Wolf of Erlik

Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.

J.U. GIESY AND JUNIUS B. SMITH

WOLF OF ERLIK

Serialised in Argosy All-Story Weekly, 22 Oct-12 Nov 1921

This e-book edition: Roy Glashan's Library, 2025
Version Date: 2025-09-10

Produced by Paul Moulder and Roy Glashan

All original content added by RGL is protected by copyright.

Click here for more books by this author

Argosy All-Story Weekly, 22 Oct 1921,
with first part of "Wolf of Erlik"

Part I.
Chapter I. A Call From Afar.
Chapter II. "C'est la Guerre."
Chapter III. Norman Haddon, D.J.
Chapter IV. A Call For Help.
Part 2.
Chapter V. The Shroud.
Chapter VI. The Wolf.
Chapter VII. Lotis Speaks.
Chapter VIII. The Flaming Sword Of The Spirit.
Chapter IX. Opposing Forces.
Part 3.
Chapter X. The Drums.
Chapter XI. A Duel Of Minds.
Chapter XII. Attack.
Chapter XIII. The Sword Unsheathed.
Chapter XIV. Thrusting In.
Part 4.
Chapter XV. Sheriff Cory.
Chapter XVI. Lotis Goes
Chapter XVII. At Satan's Altar.
Chapter XVIII. The Battle.
Chapter XIX. Triumph.

CHAPTER I.
A Call From Afar.

I READ the letter—a thing couched in a script that mirrored the femininity of the writer in every well-formed curve and line. And then I sat there at the desk in my private room of our suite in the Urania, holding the little sheaf of pages in my hand. After a time and more carefully than at first, I went over them again:

I feel that I must write you, and yet I hardly know bow to begin. The heading I have chosen for this letter is not my real address, which you will find on the last page, but rather a statement of a condition such as it seems to me should justify me in having coined a term. And it seems also as though with you, who were in such intimate contact with a phase of my existence, which, thanks to the Master and to you and your dear, dear wife, is now past, I might discuss this thing.

You will recall that my father in dying left me not only money, but a tract of some sixty thousand acres of land near our south western boundaries, and, of course, you know that immediately after our marriage, Mr. Garston and I came down to inspect it, since Mrs. Glace actually came to see us off on the train. The property was, in so far as we knew, totally unimproved, but Mr. Garston, being a civil engineer, felt, after a study of the drawings found among my father's papers, that it held great opportunities for developmental projects, both of an agricultural nature, and possibly of mines.

My friend, what do you suppose we actually found? The condition that my fanciful heading of the date line best explains. This inheritance of mine is peopled by men, yes, and women, of many races. There are Hindus, Malays, Russians, Mongolians of various clans, Mexican peons, men of Haiti and Santo Domingo, speaking a patois of French and Spanish. It seems unbelievable, and yet this little principality of mine, which I fancied without population, is in reality a very land of Babel—a place of many tongues. They have foregathered within its limits, are grazing their flocks and herds upon it, and tilling little farms.

Just what I am facing—just what it means really—I'm afraid I do not as yet fully comprehend; but I have my suspicions, and if they should prove to be correct, then I'm rather of the opinion, my friend, that I have actually stumbled quite into one of the nerve centers connected with the schemes of those who serve Erlik the Spider and his overlord, the Prince of Darkness, Supreme Sovereign of the Damned.

What does it mean? Mr. Glace, you who are the intimate friend of the Master—of him to whom I owe my present life and happiness and all I am—I think I can answer that question—I, who for a time was the mental slave of that worshiper of Erlik, the Destroyer of Souls, the Mongol, Otho Khan, I think these people of many tongues are people of one mind. I think Otho Khan has sent them here for purposes of his own—because, while he made me a tool, which he meant to destroy once the work for which it had been fashioned was done, yet even so, in making me what I was when first you met me, he taught me very, very much of his own unclean knowledge, so that I think I understand his plan. And I think that these dwellers here, simple colonists of the land though they seem, are in reality other tools, fashioned for his purpose, and swayed by the mind of Otho Khan.

Always when I was with him he was prating of the powers of the mind. One of the things he told me was of a custom of the order to which he belongs. It was that when they desired anything to be accomplished, they gathered together and all thought about it, concentrating their minds upon it by means of ritualistic forms, and that after a time of such concentration, the thing was somehow done. My friend, do you see what I mean, and how he moved in his schemes?

Until my death, under my father's will, he might not take that which was left me fully into his hands. But were I dead, then he could have seized upon it, and this supposedly barren, but actually peopled tract of land, would have remained, and—it would have been a brain center as it were—a gathering place such as he spoke of, wherein each and every dweller would have been ready at his command to concentrate his or her will toward the bringing about of those things at which he aims.

How long he has been sending them down here I do not know as yet, but through it all it would seem that he has been slowly, steadily, silently, and of a deliberate purpose, building himself a sort of artificial brain of enormous power, ready to answer to his demands. It is as though some one had planted a monster wireless station in some unsuspected place save that instead of the wireless current, this thing of his devising shall project when he commands it the thought waves of the human mind.

Mr. Garston was furious at finding them here and was for driving them off at once. But I have induced him to wait, and I am going to stay here until I have learned what I feel is to be learned.

P.S.—When I left the East it was with the firm determination to never employ the knowledge Otho Khan had given me again, but if I am right in thinking what I have found to portend a danger far greater than any aimed against any one individual, I shall not hesitate then to oppose him with those powers he was at so much pains to see that I gained.

I folded the pages together slowly. And as I did so, there crept through me a strange sensation, a seemingly actual cringing of my skin, a physical reflex of the emotions awakened in my brain.

It was a strange letter. It brought up a series of vivid mental pictures: First of the writer, Lotis Garston—Lotis Popoff, as she had been before her marriage—reed-slender, with her raven hair and brows, her white, white throat and face, wherein the line of her mouth was like a bow of living flame, and her strange way of throwing up her arm with a backward tilted hand, an advanced palm—of Lotis Popoff, in whose dark eyes the first time I intimately met her, there had lurked the torture of a lost soul, until he, whom she named the Master, had waked once more within them the fire of conscious redemption, and all that goes with what one may almost dare to term a paradise regained—and in so doing, had sent her at the last into Edward Garston's arms.

And next I thought of Otho Khan, the Mongol High Caste, who had been responsible for her condition when first I had known her, had robbed her of all conscience, persuading her that her soul was foredoomed to Erlik, already damned, no longer, save while her beautiful body was still alive, her own. Yes, I thought of Otho Khan, who had sent her to slay the Master, because he stood between him and the thing at which he aimed, that thing the letter mentioned—the establishing of unrest, disorder in the minds of men, to the result of a final overthrow of law, order, of all higher motives, to red revolution and the downfall of present day civilisation in the end.

Twice had the Master frustrated Otho Khan's plans—and on each occasion death had fallen on the Mongol's agents—one, the Chinaman Lee and the white woman fiend who was his filthy consort—on Michael Popoff, the Russian, Lotis's father. Yes, that was the way Otho worked. First, he made Popoff's child his slave, and then he sent her against the man who opposed him, to do murder in the name of vengeance, yet in reality to remove the one who had upset two of his schemes.

Sitting there I recalled how she had slipped into the apartment of the Master, where he and I waited her coining, in a breathless darkness, bearing the naked blade of a slender dagger in her hand. And I recalled swiftly all that had followed, until he had met her, faced her, proved stronger than either Khan or the hellish knowledge he had taught her, and so having literally freed her from the slavery the Mongol had placed upon her, gave her back to the love and protection of the man from whom Otho had tricked her, to destroy not only her soul but her body after she had served to further his plans.

Too, I recalled that in those days and nights which had culminated in Otho Khan's third defeat, the apprehension of still another of his agents, Georges Pitrininski, who had come against both the Master and Lotis after she had failed, I bad more than once felt the same cringing of the skin I was now experiencing again, thanks to the realization of what she described in her letter might mean.

Otho Khan had been beaten thrice, but he was not done. He was no more done than Evil is ever wholly vanquished, or can be since Force is a Universal thing, and though opposed in principle and object, Good and Evil are paradoxically one. Five agents had Otho Khan lost. Three of them were dead, and the fourth, Pitrininski, had been tried as a federal prisoner and adjudged criminally insane.

And the fifth—well, she had written the letter I was holding in my hand—and unless I was a very poor judge of the fire of resentment, loathing, I myself had seen flame within her, once she had regained the full estate of womanhood with all its tender meaning, she was a little more than lost to Otho Khan, because, unless I was sadly short in comprehension, she would, if the Deed arose, not hesitate to employ against him those strange powers which, through his efforts to fashion her into a tool for his purpose, she had gained.

She knew the code of his Cult—that Black Brotherhood—those worshipers of Erlik, which seems to have existed always as the antithesis of every and all creeds aimed toward the uplift, the spiritual advancement of mankind. She knew its rituals and forms. To her Erlik was far and more than a name, was the vice regent on Earth of Satan, the Prince of Darkness—Sovereign of the Dark Star—of him who was cast in a prideful downfall out of Paradise itself, to become the Eternal Ruler of the Damned, who following him in rebellion against the law of the One, were cast out with him into the void wherein the Dark Star whirls.

