. But I suspect he won’t, and for your sake I’d like to see
you safely married to that girl you’re so keen about before he did start
to talk. I’m with you tonight, Cunningham.”
“Better stay behind,” said Cunningham curtly. “They’ll be watching for
me.”
“No,” said Gray quietly. “I sent some wires today and they may not be
strong enough. Two of us might get her out where one wouldn’t. And I’m
thinking that if you do marry her and she does tell you the secret of the
Strangers, it might avert a tragedy. I’ve done all I can without certain
knowledge. Now, watch your tongue when we reach the hotel.”
* * * * *
Cunningham ignored the raging astonishment with which Vladimir saw him,
and was savagely amused at the worriment the man showed. Vladimir had sent
his servant after Cunningham to kill him, and had been so certain of the
attainment of that object that he had already broadcast a tale of
Cunningham’s death which laid it at the Strangers’ door.
Cunningham waited for darkness. He was sure he had been watched back to
the hotel. But after darkness was complete and before the moon rose he and
Gray slipped secretly out of the house. They struck off down the valley,
and when the monstrous ball of the full moon floated over the hills to the
east, they made their way beneath thick trees, lest the moonlight show
them to hidden watchers. They had gone perhaps a mile when Gray pointed
suddenly upward.
Far, far up, where a tree-grown peak ended in a bald and rocky knob, fires
were burning. Plainly visible in the clear night air, it could be seen
that there were many fires and many people about them. Through the
stillness, too, there came half-determinate sounds which might have been
singing, or chanting, or some long-continued musical wailing.
The moon was shining down upon the valley, with its tidy New England
farmhouses--upon Coulters, where uncomfortable rural police officers tried
to convince themselves that they would be quite safe in dealing with the
Strange People--upon Bendale, with its electric lights and once-a-week
motion picture theater. And the same moonlight struck upon a ring of fires
high up in the mountains where the Strangers moved and crouched. Old women
gave voice to the shrill lament that was floating thinly through the air.
Gray glanced once at Cunningham’s face and if he had been about to speak,
he refrained. Cunningham was making grimly for the hills.
The woods were dark. The two men crept through long tunnels of blackness,
where little speckles of moonlight filtered through unexpectedly and
painted the tree-trunks in leopard-spots. The valley had been calm, but as
they climbed, the wind began to roar over their heads, rushing among the
tree-branches with a growling sound. That noise masked the sound of their
movements. Once they saw one of the Strangers cross a patch of clear
moonlight before them. He was moving softly, listening as he half trotted,
half walked.
“Sentry,” whispered Gray.
Cunningham said nothing. They went on, and heard voices murmuring before
them in a foreign tongue. They halted and swung to the right. Perhaps two
hundred yards on they tried again to continue up toward the heights. A
crashing in the underbrush made them freeze. A Stranger trotted within
five paces of them, peering about him cautiously. Only their immobility
saved them from detection.
When he had gone they made for the spot from which he had come. It was
breathless work because at any instant a liquid little glitter in the
moonlight--a throwing-knife--might be the only herald of a silent and
desperate attack.
But they made their way on and upward. It seemed as if they had passed
through the ring of sentries. The trees grew thinner. The wind roared more
loudly above their heads. And suddenly they saw the glow of many fires
before them.
If they had gone carefully before, now they moved with infinite pains to
make no noise. A single voice was chanting above the wind’s screaming.
Gray listened and shook his head.
“I thought I knew most languages by the sound of them,” he whispered, “or
could guess at the family anyhow. I worked on Ellis Island once. But I
never heard that one.”
They went down on their hands and knees for the last hundred yards. Then
they could see. And Cunningham stared with wide eyes, while Gray swore in
whispers, shaking with excitement.
There were a dozen huge bonfires placed in a monster circle twenty yards
across. They roared fiercely as the flames licked at the great logs they
fed upon. And the wind was sweeping up from the valley and roaring through
them and around them and among them.
The rushing of the wind and the roaring of the fires made a steady,
throbbing note that was queerly hypnotic. The flames cast a lurid light
all around, upon the trees, and the rocks, and the Strange People, and the
vast empty spaces where the earth fell away precipitously.
A single aged man chanted in the center of the twelve huge beacons. He was
clad in a strange, barbaric fashion such as Cunningham had never seen
before. And the Strange People had clasped hands in a great circle that
went all about the blazes, and as the old man chanted they trotted
steadily around and around without a pause or sound.