Odd fancies these for a modern, twentieth century world, for a modern twentieth century man, one of a partnership which had set itself up for the detection of crime and its doer. And yet things that had filled my mind more or less ever since I had seen Lotis Popoff, as beautiful as sin may sometimes appear in its deceiving guise, as beautiful as a seductress, an enchantress, yet one having no hope, and without God in the World, come creeping like a ray of dark light from the star of darkness, toward the commission of a crime, that time before the Master tore away from her the soul destroying chains forged upon her by Otho Khan.

And after that, after the appalling and revolutionary realization of what we were witnessing had come upon us with its evidence of undreamed, little understood forces in operation, Bryce, my partner and I had discussed the thing many times. And out of it there had come to us an understanding of the germ of truth which has always lurked back of the folklore stories, the legendary narratives of the work of black magicians, sorcerers, necromancers, of werewolves, vampires, men who had sold their souls to the devil, were accompanied by "familiars" who wrought the wishes, the desires, of those men's minds.

We had come to realize that there is a germ of truth behind every persisting human story—and that those men had been Legionaries of the Dark Star—agents of that force of Evil men have denominated in all ages the Devil, Sathanis, Yam.

And the girl who had written my present letter had been the means of proving to us that there is truth in such things—that there are forces operating throughout the universe always, affecting the lives, the souls of men and women, far transcending the every day forces mankind knows on the material plane.

So much the Master himself had explained, after stating that all Force was one—all phenomena a manifestation of it and that what seemed the paradox of some force of common recognition might well be no more than the parallel of it, operative on a higher plane.

For die Master was our friend, save that we did not so call him. It was Lotis, after her literal redemption from that "all deceit of unrighteousness for them that perish," which bound her, who had used the term. To James Bryce and myself he was, as always, Semi Dual, the strange, strong man, who dwelt in the tower of the Urania, where Jim and I had taken our office suite when we organized our private detective firm.

Like Otho Khan himself, he was a student of those Higher, and save by few unrecognized, Forces of Universal Creation, by which the World may one day be either redeemed or damned, except that he, devoting his life to their comprehension, sought ever to employ the knowledge so obtained for Good as opposed to Wrong.

Metaphysician is a term which possibly best describes Semi Dual, the man. And perhaps Lotis had not been far wrong in calling him the Master, since certainly he had obtained a wonderful mastery over what are commonly called "occult" things.

Only that Dual held nothing as "occult" in the commonly accepted meaning of the term. It was his philosophy that nothing was super or preternatural, because all Force was one, and being one was the enabling cause of any and everything. Manifestations of force of no matter what nature, were no more than a refraction of the element through an infinite number of Universal planes.

And as knowledge is said to be power, so, too, knowledge may well give to its possessor an impression of strength. Once in his presence, one knew that Semi Dual was strong. Strength lurked in his figure, tall, perfectly proportioned, in the splendid forehead, the slightly aquiline nose, the firm lips that could be so impassive in their repose. But more than that, it dwelt in his grey eyes, deep, steady, calm as strength may be—and beyond and transcending even that, it struck off from the man's entire personality, as a subtle, none the less real, though intangible thing.

All at once I felt myself glad that it was so, that Semi Dual was strong—that he was strong enough to have thrice defeated the ends of Otho Khan. Because now, if I rightly understood the letter I had just received, there could be small doubt that the Mongol legionary of the Dark Hosts of Evil was still busy with his schemes—that through him and his kind the world was faced by a danger more deadly than any natural cataclysm, any dread plague—a danger not only to the bodies of men but to their minds, and hence to their souls, since the mind was no more than the link that bound the body of the spirit to material things.

Truly it mirrored Lotis Garston's frame of mind. I recalled her marriage to the young engineer, after she had become again all woman, freed of the obsession placed upon her by the Mongol fiend. I recalled too that she had gone West with the announced intention of getting back to a closer harmony with normal life, in the love of her husband and the solitude of vast empty places, where he and she might be together.

I knew she had held in her mind some picture of a sort of spiritual recuperation from the dread ordeal through which she had passed. But fate—or the law of cause and effect, to which we give that name—would seem to have otherwise decreed. That law, be it understood, wastes little, and—that law is back of cosmic justice. Wherefore, Otho Khan, having fashioned a tool, had made also a boomerang.

Lotis and the Master. Suddenly it seemed to me as though from the very beginning the thing must have been ordained. Satan, the force of Evil, call it how one pleased, had raised up a danger in the person of Otho Khan, and since in nature there must ever be a counter balance, there were raised up also these two by whom his plans were fated to be overturned.

I got up. I left the office. I caught an elevator cage to the twentieth floor, left it, and mounted a stairway of marble and bronze. I came out into a garden—a thing of flowers and shrubs, with a tiny sun dial, a fountain—the setting Dual had constructed about the tower when he made it his abode.

I passed up a central path, across an inlaid plate that rang out a soft-toned chime of bells to announce my coming.

The door of the tower opened and showed me Semi's one companion in his seclusion—Henri, whom I had known for years.

"The Master—" it was so he, too, named the man I was come a seeking—"is within," he said and bowed.

I pushed the door before me and offered another room. It was long as the tower itself, lighted by two windows at one end, furnished in quiet, yet sumptuous fashion. And beside a great desk on the side next the door was seated a figure clad in robes of white, edged on cuff and hem with purple—a figure with a head, large, perfectly modeled, and a face, the lips of which, as they were lifted toward me, smiled. It was Semi Dual—the Master.

For a moment, he said no word. But his gray eyes held me. It was as though through them he thrust the fingers of his brain deep into my mind, as though he read it—drew out of it the troubled thoughts it contained. And then he spoke:

"Welcome my friend, who comes, as it has been ordained you would come from the beginning, at the appointed time. You bring me—"

CHAPTER II.
"C'est la Guerre."

I found myself a seat at the end of the desk, sinking into a chair I had occupied on more than one former occasion when I had come to this same room seeking help or advice from him in some matter that had proved too much for Bryce or myself, and watched. But I said nothing. Nor did Dual make any comment as his gray eyes scanned the clearly written lines.

Save for the slight whisper of the pages as he leafed them, there was no sound, if one excepts the slow rhythmic ticking of a huge clock in one comer. And its voice, numbering the span of the time we sat there in such fashion, seemed almost a part of the silence, so intimately had it come to be associated with the surroundings of Semi Dual, in my mind. It was no more than a part of the atmosphere about him, who was wont to speak of All Life as the "Wheel." And the Wheel was always turning with the same steady, unfaltering sweep in which the old dock drew the unresting circle of its hands.

Consciously I did not let my mind dwell upon it then, but now I know that as I sat watching the face of the reader, seeking to mark upon it some effect of Lotis Garston's letter, I heard too the slow tick-tock, tick-tock, like the footfalls of some stolid marcher down the Path of Time.

Then Semi bunched the pages of the letter together and lifted his face, turning his eyes upon me. They were calm, steady, direct in their regard, those eyes, and yet—that was only on the surface. And—under it—I became conscious as I looked back into their depths, of a something, a spark of meaning, a subtle, unnameable something, not unlike the effect of a rift between two somber curtains back of which a clear light burned. In such fashion an undismayed spirit may look out of the eyes of a man or a woman at times.

Some way it thrilled me, set me a-tingle. It lifted me up, seemed to strengthen me in some undreamed of way, even while it hinted of things I did not understand, or if at all, only vaguely. And yet—I found it forcing, as it were, the impulse for the framing of certain words from my mind:

"War, yes." Dual returned. "War—the Eternal conflict between Good and Evil, my friend—between Right and Wrong—which never ceases nor will while the Wheel of material creation goes round—in which Evil is forever rising to confront the course of those on the Path of Advancement, no matter how many times it is overthrown and cast down. How is it Revelations puts it? 'And there was war in heaven: Michael and His angels going forth to war with the dragon; and the dragon warred and his angels; and they prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast down, the old serpent, he that is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world; he was cast down and his angels were cast down with him.'"

"Satan, Lucifer." Dual inclined his head. "Of whom Ezekiel says: 'How art thou fallen from heaven O Day Star, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, that didst lay low the nations!—Thou wast the anointed cherub—thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. Thou was perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till unrighteousness was found in thee—and thou saidst in thy heart I will ascend into heaven; I will exalt my throne above the stars of God—I will ascend above the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.'

"Satan, my friend, the Spirit of Evil, which seeks ever to exalt itself above the All Good—the Spirit of Evil come upon the World—the evil thing that lurks in the breast of every child of man from the hour of its birth until death closes its eyes, between which and the good involved equally with it there is warfare never ceasing—since as it is below so is it above, and the struggle in the heart of man on Earth becomes the finite expression of that warfare between the All Good and the Supreme Evil in an Infinite Universe."

For a moment as he paused I found my brain filled with those whirling fancies of unclean intelligences, of obsessions, possessions—those fragments of folk tales and legendary lore which had crept into it at times ever since Lotis Popoff as she was then had come through the night of this same room to compass his death, and then:

"Let us say Element rather," he answered slowly. "For who may know God, or who the opposing degree of the Scale of Creation, since God being Spirit and Light, the opposite must be of a material nature, equally past the comprehension of the finite mind, the thing in or of the Dark Star, at which astronomers today are beginning to guess faintly—which reflects not light, but absorbs it, destroys it like some dread and unthinkably absorbent sponge."

"The junk heap, the sink, the stinking cesspool of the World—the Dark Star involving into itself, Gordon my friend, all within its magnetic plane—the disintegrating point of lost souls—toward which once the life of the material body ceases—they being still material must be inevitably drawn—save the spirit and the soul be one. The Spirit being of God, returns again to Him, but the soul it has left is drawn into the maw of the Destroyer and is as though it had never been."

"Yes," he said with no least hesitation. "Its existence has been known to the Sheiks el Djebel—the leaders of the Cult of Devil Worshipers for years. It is upon its existence that their cult is reared. Hence they cry on Erlik the Prince of the Dark Star, the Destroyer of Souls, and in so crying speak truth. Well are they called necromancers, for are they not dead, though physically living, who have broken the tie that binds the Spirit to the Soul?"

"Dead save in the material existence," said Semi Dual. "They are become as a band of ghouls."

"And we're opposing things like that—a little less than human?" I broke out, staring at him. "Good God, Semi—"

"Steady my friend," he said. "This matter is as deep, as all embracing as the All in All itself. None may understand it save in degrees. Man before the Eternal Mystery and Purpose of Creation stands a pygmy, gazing upon the billowing curtains that reach into the infinitude above him, veiling the Plan of Eternity from his eyes. Yet since we presuppose the Living Dead, so too may we assume the Dead Alive. The gne is not only the parallel but the paradox of the other—even as Good and Evil are but manifestations of the One Force of Existence, one manifestation of which we call life. And the key to the Mystery of Good and Evil lies in the manner in which that Force is used.

"Man is a free moral agent in as much as he may choose. Hence is it said truly that he who loses himself shall find all else, since the path of attainment lies in self-forgetting, and the opposite way consists mainly in the polarization of the same individual powerseon the plane of Self. Thus does the Deceiver betray his disciples, since in seeming to promise all things, he who seeks in such fashion to gain them is destroyed. Do you not see wherein the paradox is readily harmonized?"

I nodded. "It all depends on how the Force of Creation which is One Force is used."

"Briefly, yes. Force—akasa, call it what you will, is one. It may be used thisly or thusly, for right or for wrong. Yet he who wrongfully employs it, is in its wrong employment damned. As for example, an explosive charge which may, rightly used, expend its power toward the advancement of human ends, or improperly handled destroy the handler. Yet is the explosive charge the same in both cases and holds in itself nothing of either right or wrong. So with the akasa—the Universal force which permeates all universal things, is of them and in them—the stuff of which their substance is formed. If it be polarized, held to a material level wholly, must it not meet a material end?"

"I suppose so," I agreed. Frankly the discussion was getting rather beyond my depth. "What gets me," I went on, "is why the Omniscience which created the Universe ever permitted Evil in the first place."

Dual smiled slightly. "It has 'got' many a man beside yourself, my friend. But—can you have a line with only one end, or a circle without a circumference? Hold fast to the primal truth, that Good and Evil are one from the beginning. What is a day save man's effort to measure Time? Or what is Time save the measure of Eternity itself within man's span? Hence is Good or Evil no more than a measure of man's employment of that Force of which he is both a product and a part?

"For look you, Gordon, there is one thing which never dies, and that thing is life. Life is. It is the vibration between the ions of akasa, as science today is beginning to realize. And an ion is no more, than a droplet out of the ocean from which all manifest created forms are made.

"Death as we know it, then, consists in no more than the withdrawal from the body ions of that vibratory rate by which its so called life was maintained, a process which usually extends through several days—as witness scientific experiment within the last score of years, in the grafting upon living subjects in need of such procedure, of skin taken from the amputated arms or limbs of others compelled through accident to lose them, and the success of the endeavor—the taking hold, the recuperation of the life in the bits of skin and their growth, even though the member from which they were obtained was in the broadest sense of the term, past any question dead."

I sat up sharply. His last words woke a parallel in my mind. It seemed to me on the instant as though so be was explaining his use of the words "Dead Alive" in reference to the unclean brotherhood to whom Otho Khan and others like him belonged.

"Those men—" I said sharply. "You mean they are individuals out of whom the life is being drawn slowly?"

He smiled again faintly. "Out of whom the Light of the Spirit is being slowly expelled through their own improper use of—by reason of their prostitution of their own involved Divine Essence, if one may so employ the term—their perversion of their individual powers to improper ends. Death to such a one means that his soul goes into the Oblivion of Nothingness and his body to the worms.

"It is the creed of those of the Silent Towers—that Life is of God and returns to Him—and the Life being indrawn to its Source, what but the material remains. Hence with them Life and its living embraces all of Advantage, of Enjoyment, of Power, which may be gained."

"What of Lotis's letter?" I queried as he paused. "Do you think Otho Khan is really doing what she seems to think—that those people she found there are his agents?"

"I think," he said, "that Otho Khan, the Mongol, Sheik el Djebel, came to this country for a purpose he has not yet attained."

Dual inclined his head. "In my estimation—and apparently in hers—and remember that, as she herself says, he taught her many things. Remember, also, that in our first acquaintance with her, I very carefully set up her astrological figure—and that even though defeated in his efforts, he suffered no more than a repulse."

"You mean there is something in her horoscope to indicate trouble at the present?" I said. I knew astrology was one of the things in which he sincerely believed—and I had seen him prove the correctness of his deductions derived from it on many an occasion. "Was that what you meant when I came up here in saying I came at the appointed time?"

"Practically," he assented. "At least I knew that even though she went West with the intent of recuperating in a measure from the experience she had been through, her peril was not at an end. Yet I deemed she would gain strength more rapidly in the love and companionship of her husband, and I have maintained a watch upon my figures of her astral chart ever since. Moreover, I have had a letter from Garston himself?'

He opened a drawer of his desk and placed in my hand an envelope bearing the same postmark as that I had carried to him.

I drew out the single sheet it contained and read it with a quickened attention:

Once more as it seems it is to you who have held so large a part in the destiny of myself and wife, that I must turn.

As you know when we came out here we fancied that Lotis's inheritance was practically an undeveloped tract of land. We found it fairly well populated with a polyglot population of various races, the individual tenants operating small ranches or farms. So far as I can learn these people are merely "squatters" with no right save that of tenure, but their presence seems to have excited a belief on the part of my wife that they are in reality agents or something like that of Otho Khan.

After her experience with that human fiend, I can hardly blame her no matter how far fetched the notion may seem. But, frankly, I'm wondering if her terrible ordeal has not left some morbid fancies still persistent in her mind.

I'm asking you for any advi ce you may give in regard to the situation so far as Lotis is concerned, and I'm thanking you for it in advance, as I know it will be forthcoming.

"His anxiety is but natural," he returned. "And I wrote him to disabuse his own mind of the thought that his wife was mentally unbalanced. If you will note, his letter was written before yours, and since posting my reply I have, as Lotis herself would probably put it, felt the fingers of her mind."

"Then," I said urged by an eagerness I did not try to conceal, "something has happened since she wrote me. She sent you a telepathic message?"

"In the days when we wrested her from the clutches of the Mongol," he said slowly, "there grew up a sympathetic quality between the ions of her brain and mine. Thought projection was something Otho Khan taught her."

"And?" I prompted. Weird as the conversation was coming to seem, I no longer balked the ability of those who had developed the power to control the thought waves of die brain as more than a step beyond the wireless.

"She too knows it is war," Dual returned. "Young though she is in years, yet have the experiences through which she has passed being turned to a good advantage made her exceedingly strong. She is become as a shining blade tempered in the flame."

"She has been tempted by the Devil," he made answer. "She has been taken up into the high places and shown the kingdoms of the World."

The answer was cryptic. I did not try to understand. I simply stared back into Dual's inscrutable face and asked another question.

"In danger, yes," he said. "Yet in a way is her position strong. For forewarned of danger, she is thrice armed against any of the agents of Otho Khan, and strong in her knowledge is she able to defend herself before their machinations. At present her main concern is for the overthrow of his schemes and the welfare of Garston."

"Aye. He is her husband, and as you say, he does not as yet understand. Therein is one of her weaknesses—perhaps the greatest. Her destiny has become joined with his. Think you they will fail to strike at her if they may, through him?"

I took a long breath. It was a damnable thought, but—it was one I could not gainsay. I got up and paced across the room and back.

"Then what are we going to do?" I demanded. "Are we going to sit here and let her fight it out alone, or are we going out there?"

"Patience," said my friend. "We shall do what we shall do at the appointed time. Do you recall how Otto Khan's agent, Georges Pitrininski, at the time of his apprehension, cried out that he had felt the fingers of her intelligence thrust into his brain—or the night on which before that she sought so to learn Otho Khan's plan?" I nodded.

Dual went on. "Wherefore because of the knowledge she is possessed of, and having reached my intelligence with hers inside the past twenty-four hours, she, who has now become a watcher, as one on guard, will, should the need arise, be able to equally reach me again."

"Patience, and yet patience. That patience inspired of the knowledge that before the sincere cry of a soul demanding its divine right of advancement, not even the ramparts of Gog and Magog, or all the Sheiks el Djebel who have ever been, may stand, nay nor yet the old Dragon, who, seeking to exalt himself, was himself overthrown."