The old man halted his chant and cried a single sentence in that unknown
tongue. From the men in the circle came a booming shout, as they sped with
gathering speed about the flames. Again he cried out, and again the
booming, resonant shout came from the men.
“The sunwise turn,” panted Gray. “_Widdershins!_ It’s magic, Cunningham,
magic! In New Hampshire, in these days!”
But Cunningham was thinking of no such things as magic, white or black. He
was searching among the running figures for Maria. But he did not see her.
The barbaric garb of the Strangers confused his eyes. That costume was
rich and splendid and strange and utterly beyond belief in any group of
people only eight miles from a New England mill-town with an accommodation
train once a day.
“Magic!” cried Gray again in a whisper. “Cunningham, nobody’ll believe it!
They won’t, they daren’t believe it! It’s impossible!”
But Cunningham was lifting himself up to search fiercely for a sight of
the girl he had found at the end of the route to romance and to high
adventure. Here were strange sights that matched any of the imaginative
novels on which aforetime he had fed his hunger for romance. Here was a
scene such as he had imagined in the midst of posting ledgers and
day-books in a stuffy office on Canal Street. And Cunningham did not
notice it at all, because he was no longer concerned with adventure. He
had found that. He was fiercely resolved now to find the girl who loved
him and whose love had been forbidden by the laws of the strange folk of
the hills.
He saw her. Not in the circle. She was crouched down on the grass amid a
group of women. Rebellion was in every line of her figure. Cunningham
loosened his revolver. It was madness, but----
A shout rang out sharply. And the running line of men broke and milled.
Cunningham saw a hundred hands flash to as many knife-hilts. He saw the
sheriff and four frightened-looking constables come plunging out of the
brushwood, shouting something inane about halting in the name of the law.
There was a shout and a scream, and then a man’s voice raised itself in a
wild yell of command and entreaty. Cunningham’s own name was blended in a
sentence in that unintelligible language.
The Strangers darted for the encircling woods. The women vanished, Maria
among them. There was only a blank space in the open lighted by monster
flames, and the sheriff and two constables struggling with a single figure
of the Strangers.
“Go git ’em!” roared the sheriff, holding fast to the captive. “Git ’em!
They’re scared. Ketch as many as ye kin!”
Cunningham felt Gray holding him down in an iron grasp.
“Don’t be a fool!” rasped Gray in a whisper. “It’s too late! The Strangers
got away, all but one.”
The other men were racing about here and there. They found nothing but a
bit of cloth here, and a woman’s embroidered cap there, left behind in the
sudden flight.
The struggle in the open space ceased abruptly. The sheriff triumphantly
called to the others.
“I got one now! Dun’t be scared! We got a hostage!” He reared up and
yelled to the surrounding forest: “Dun’t ye try any o’ your knife-throwin’
tricks! This feller we got, if we dun’t get down safe, he dun’t neither!
Dun’t ye try any rescuin’!”
He bent down to jerk his prisoner upright. And Cunningham heard him gasp.
He chattered in sudden stillness and the others huddled about him.
“Dead!” gasped one of them.
“He stabbed hisself, I tell ye,” shrilled the sheriff. “He stuck his own
knife in hisself!”
The five ungainly figures stared at each other, there amidst the roaring,
deserted bonfires. One of them began to whimper suddenly.
“They--they’ll be throwin’ their knives all the way down to the valley!”
he gasped. “They’ll be hidin’ behind trees an’ a-stabbin’ at us.”
The sheriff’s teeth began to chatter. The others clutched their weapons
and gazed affrightedly at the woods encircling them.
“We--we got to try it,” gulped the sheriff, shivering. “We got to! Else
they’ll get guns an’ kill us here. If--if ye see anything movin’, shoot
it! Dun’t wait! If ye see anything, shoot....”
With staring, panic-stricken eyes, they made for the woods. Cunningham
heard them crashing through the undergrowth in the darkness, whimpering
and gasping in terror at every fancied sound.
They left behind them nothing but twelve great fires that began slowly to
burn low, and a crumpled figure in barbaric finery lying with his face
upturned toward the sky. It was the young Stranger who only that afternoon
had told Cunningham of the girl he had loved and lost because she was not
of the Strange People. He had stabbed himself when captured, rather than
be taken out of the hills and forced to tell the secret of the Strangers.