I gave it up. He had fallen into one of the moods in which he spoke in symbolic fashion, not being ready to speak in a more explicit manner concerning a thing. But he had said it was to be war, and I had no longer any doubt that we would be in it.

CHAPTER III.
Norman Haddon, D.J.

WE were facing war then—war with Otho Khan. On this sunshiny day, in the midst of a modern city, the thing seemed wild, beyond all imagining, like the figment of some bizarrely distorted dream. And even while I sat there, the forces of Evil were gathering together like the banking clouds of a storm—and the unclean minds of the Sheik el Djebel, as Semi Dual had called him, and his fellows were reaching out once more in their endeavor to affect the minds of their fellow men—to the end that all sanity, all decency, all—all the world of man as I now knew it, might be overthrown—toward the production of turmoil, strife, discord of every nature, to rebellion, revolution, out of die reek of which the Worshipers of Erlik were to rise in the end Supreme.

I buzzed for Bryce. There was a little alleyway between his private quarters and mine through which we might pass back and forth without entering the outer office. And it suddenly occurred to me that he should be acquainted with the latest developments in a matter into which one or both of us seemed now inevitably fated to be drawn.

He whistled at mention of Loris's letter and its contents, pursed out his stubby brown mustache and sat with his heavy set figure leaning a trifle forward, his elbows on the arm of his chair until I was done.

"Otto the Devil," he said then, nodding. It was the way he had come in the days past to speak of Otho Khan. "But what's eatin' you, Gordon? Dual's been keepin' tabs on that jasper accordin' to his own say so right along. You know how he does it with them astrological figures of his—them cart wheels an' curlimecues an' signs, what are enough to drive an average man off his mind. An' he says Loris has got to be a watcher, don't he—that she's on guard, an' that he'll know it any rime it's necessary for us to be buttin' in?"

"He does," I agreed, somewhat surprised at the way Jim took it, even though I knew his faith in Dual and his strange use of Nature's forces was as great as mine. "But the idea of that girl being out there in the midst of those fiends Otho seems to have planted, any one of whom would be ready to kill her at a word from his master, sort of gets me, Jim."

He nodded. "Well yes. An' it would get me too if she was an ordinary sort of woman, but as it is she's a bad proposition for any of them sub-devils to tackle, the way I see it, if you get what I mean. Otto taught her a darned sight too much for his own good, seem' as how she's seen fit to break with him."

He paused and went on again quickly: "I bet that's what Semi meant by sayin' she'd been tempted by th' Devil since she wrote that letter. I bet he meant Otto th' Devil, an' that yellow guy has been tryin' to get her to flop over to his side again."

The door of my den was pushed open and Danny Quinn, the red-headed youngster who served the firm of Glace & Bryce in the capacity Of office boy, entered.

"He's back again," he announced, placing a bit of engraved cardboard in my hand, "an' he wants to see both you an' Mr. Jim."

The words called a picture to my mind. It was that of a olender, impeccably dad, almost foppish appearing person, one who might well have been judged at first glance a member of that type of masculinity commonly known as "a man about town"—a sort of human lily who neither toiled nor spun. He had been to our office before, even as Dan's declaration had served to indicate, and, now to quote the observant youth still further, he was "back."

I frowned. Some way his coming seemed more than a mere coincidence. Because Norman Haddon was a living instance of the oft-repeated allegation that things are not always what they seem. Back of his apings, his mannerisms, his at times inane words and actions, there lurked, as I knew, a very different man from what they might lead one, were indeed meant to lead one, to suppose. And that man was one of an indefatigable purpose, an unfaltering persistence, an unshakable nerve.

Norman Haddon, in "short, was a D. J. man. He was an agent of the Department of Justice—one of the eyes, the ears, by which the safety of the social body and the nation was bulwarked and served. Wherefore what mankind in the rough knew as Norman Haddon was, in so far as it served his and the Department's ends, no more than a cleverly maintained disguise.

On the occasion of his former call, he had been engaged in the running down of a most remarkable band of dealers in illicit drugs. Now as I passed his card across to my partner, I asked myself what his present visit might portend.

"Holy Smoke!" Bryce exploded and lifted his eyes from the card to mine. They were alert, somewhat narrowed of lid, lighted by unvoiced conjecture.

"If you ain't goin' to see him I better go tell him. He's standin' out there waitin'. He's so dolled up I guess he's afraid to sit down in his clothes," Danny suggested.

"That will do, Daniel," I said. He was a character who, presuming on both Jim's and my own liking for him, rather did and said what he pleased. "Show Mr. Haddon in."

Then as he withdrew, I glanced again at Bryce and found him fumbling in a pocket for a cigar without shifting his glance from the door through which Haddon must enter. There was an odd expectancy on his face that seemed in some way to foreshadow future things.

"Morning, you chaps," he greeted, smiling. As always he was debonair, groomed to the last degree of fashion, entirely at his ease. There was a tiny blue flower in his buttonhole, I remember, and he was twirling a light and flexible stick, which he shifted in order to grip Jim's hand and mine, before he sank with an effect of an actually physical lassitude, into a chair.

"Hello, Haddon. What brings you here?" Bryce inquired with the bludgeon bluntness he had developed what time he was an Inspector of Police, and had never discarded.

"Yes," I followed up; "are you a bird of passage merely or a falcon with an eye upon the quarry?"

"Both." Haddon waved a slender, perfectly manicured hand, from which he was stripping a glove. "Both—always and ever, old dear. Here, there, everywhere, I wander. I never tarry. I'm a plaything of fate, a creature of circumstance. Eh, what?"

"Yes, and a darned dangerous plaything too," Bryce retorted. "However, seem' that you've lit for the present, what besides that dicer of yours was you carryin' on your mind when you busted in here?"

Norman Haddon smiled faintly. "Direct as ever. Eh, Bryce, old thing? Well, no matter. A straight line—and so forth, as we used to say at school. Q. E. D. Georges Pitrininski was adjudged criminally insane, I hear."

Georges Pitrininski! I felt my every nerve stiffen. It wasn't an hour since Semi Dual had named the same man to me, and now here was Haddon—a federal agent

"Georges Pitrininski," Jim erupted. "Haddon, cut out the pink tea chatter and get down to tacks. Both Glace and I know you ain't half as big a fool as you sound or look. What about Pitrininski's bein' found bughouse?"

"And the chap's talk concerning—wasn't it the Prince of Qiaos, he called him—some sort of Spirit of Evil with a group of human worshipers and emissaries and all that sort of thing, bent on overturning all law and order, was enough to justify the verdict?" Haddon paused on a rising inflection.

"You'd think so, wouldn't you?" Jim grunted. "But that's the trouble. I don't know whether it was or not."

"Eh?" said Haddon sharply, and then more slowly. "You aren't going in for demonism—black magic—that sort of thing; are you, Bryce?"

"Look here," I interposed before Jim could answer. "Haddon—what is it you want?"

"About him and everything else connected with his apprehension, particularly the last—those ravings of his on which the insanity verdict was based, for example."

He nodded. "Of course. You're right. There were things in the course of his trial that led the Department to think some of it might be based on an element of truth—a sort of distorted expression of actual fact. So—well, they shot me out on the matter. I knew you boys were mixed up in his apprehension."

"We were," I agreed; "also Semi Dual and Lotis Popoff and her fiancé, Edward Garston."

"Lotis Popoff," he repeated. "That's the girl Pitrininski insisted on calling 'The Traitress'?"

I asked a question: "You're conversant with the facts brought out in the trial, aren't you?"

"Yes. I was furnished a transcript and I've read it. It's weird, to say the least"

"Suppose," I said as he paused, "that I tell you the story as Bryce and I know it, and that after that you ask us what you please."

"Righto!" he assented. "But while we're on the subject of the trial, there is one more question I should like to ask."

"In naming Lotis Popoff the 'Traitress', Pitrininski actually called her 'the Traitress to the Master.'"

"Otto Kahn or Otho Khan, according to how you like it. He spells it one way in this country and the other in his. He's a Mongol, really."

"Mongol—you mean a Tartar?" I noted the spandrils of Haddon's cleanly chiseled nostrils quiver.

Jim chuckled. "Correct. He's a Tartar all right. Go ahead, Gordon—shoot—give him both barrels."

Haddon nodded. His debonair air had departed. As I began my story I noted that his lips were a trifle compressed and that there were little lines of tension radiating outward from the comers of his eyes. Yet he leaned back in his chair with his stick across his knees and heard me through without once bringing me to a pause.

And then he sat up. "Glace," he said, "that is the most remarkable narrative I have ever heard. Of course I've both heard and read stories dealing with devil worship, necromancy, sorcery, whatever you like, but I thought that sort of thing had gone out of vogue with the Salem witches in this country at least."

"You can think what you please," Jim cut in, "but on the level, Haddon, somebody did something to Popoff's kid. They made her think she'd sold her soul to the devil until Dual got her to thinking the other way about, and then—well, she turned against him and she took a big part in getting Pitrininski into your people's hands."

"I'm not doubting, as it happens," Haddon replied, and his voice was suddenly tense. "I know both of you and I know Dual, and as it happens a lot of this checks out We've known of this Otto Kahn party for—some time—we've even known he wasn't a German no matter how he spells his name—but we've known of him as the head of the Society for Spiritistic Research—an organization never exceedingly active in any public sense in so far as we have been able to learn since it was organized—and, see here! About this tract of land in the Southwest? You know we got the gang that was running that opium game here the last time I saw you, but we never found out where they got their drugs. Is it possible the two things hook up; that those folks down there, no matter whether they're doing what the woman thinks or not, were mixed up in the matter? They're close to the border, and she says there are Mexicans among them. Could they have been smuggling the stuff across?"

I stared. I heard Jim catch his breath. Here was a new angle of the matter, a new thread, in the web Otho Khan and his fellows were spinning—perhaps.

"My aunt, yes," Bryce broke out in a tone of excitement. "Haddon, I reckon you've hit it—or a part of it, at least."

"Let us revert to Pitrininski's allusion to a Prince of Chaos," I suggested. "The real aim—toward which all other things are but steps in attaining the final object—is the overthrow of all constituted law and order, the upheaval of the social fabric, the production of a literal state of chaos among the human race, upon which they may prey to the acquirement of wealth and an overwhelming power; the bestializing, the brutalizing of mankind; the collapse of our present day civilization; a materializing of all impulse; a return to savagery; a substitution of might for right, of force for justice, of superstition for religion, of unsanctity, lust, rapine, for spiritual uplift, chastity, legitimate competition."

For a moment Haddon made no comment and then he said slowly, "Good God!" and caught his breath. "This Popoff girl—once she regained her normal balance—what sort of a woman is she, Glace? Can you trust her?"

"I think," I returned, "that her letter should answer that. She knows, Haddon. She was Otho Khan's mental slave. I think the mere fact that she writes as she does is sufficient proof that she believes what she says to be the truth."

"And she thinks that Khan and his associates are actually possessed of supernatural powers?"

"That they possess the ability to employ forces little understood by the mass of mankind, by means of which they plan to bring about their own selfish ends through influencing and swaying the minds of the masses."

"Forces little understood," he repeated. "A sort of general hypnotism, do you mean?"

"Hardly. More of a general telepathic influence, as I understand it," I said. "She wrote that it was as though he were building himself an artificial brain. Get this straight, Haddon. If all creative manifestations are manifestations of one force, then thought is a force and the concentrated thought not of one man alone, but of many may well produce the effect toward which it is aimed. Look at the wave of spiritualism sweeping the world to-day. Are we to believe what it setons or something else—the effect of spirits that have passed on—or—the work of intentionally deceptive intelligence, influencing gullible minds?"

"I don't know what I mean exactly," I confessed, "except that I do believe that there is a dreadful danger, of which spiritualism is a part, to-day threatening not only the bodily, but the mental welfare of mankind and that men like Otho Khan—men who have foresworn all that is high or noble; men to whom self is God; who have literally polarized themselves on the plane of selfish, material advantage—are behind it, and that unless something is done to forestall them, they are going to drag mankind down to its undoing. They're—well, I don't know what to call them unless vampires of the race."

"Yes, they're men," I admitted. "But they've lost something." I was finding it hard to express myself.

"Yes. The thing that makes them human. They're not. They're inhuman. They look like men or women, but—they've actually foredoomed their own souls."

"Eh?" He put up a finger and ran it about inside his collar. "You really believe that, Glace?"

I inclined my head. "I can't help it after what I saw in this Pitrininski matter."

He shifted his glance to Bryce. All at once he seemed vastly, even if vaguely, shaken.

And Jim answered his silent question. "I got to. I'm like Gordon. After what I seen I got to admit there's more in this devil matter than just a thing to help support th' church."

"And the girl," Haddon said slowly. "Your friend Dual believes her experience left her mentally balanced?"

"She's sane," I told him, "whether Pitrininski is or not. She is possibly saner than you or I or the average man or woman, because she knows more. Khan taught her, and die is able to employ the same forces he is accustomed to use."

"Well, I don't know," said Bryce. "You don't want to forget those forces can be used two ways, an' what is bad to good, may be pretty darned good to worse. To my way of thinking, she's come clean. She's stumbled onto this layout of Otto's and wised us up about it."

"By Jove, yes," Haddon nodded. "See here, there's another word keeps coming up in Pitrininski's testimony. Who or what is Erlik?"

I gave him all I really knew in one sentence: "The vice-regent of Satan, Prince of Darkness on earth, sometimes known as the Spider, the Devourer of Souls."

CHAPTER IV.
A Call For Help.

SNAP! Haddon's stick broke in two in his hands. He looked down, lifted his eyes in an almost apologetic fashion, and cast the fragments aside. Then he grimaced. The action seemed to give him back his momentarily lost control.

"At that rate, and considering what you've told me, this Otho Khan and his gang are planning to pry the lid off of hell," he drawled.

"And in view of the fact that my mission is to see that the lid stays on, that lets me into the thing, I guess. It would appear that I came to the right market when I started after information."

He tilted back his head and stared at the ceiling, and brought his eyes down again at the sound of a staccato buzz.

I got up. Startled as it left me, I recognized the sound for what it was. There was a little telephone-box on the wall of my room, facing the desk—one end of a private line that led from Dual's quarters. I reached for the receiver and got it off the hook.

Semi's words came back to me distinctly. "If Mr. Haddon desires to see me, Gordon, suppose you bring him up."

"Very well," I agreed, and turned back from the phone with a nervous sort of laugh. The thing was uncanny—as little to be expected in the ordinary sense as everything else. And yet it was not even surprising if one knew Semi Dual, if one believed in the eery sort of power I knew from past experiences to be his.

Haddon had been sitting here for an hour discussing the matter closer to Semi's interest, as I knew at this time, than anything else—and whether he had mentioned it earlier or not, he had been thinking of visiting Dual of course. As a result Semi had simply picked up his thought wave, read it, and acted in that calmly assured .way that sometimes left one almost gating, "The man on the roof quite evidently agrees with you," I announced. "He suggests that we call upon him."

"Eh?" Haddon got up smiling. "Well—that's like him, by Jove. He's so much, too much, for me to comprehend rightly, Mr. Glace, that I'm hoping he will prove too much for the Tartar also. More telepathy, I suppose—his knowing of my presence."

"In so far as either Bryce or I are concerned," I said, as we all went out to catch an up-going cage.

But it was something more than telepathy, as Dual's first remark, after we were inside the tower, and had exchanged the ordinary greetings, showed.

Your presence, Mr. Haddon, is but another manifestation of the way in which the One Inscrutable moves. His purposes are as measured in their courses as the sweep of the stars and as little swayed. Hence, it has been without surprise that I have felt the thoughts you have directed toward me, beating against my brain with a gradually increasing force, the past two days."

Haddon glanced at Bryce and me as he answered. "Quite so, Mr. Dual. Naturally, I've been thinking of coming here for an interview ever since I was asked to investigate what might lie back of the Pitrininski case. But you say you were not surprised. Am I to assume that you knew of my coming in advance?"

"Of yours, no—not in the individual sense, that is," Dual said. "But—of a force raised up to oppose Evil purpose, yes. For since it is written that Evil may not triumph in the eventual end of things, it was time that such a force should be so raised. And since this evil is aimed largely at the nation of which you are an agent, it was not hard to assume that it would take the form of some step on the part of the nation itself, through an agent or some number of the agents by which that nation is served. You know my methods of arriving at my conclusions, Mr. Haddon—"

"Yes. That being the case I shall say merely that I have not ceased their study as applying to this matter since Lotis Garston went West with her husband, to what she hoped was a physical and spiritual recuperation from the ordeal through which she had passed."

Haddon nodded. "What she hoped," he repeated. "You mean you knew that hope was false."

"In so far as an enduring peace was concerned." Dual inclined his head. "Otho Khan, in making her what she was when first I knew her, created a peril to himself. There can be no peace between them while one of them remains alive."

"In a physical danger, yes, but a danger of which she is fully aware—against which she is able to personally defend herself. Her position is peculiar in its strength. Mr. Haddon, I have already said that the Inscrutable moves in a mysterious way to bring about his ends. In the midst of Otho Khan's people, she, whose destruction he sought to accomplish with my own, is unassailable by them because of the knowledge he taught her.

"Wherefore, her removal from the path of his schemes may entail Otho Khan's own presence, and if so—if in the end he come against her in person, who do you think will triumph—she, who being freed from the power he once held above her, has gone to her husband, has found her soul figuratively at least fused with his, and in that fusing has become the Guardian Priestess of the Flame of Life itself, or he, who through the perversion of the spark of life within him, has so dimmed its light that it is become no more than the charring wick of a candle gone out?"

Semi asked the question and paused. There followed a little silence. But I thrilled some way to the suggestion of his words; the hint they contained of material events, caught in a mesh of symbolic phrases; of an impending duel—a strange, indescribable sort of duel, in which the weapons were to be the powers of the human soul itself; a life-and-death struggle; a supreme and final test between the Mongol sorcerer and the girl—the child he had taken and sought to make a tool to his purpose, thereby in the final equation succeeding in making her what she now was.

I felt Jim's eyes upon me and knew he, too, understood all Semi's question embraced.

"Quite so," Haddon assented and cleared his throat. "By Jove! She's married to Garston, and she'll fight not only for herself, but him. And about that land—" He explained his suspicions as to the possible smuggling of drugs across the border.