12
By morning the outside valleys were up in arms. One man--the foreigner of
the train--had been killed by the Strange People, and a servant of
Vladimir’s had disappeared among them. And witchcraft had been believed in
not too long ago in those parts. The wild ceremony of the Strangers among
their blazing fires was told and retold, and with one known killing to
their discredit and the long-smoldering hatred they had inspired, at the
end it was related as devil-worship undiluted. Something out of Scripture
came to be put in it and men told each other--and firmly believed--that
children were being kidnaped and sacrificed to the Moloch out of the Old
Testament. The single Stranger who had been killed became another human
sacrifice, confusingly intermingled with the other and more horrible tale,
and there was no doubt in the mind of any of the local farmers that the
Strangers planned unspeakable things to all not of their own kind.
Had any Stranger been seen without the hills, he would have been mobbed by
an hysterical populace. Sober, God-fearing men huddled their families
together and stood guard over them. Women watched their children with
their husbands’ shotguns in their hands. Wilder and ever wilder rumors
sped with lightning speed from homestead to homestead in the valleys.
And all this was done without malice. The native-born people had
distrusted the Strange People because they were strange. They disliked
them because they were aloof. And they came to hate them because they were
mysterious. It is always dangerous to be a mystery. The story of what the
sheriff and his four constables had seen among the fires on the heights
became enlarged to a tale of unspeakable things. It would have required no
more than a leader with a loud voice to mobilize a mob of farmers who
would have invaded the hills with pitchforks and shotguns to wipe out the
Strange People entirely.
They did not fear the Strangers as witches, but as human beings. They
feared them as possible kidnapers of children to be killed in the inhuman
orgies the fire-ceremony had become in the telling. They had no evidence
of such crimes committed by the Strangers. But there is no evidence of
kidnaping against the gipsies, yet many people suspect them of the same
crime. Had any man spoken the truth about the Strangers, he would have
been suspected of horrible designs--of being in sympathy with them. And
because of the totally false tales that sprang up like magic about their
name, to be suspected of sympathy with the Strangers was to court death.
Cunningham’s rage grew. Gray shrugged and rode furiously to Bendale to
send more telegrams. Vladimir went about softly, purring to himself, and
passed out bribes lavishly to those who could be bribed, and told lies to
those who preferred to be suborned in that way.
He was holding back the plans of mobbing. The sheriff, acting on his
orders, broke up every group of wild-talking men as soon as it formed. But
Vladimir held the Strange People in the hollow of his palm. Half a dozen
murmured words, and the men who had taken his lavished money would stand
aside and let the simmering terror of the countryside burst out into the
frenzy of a mob. And then the hills would be invaded by Christian men who
would ferret out the Strangers and kill them one by one in the firm belief
that they were exterminating the agents of Satan and the killers of
innumerable children.
It did not matter that Vladimir’s hold was based on lies. The lies were
much more exciting than the truth. The truth was dull and bare. The
Strangers had been dancing about the fires. The constables had rushed out
and they had fled, without attempting to resist or harm their attackers.
One of them had stabbed himself when caught. And the truth was mysterious
enough, and inexplicable enough, but it did not compare with the highly
colored tales of human sacrifice and heathen orgies that had been
embroidered upon the original tale.
* * * * *
Cunningham was inevitably in the thick of all these rumors. Men came
rushing with news. A Stranger had been seen lurking about where children
were playing. He was instantly suspected of planning to kidnap one of
them. He had been shot at and now was being chased by dogs. A Stranger had
stopped a doctor in the road and asked for bandaging for an injured arm.
He had been shot by one of the constables the night before. Other
Strangers guarded him lest the doctor try to arrest him while he dressed
the wound.
That was in the morning. As the day went on the reports became more
horrible. It became clear that if any Stranger showed his face he would be
shot at as if he were a mad dog.
Word came from one place. Two Strangers had been seen and fired on. They
vanished, leaving a trail of blood. From another place came another
report. An old Strange woman had come out of the hills, to beg for
medicines for their wounded. Dogs were set on her as she screamed her
errand. She fled, and knives came hurtling from the brushwood, killing or
wounding the dogs that were in pursuit.
Gray had promised much. With a drawn and anxious face he had told
Cunningham that this day help must come. His telegrams must have produced
results. They must have had some effect! He had long since dropped his
pretense that his only mission in the hills was the study of the Strange
People’s dialect. He was off in Bendale, struggling with a telephone,
pleading with a long-distance operator to give him a connection to
somewhere--anywhere outside.
Noon came and passed. The afternoon waned, with the inhabitants of the
valley growing more and more hysterical in their hatred of the Strange
People, and more and more detailed and convinced about the horrors they
ascribed to them. The wholly imaginary menace of the Strangers was making
it more and more difficult to prevent the formation of a mob. Men raved,
wanting to protect their children by wiping out the hill folk. Women grew
hysterical, demanding their annihilation.
Cunningham went to Vladimir. Vladimir blinked at him and licked his lips.
“Your servant is a prisoner among the Strange People,” said Cunningham,
coldly. “I’m authorized to say he’ll be killed if a mob enters the hills.”
Vladimir smiled, and all his cruelty showed when he smiled.
“How are you authorized to speak for them?”
“Let that go,” said Cunningham grimly. “He’s alive and safe, but he won’t
be if that mob goes in.”
The sheriff came in hurriedly.
“Mr. Vladimir----” he began.
Cunningham cut into his report with some sharpness.
“Sheriff, the Strange People are holding Vladimir’s servant prisoner, as a
hostage. They’ll kill him if you raid the hills again.”
Vladimir laughed.
“He is vastly mistaken, sheriff. I had a servant here, it is true. But I
sent him to Boston, on a mission. And I had word from him yesterday that
he was quite safe and attending to my orders.”
He blinked at Cunningham and moved close to him.
“Fool,” he murmured gently, so that the sheriff could not hear, “do you
think his life counts any more than yours?”
The sheriff glared at Cunningham hatefully.
“Tryin’ to scare me, eh?” he rumbled. “I got enough on you to arrest you.
You’re in thick with them Strangers, you are. I reckon jail’s the best
place for you. You won’t get no chance to talk about bribes there.”
Cunningham felt himself growing white with fury. His threat to Vladimir
had been a bluff, and Vladimir had shown complete indifference to the fate
of the man he had sent to murder Cunningham. But there was one thing he
would not be indifferent to.
“You try to arrest me,” he said softly to the sheriff, “and I’ll blow your
head off. And as for you, Vladimir”--he made his tone as convincing as he
could--“I just tell you that you’d better call that mob off or I’ll tell
them who the Strangers are and where they came from!”
Vladimir’s eyes flamed close to madness, while his cheeks went ashen.
“So they told you!” he purred. “Sheriff, go to the door. I wish to speak
to this man privately.”
The sheriff, rumbling, moved away.
“My friend,” murmured Vladimir softly, “now I shall have to kill you. Not
myself, of course, because that would be illegal. And dangerous. But I
give you news. Today, while you and Gray were outside, a little note was
tossed into your window. I heard the breaking glass and found it. It was
from a girl, who signed, ‘Maria.’ She said that she loved you and would
wait for you at a certain spot to flee with you.”
Cunningham’s heart stopped. Vladimir laughed at his expression.
“Oh, she was met,” murmured Vladimir. “She was met--and arrested. She is
held fast. And tonight a story will go about and the women of the
neighborhood will learn where she is. She is in the hotel here, safely
bound. With such a tale as will be spread about, do you not think the
women will pull down the whole hotel to tear her in bits? Now do you go
and tell the secret of the Strangers! No one will believe you. But you
believe me!”
He tossed a scrap of paper to Cunningham. And Cunningham knew that the
story was true.
“Now,” said Vladimir, purring, “I shall give orders that you be arrested.
If you are taken, she will be torn to bits. And that is how I kill you, my
friend. That is how I kill you! For I do not want anyone to live who will
remember or believe the secret of the Strangers.”
13
Then the news took a definitely dangerous turn. A farmer who was hastening
to Coulters was stopped by a band of Strangers. They had taken his shotgun
and shells from him, contemptuously tossing him half a dozen of the square
lumps of gold. The gold would pay for the gun ten times over, but men
raged. Another man came in foaming at the mouth, with a similar tale. He
had seen a Stranger and raised his gun to fire as at a wild beast. A knife
had flicked at him and gone through the fleshy part of his arm. They took
his gun and shells, leaving gold to pay for them.