"Quite possible, Mr. Haddon," Dual said at the end. "Otho Khan and his associates aim at the demoralization of the social fabric, and there is no more subtle debauchery of both mind and body than the debauchery of drugs. It is possible that the local sale which you, with myself, were instrumental in curtailing, was supplied in some such manner."

Haddon nodded. He took a deep breath. "That's enough. I'm going down there," he declared. "If you'll supply me with the name of the nearest station I'll take a look into this. And I say—if you can suggest some way in which I can be of service to that young Woman I'll be glad. Anyway, I'll put men on this Khan person, and if he takes a notion to go out there, well know when he makes the move. If these devils are going to strike at her—"

"Eh?" The Department of Justice man appeared to tense in all his slender length. "You mean you've some definite word?"

For a single instant Dual appeared to hesitate and then he answered, "Since my friend Glace brought me her letter she has appealed to me for aid."

"Appealed?" Haddon caught up his meaning quickly. "Then you've had a message or something. She's wired you. I say, sir—"

"In person—" Haddon parroted once more while I felt my heart skip a beat and heard Bryce catch his breath in a rasping whisper.

And Dual went on, "The woman herself, Mr. Haddon, her intelligence, not her body—here in this room. There are means whereby the intelligence may project itself to a distance if the need requires. I mention it now only because of the reason that in the further course of this matter you may again be brought face to face with some such thing—because in this matter we are dealing, and shall deal, with phenomena somewhat above the every-day commonly accepted plane. That Lotis Garston has been present within this room, despite the fact that her body was lying in a frame structure somewhere east of the Rio Grande; that she asked for and was promised my support and assistance in the struggle now beginning, is something I can do no more than assert and ask you to believe."

Haddon stared. As Semi paused his expression was that of a man in a daze. His eyes were wide both of lid and pupil, and I had the impression that his jaw sagged a trifle, just before he pulled himself up sharply and laughed. "You don't need to do any more than that, Mr. Dual. Your assertion is enough, though the Lord knows this is getting beyond my depths."

And suddenly Jim broke out in a question. "If you promised her help, does that mean we're going out there?"

Dual turned his glance upon him. He smiled slightly. "You and Gordon, my friend, if you desire."

"If!" Jim sat up and puffed out his mustache. "If—say, I'm Irish, and I believe in banshees and th' little people, an' I never slough a fight even if I have to cross dubs with th' old Nick himself. I'm enlistin' for th' war right now. When do we start?"

"On the first through train in the morning," Semi told him. "Henri will arrange for die tickets."

It was all cut and dried, it seemed—all settled. I shrugged my shoulders and got up. I didn't know just what had happened since I had been up here before, but I fancied it must have been something like the events of the night when Connie, my wife, had sat beside Lotis's body, from which all consciousness seemed to have departed; the night before Georges Pitrininski was taken, when the girl who had married Edward Garston had sought to leant the plans of the Mongol we were fighting. Whatever it was, it had seemingly been enough.

"At that rate," I said, "Jim and I had better get back to the office and arrange to leave it and then get ready for the trip."

"Five, yes, Mr. Bryce, I think. Mr. Haddon, shall we speak more at length concerning this matter?"

We returned to our office and plunged into a rather frenzied consultation with Miss Newell, our confidential secretary and clerk. In substance our directions were simply to refuse all new business until such time as we should return from this most amazing trip.

It was poor business policy, of course, and I could see that Nellie was puzzled, but as a matter of fact, neither Jim nor I had any intention of remaining behind. He had already announced his intention of going, and I was resolved that I wouldn't be left.

"I suppose he's taking Henri, too," Jim remarked as we finally put on our hats and left the office and were waiting for a cage. "Him an' you an' me an' Haddon makes four—an' th' Frenchman would make five."

"Quite likely," I returned without any teal feeling of interest in the matter. "Why not?"

"Oh, no reason, I guess," Jim grunted, and made no further comment until we were in the street. Then, "See you at th' train," he advised, and swung off in the sidewalk traffic toward his rooms.

I caught a car and rode out to my home, arriving there something before five o'clock.

She was standing in the middle of the floor and it struck me there was something tense in her posture, and that her face was unwontedly white; that her blue eyes were wide and staring, like those of one suddenly wakened. The thought was helped out by a tumbled pillow and a soft slumber robe, trailing down from the living-room couch.

"You don't know—" I began, and took a step toward her. "See here, Connie, what's the matter?"

"Yes," I nodded. "I've got to pack. Dual and I are going on a trip in the morning."

"Dual!" she cried, and was upon me in a flash, her fingers gripping my arm. "Gordon—wait—where are you going with him? Quick!"

"Why—I—don't know the exact locality," I replied nervously. "But it's some place down Southwest, near the border."

For a moment she said nothing, and then in little more than a whisper, "It's about Lotis—isn't it, Gordon?"

"Why—yes," I actually stammered. "As it happens it is, but how did you know? See here, Connie—"

"I know," she said again in almost inaudible fashion. "She's been here. She told me. I wasn't asleep. I didn't dream it. I've been trying for the past two hours to make up my mind whether it was a dream or not—but it wasn't. It—it was something like that night in the tower."

"What was?" I caught hold of her by the shoulders. "Connie—what are you talking about? Good God!"

"Lotis," she said, her eyes still wide and staring. "Gordon, she came here this afternoon. I had laid down to take a nap and I was just dropping off; all at once I saw her as plainly as I ever saw her in my life. It wasn't like anything imagined. I saw her as plainly as if she had been before me in the flesh. She came in and stood beside me there on the couch, and I sat up and she told me that she was in trouble; that she was afraid for her husband's life; such a strange, strange tale about things out there on that land her father left her; about the place being foil of Otho Khan's people and how he was planning to wreck the world; that he had offered to make her Queen of the. Earth if she would work with, instead of against, him, and how she had refused and how that meant war between them.

"Then she told me how the Master—you know that's what she always called Semi Dual—had promised to help her and how she was going back to fight Otho Khan until either he or she was destroyed, only, and she smiled in such a terrible way, Gordon, she said she thought that before it was ended Erlik would certainly seize upon Otho's soul. Then she said such a strange thing. She said 'Aie—Otho Khan, the Tartar tool of the devil, shall not grease his toug with the blood of Garston or Garston's child.' She said it, Gordon; she said it just like that. What do you think she meant?"

"Nor I," Connie went on. "But she said it, and I never heard the word 'toug' before in all my life. I don't know what it means. But I heard her say it, standing there beside my couch while I sat upon it, just as I found myself sitting bolt upright after she left. And now you come and tell me you are going to her with Mr. Dual."

I nodded again. I felt myself shaken, caught up, whirled around in the grip of unnameable forces, unnameable things, caught and swept on in an irresistible current. Lotis had been here. I no longer doubted. She had come after she had seen Dual, and left in Connie's memory the sound of a meaningless word. She had come here, to my wife, who had fought the fight with us in the tower—that fight wherein we had wrested Lotis from Otho Khan's unclean control and given her-back to the normal world of men and women. And no matter how, by means of what power she had done it, what Connie had heard and seen had been no dream. It had been some handling of that force, that undreamed energy which seemed to have seized upon us all as pawns to the end of its purpose.

And suddenly she tore loose from me, drew back a step and flung up her arms. She tilted back her head.

"The government man! A government agent. It is proof, Gordon! Proof as much as that word she used. They plan to wreck the nation, the world; to seize on the minds of men and destroy them, and the government is moving. I am going with you!" she cried.

Of what use, I asked myself, were words. Connie's posture, her expression, her words in their intonation, were exalted, and already she had passed with us all, save Haddon, through this selfsame fire. She had been tested, tried, and—

All at once it seemed to me that I saw clearly why Dual had set the number of the morrow's reservations for our party at five. I looked into my wife's purpose-widened eyes and wondered if Lotis had really told him she was coming to Connie before she left him.

CHAPTER V.
The Shroud.

OF the trip there is little to record. We met—Jim, Semi Dual, and Haddon—at the station; and the government agent was introduced to Connie, to whom Semi bowed with no slightest indication of surprise.

Indeed, once I had seen the reservations I became convinced that he had expected her as fully as he had myself. They were compartments, one for Connie and me, one for him, and one for Haddon and Bryce. It was an ideal arrangement whereby we could be alone whenever we wished and indulge in conversation. And as a matter of fact, talk was about all we did as we rushed day after day into the West. We talked about any and everything imaginable on earth.

Haddon indeed spent a great deal of time with Semi. He seemed much as ever perfectly groomed, suave, smiling. And yet it came to me that he was being very carefully coached for his part in our task. For the rest, I am sure there was nothing about our party which could possibly have even remotely hinted what that task was—that we were actually five people traveling with what speed we might toward a destination wherein we were destined to combat inimical forces by which not only the nation of which we were a part, but the entire world of man as we then knew it, might very well be wrecked. And oddly enough, we touched only at random on the matter ourselves. As yet even to us, the thing was too vague, too indefinite, too vast.

Yet there was one evening I remember when Bryce voiced the feeling which I myself had entertained at times since the start. Our whole party was sitting on the observation platform rather late—so late indeed that we had the place to ourselves. We were whirling across a darkened bit of nearly level country, which by its very night-wrapped obscurity gave a sense of immensity, akin to the feeling one might have if he were caught up and whirled out across some unseen void.

He had been smoking and cast the end of the heavy cigar he affected back upon the track. It winked a red point for an instant and went out.

"Some country," he said. "Some job to wreck it, not to mention the human race. I reckon a certain party has picked him a man-sized bit of work?'

"In the Middle or Dark Ages, so called," Semi replied. "Then, too, the followers of darkness sought to snuff out the light. Ignorance then was the weapon they used. It is a thing that breeds no true faith, but superstition and doubt.

"Mankind had reached a considerable stage of attainment prior to that period of savagery and materialistic supremacy into which, during a span of some hundreds of years, it was plunged. Such things, such debacles of faith and progress, are the work of Otho Khan's cult. Whatever is wholly material, in its nature darkly superstitious and flagrantly unlawful, may be called the results of their disseminated thought.

"Those races or creeds of mankind which stand for such things are either their followers or their dupes. Attila was a scourge they loosed upon the world. The present-day propaganda of anarchy, bolshevism, in its lawless license, are the seeds of discord they are sowing to the raising of a harvest of disquietude. And back of it all they work, unseen, unrecognized, and disguised.

"Was the burning of Louvain, with its loss of the countless treasure of knowledge collected through a thousand years, the work of sane men, or men inspired by fiends—or die destruction of Christian churches, the profanation of convents, the proper work for men who claimed to march to battle in the name of God?

"Think you not that when those things happened—when men cried on God in the same breath they defiled His altars—Otho Khan and the Black Brotherhood must have laughed in sardonic amusement—they who are like a wine press full of poisonous grapes, from which little by little the poison of unclean thoughts, unclean teachings, unclean influences, drops into mankind's cup?

"For whatever it is that disturbs man's faith in established things, that serves them. Whatever may trick him, dupe him, shake his faith in his own immortality and his God, but gives them greater strength in the furtherance of their diabolical plans. You say it is a large task, and I grant it, but it is not without precedent, in that time from which have come down to us stories of barbarity appalling, of superstitions, weird enough to yet thrill us, of personal dealings with the devil, the Black Brotherhood tried, even though they failed—and failed because of those few steadfast souls who, despite all the powers of Satan himself, kept the lamp of the true knowledge still burning in the world."

"Oh, well that—" remarked Jim rather vaguely. "What I meant was a sort of universal hypnotizing—getting hold of men's minds."

"Does it matter how a man's mind be controlled, if the control is gained, Mr. Bryce—whether by direct means or by circumstance or environment?" Semi replied above the click of the wheels.

"Well, no," Bryce admitted slowly. "I guess if you work long enough at th' job, almost any spring can be fouled, an' it don't matter if you work th' mud up from th' bottom or pour it in."

And it was then that Connie asked a question I knew she had kept in her mind for days.

"The term, Mrs. Glace, is a Tartar word meaning standard or bannerette. It is said to be greased or anointed when the head of a victim slain in battle is cast at the foot of the lance on which it is carried."

"Eh?" said Haddon sharply. "Tartar word, is it? What's the notion? Khan's a Mongol, isn't he? Does he sport one of those contraptions, and if so, who's to furnish the head?"

I heard Connie's breath whisper in her throat. I knew now that she understood. I felt her fingers fumbling for mine and took them into my clasp and found them cold.

And I heard Semi answer: "Does it not occur to you, Mr. Haddon, that your point is of the future? Otho Khan, the Mongol, if true to custom, carries not only his toug but his shroud. In the final end it must be decided whether the one shall be greased or the other filled. As to that—there is but one God."

"Oh—quite right," said Haddon a bit hoarsely and sat staring off into the night.

Lotis and Garston met us in a high-powered machine. There was a flare of something like eagerness in the face of the girl, I thought—and Garston's well-formed features were a bit puzzled, a bit drawn under a newly acquired coat of tan.

I helped Connie down, and the next instant she and Lotis were kissing after the manner of women.

"Master," die said, and laid her hand in his, lifting her eyes to meet the glance he bent upon her.

"Lotis—Thou Sword of Flame," be called her, and shook hands with Garston. "My friend?"

"I'm—glad to see you, sir," Garston met him simply, "even if I could hardly believe it possible, when Lotis insisted on meeting this train."

"Yet—you perceive now that die was right," Dual said with what seemed a deeper meaning than the mere words m themselves conveyed. "There are many ways, Mr. Garston, in which a thing may be known.''

He dropped Garston's hand, and the man turned to Bryce and me without a word and a strange baffled lode. m his eyes. I presented him to Haddon, and then he managed to draw Jim and me aside under the pretense of loading our bags into the waiting machine.

"This passes the limit, Mr. Glace," he broke out tensely while we were piling the things aboard. "I'm dazed—and I have been for days. Lotis hasn't been herself for some time. I've been worried about her. The other day she was unconscious for hours. I managed to get a doctor, and he said it was a touch of the sun—but I don't believe it.

"She keeps talking about that human fiend Otho Khan—and this morning she insisted on meeting this train, as you just heard me say. She said your strange companion over there had promised to be on it. What's back of it, Glace? Is there really something behind these fancies of hers?"

"Dual stud die was right, didn't he?" Jim replied before I had framed what I fdt was a suitable answer.

Garston nodded. "Yes. But—good God!" His lids narrowed and he caught his breath sharply. "Who's this man Haddon?" he asked.

"A government man," I said. "But keep it under your hat if you're talking outside our crowd."

"All right, folks," he called. "We'd better be getting off. Your train was late."

Dual came toward us with Lotis, Connie, and Haddon, and we took our places, Garston's wife in front beside him, and the rest of us in the tonneau. Garston shot up spark and gas and stuck his foot on the starter. We moved off south and east across a slightly rolling country covered with gama grass and the sotol, and dotted here and there with clumps of mesquite, as Garston in reply to a question of Haddon's told us the brush was called.

As he had said, our tram had been hours late indeed. The sun was far down in the west and flung long golden rays across the landscape, so that our shadows fled before us whenever the nose of the machine turned east. The road was dusty. A fine film of dust swept forward with us, kicked up by the speeding wheels. It was not conducive to conversation, and we indulged in very little speech.

I glanced at the immaculate Haddon, who sat with a powder of gray beginning to film the shoulders of his suit. But he seemed very little disturbed and kept sweeping the countryside with his eyes. Far off to the east I marked a line of hills, or mountains rather, their summits still bathed in the light of the sun till they blushed a delicate rose.

The car whirled on. It dipped now into a swale of the road, swooping swiftly and again climbing up. The sun dropped to a red ball—a fiery eye—and then plunged below the horizon out of sight I saw Lotis Garston bend and whisper to her husband. I saw him frown; sensed that he resisted some purpose contained in her words.. I saw her fingers creep out and fall upon his sun-browned hand as it gripped the wheel. He yielded. He slowed the car. Man and woman exchanged seats, and now it was Lotis who drove with an increased speed.

I glanced at Dual and met his eyes. They were clear, steady. I turned to Haddon and saw he was staring at Garston's back. Twilight deepened into dusk. Our lights blazed out at Lotis's touch, picking up the road. On either ride the clumps of mesquite grew into blurring, distorted shadows. Connie slipped her hand into mine as we reeled on behind the roaring motor. I bent my own glance on the back of our slender driver.

Her action in changing places with her husband said more plainly than words her valuation of the situation—what Dual himself had predicated in saying the man was her greater weakness—that she feared for him—had shifted seats because she knew he would be expected to drive. And yet—if we were dealing with those who read minds, worked with undreamed-of forces—what use, I asked myself, and gave up the answer.

There was a line of light rising slowly in the east—the sign of a moon. And after a time the silver disk came above the tips of the hills and the gama-covered plain till the mesquite clumps took on the seeming of small, dark islands scattered across the expanse of a silent flood.

We were running up a long, slow rise at the time, and the thing, whatever it was, seemed to be at the very top. And whether it was due to the distortion of the moonlight, which at times seems to magnify objects strangely, or not, I did not know. But what I saw was the figure of a man, unduly large, as it seemed, and beside him a monstrous dog.

Or I thought it was a dog at first—a dog with an exceedingly pointed muzzle cast into sharp silhouette by the circle of light behind it. Both it and its human companion stalked inky black for a moment after Connie's recognition of them, and then—

The dog sank down upon its haunches, lifted its head on an upreaching neck, and howled.

But—it was no howl of a dog that came in a long-drawn ululation from its stretching throat.

I stiffened as the sobbing, long-drawn, high-pitched cry cut quivering through the night. I knew it, had heard it at other times in the West. It was the plaint of the coyote—the pariah wolf!

And suddenly, as it wailed about us, Lotis Popoff stiffened. Her foot shot down on the throttle. The car leaped ahead, straight up the long slant toward the man and the creature beside him, rushing toward them a roaring thing with two flaming eyes. Her voice rose as If in answer to the beast's cry. Strange words—things I did not understand—came out of her pulsing throat. "Hai!" an exclamation, "Children of Erlik, carrion food for worms," and then the patter of lips and tongue, and—

As she spoke, there were two men where there had been but one before, and the wolf—was gone! There were two men—running toward the shelter of a clump of mesquite bushes. They vanished behind it. The car roared past and away like a sentient, leaping tiling. But behind it there broke out not the cry of a wolf, but inhuman laughter, wild, ribald, sardonic—the merriment of friends.

"Hey—hold hard" Haddon jerked out words as the machine we were riding in rocked and swayed. "Let's get those—"

Lotis's voice whipped back to us, speaking now English words: "They know—of your coming—Master. They know! That day I came asking thy help—leaving my body—they surprised my soul—and battled with it. My soul and theirs were locked in combat, so that I cried out to God, lest they trap me, hold me, prevent my return. They fell upon me as I was returning, and we struggled. I was surrounded on every hand. They had fallowed me, and were waiting for me. They knew where I had been.

"But I cried on Allah and Elohim, and defied them, till they slunk back like cowed dogs, like beaten wolves, cheated of the kill, those creatures of the pit, who Work their deceiving illusions, making things seem other than they are—aye, they slunk back to their master, telling him they were beaten—and I came and found my husband working over my body with another—a man—a doctor—who told me I had been exposed too long to the sun. Hai! I poured no pearls before the feet of his unwisdom, knowing he would not understand."

"Peace, daughter," Dual said calmly. "As yet no harm is done. Nor doth it matter that they know of my presence, since sooner or later they must have learned."

"What was it, Gordon?" she asked in a whisper. "Was it really a—a wolf—or—a man?"

"Oh, yes, certainly," he answered in a sharp voice. "Two men. Quite right, Glace. Two men."

Here and there lights showed in the dusk pin-points indicating the whereabouts of a house. Some of the "squatters" Garston had mentioned in his letter, I imagined—the dwellings of the people of Otho Khan.

Once more, save for the roar of the motor, there was no sound. I felt Connie quiver against me.

By and by we turned toward a light that seemed to stand on higher ground, purred up a slope and paused. I made out the outlines of a house with light pouring out through its windows. Garston reached over and sounded the horn. But there was no response.

"Wait, Ed." Lotis threw the car into reverse and backed around. The headlights picked out the front of the house. There was a low porch, as I saw, along the entire side of the frame structure—a flight of wooden steps—and on the latter was something white.

The girl at the wheel stopped the engine and opened the door at her side. "I shall go first," she said as she got down. "You follow with the others, Ed."

Garston sprang down, breathing hoarsely. I followed with Jim and Connie and Haddon.

Semi and the woman beside him were half-way to the house. As we followed in a close-pressed group I saw them pause. And then we had caught them up.

On the steps before them was a sheet—a common oblong bit of cloth. But it was held down securely at each corner and in the center, by a knife, driven through it into the wood.

And Lotis cut him short. "Wait—" She darted forward swiftly, tore out the knives, and cast them into, the center of the sheet, a clashing heap of metal, rolled the sheet about them, caught up the wadded bundle, and turned.

"Hai, Mongol!" she cried. "There is but one God, and in His name I defy thee, thou servant of Erlik, whom the Long-Suffering One shall yet cast into hell as I spurn thy shroud!"

Her arms rose. For an instant she held the white mass poised, then flung it from her.

"I suppose they've got Andy," Garston broke in gruffly. "If they have there's going to be a dean-up around here mighty sudden."

And even as we entered there came once more the long-drawn cry of a wolf, as though the creature were baying at the moon. It was like the cry of a lost soul, and out of all reason I found myself wondering if perchance it was.

CHAPTER VI.
The Wolf.

NO matter what the exterior of the Garston home, the inside was something of a surprise. As Garston explained later, they had run up the place since he and Lotis came, out of such materials as they could most readily obtain. But it was well furnished, with an excellent taste.

I think none of us gave much attention to such details, however, when we entered it first. After the episode of the drive and the later grim welcome of the shroud spiked to the steps by heavy-hafted knives, I know I crossed its threshold with the full expectation that beyond it some fresh horror would be revealed.

Consequently the reality came as a sort of anticlimax, an almost startling relaxation of straining nerves. The room we entered—a living-room, plainly—was lighted by an oil lamp swinging from the ceiling—and within it, so far as I could mark, nothing was disturbed.

Garston gave a single glance about it, strode over, and jerked open one of several doors that opened from it—it was a long, low-ceiled room occupying nearly all of one side of the house.

He was answered by a sort of animal-like grunting, a bumping and pounding sound really hard to correctly analyze.

"He's out here somewhere—and he's alive, at any rate," Garston declared, and ran out of the door.

Jim, Haddon, and I were hard on his heels, but not before Lotis, who flitted like a guardian shadow just behind him. Still we were all pretty much together as we pushed into what was evidently the kitchen and paused.

A man sat there—seemingly a young fellow of the country. He was trussed to a common chair, hands and feet, and gagged. And before him, spread out upon the floor, was a second shroud and yet another of the heavy-handled knives.

"Spooky, yet not necessarily fatal, eh, Glace?" Haddon nudged me with an elbow as Garston loosened the man and tore the gag out of his mouth. "I suppose the beggars expect their shrouds and knives to get on our nerves."

And apparently they had, in so far as Andy was concerned, for once free of hand and feet and jaws, he started up, rolling his eyes.

"I'm done—I'm quittin', Mr. Garston," he declared. "My Gawd—I was sittin' here waitin' for you not a half-hour ago—an' Chang had gone to bed—when I looks over an' seen a Gila monster lyin' just inside th' door. I thought that was funny, an' I gets up an' goes over to put it out. I opens th' door, an' two fellows busted in an' hopped me before I could put up a fight.

"They tied me up an' went in an' got a sheet, I guess, an' put it there on th' floor, an' laid a knife on it, an' mumbled a lot of stuff I couldn't understand—an' then they tell me it's a shroud, an' if I stay around here I'm liable to need it, an' then they go out through the front of the house. Did you see any signs of 'em in there?"

"We found another sheet tacked to the front steps by a lot of knives," said Garston.

"Gawd," said Andy again. "They're after all of us, at that rate. I been sort of suspicious fer some time; these folks wasn't tickled to have us around here."

"And you're going to let them run you out, are you?" Garston's lips curled in something like a sneer.

"Well—''Andy scowled—"I reckon gettin' out is a pretty good life-insurance, as it looks to me."

Garston shrugged his shoulders. "Well, go run the car in and tell Chang we want supper," he directed. "We've got to go in after Mrs. Glace's trunk to-morrow, and you needn't come back if you're scared."

"I ain't scared, Garston, but—I'm prudent," the man said as he opened the door and went out.

"Come on back in front," he suggested. "This isn't exactly the welcome Lotis and I had planned, but needs must when the devil drives."

"You said a mouthful that time, m' son," Bryce remarked as he stood aside to let Lotis and Connie, who had trailed us, pass.

We all went back. Dual alone had not followed into the kitchen, and I remember that as we entered the living-room he turned toward Lotis and smiled.

Garston opened a number of doors. He seemed rather bent on showing his house. "This is your room, Mr. Dual," he said—"this we've assigned to Mr. and Mrs. Glace. Haddon and Bryce can occupy this one. Lotis insists that we keep this middle one ourselves. She's close-herding me these days, as you may have noticed."

As he spoke, a slow flush crept into the face of his wife and receded, leaving her deathly white, and it came into my mind again that Garston did not understand quite how deadly the thing that menaced his and her welfare was. He was a stalwart chap with the hot blood of youth, and one could hardly look for him to take kindly to what must have seemed to him his wife's endeavor to hide him, as it were, behind her skirts.

Still, he seemed to note the effect of his remark upon her and changed the subject quickly. "This isn't much of a shack, but I designed it myself—sort of a dormitory effect, you notice—all bedrooms in the back and opening into this one—the dining-room is up there beyond that arch. It will be the main point of interest as soon as Chang manages to get to work. Now, if you like to get rid of some of the dust."

We took him at his word, and disappeared into our several rooms. Garston had been right, I soon found, in saying the house wasn't much. The partitions were simple board walls. Bryce's room and Haddon's was just beyond that of Connie's and mine, and all at once Jim's voice boomed out:

"Oh, that—well, what's the notion? Are you muddling over the werewolf theory, Bryce?"

"Eh?" I could imagine Haddon staring. "Bosh, old chap—it was the man laughed, of course."

And Jim seemed to floor him with a question. "It was, was it, Mr. Government Wise Guy? Well, what was he laughing about?"

I looked at Connie. There were vague shadows—vague, unvoiced things lurking in her wide, blue eyes. Her lips moved.

We returned to the living-room to find Lotis and Garston standing side by side near the dining-room arch, which formed the farther end of the midway partition of the house.

Lotis had changed into a dress of some soft, dark material that accented her slender, almost lancelike lines. But Garston still wore the clothing in which he had met us, khaki breeches and coat with a pair of laced engineer's boots.

Both of them turned toward us as we left our room, and Lotis put out her hands to Connie.

"It was heavenly of you to come," she said. "I'm having trouble with this big boy of mine. But now I hope we can persuade him to behave."

Garston laughed before Connie did more than slip her arm about Lotis's supple waist. His manner was somewhat embarrassed. "Lotis treats me like a guardian angel, which she is—but—I never was used to being held on an apron string for a leash, Mrs. Glace. All my life I've knocked about a bit—and it takes more to frighten me than a lot of baby tricks like these bedsheets and knives. If I had my way, these squatters on her land that are back of the things would get short shrift."

"Or give it." None of us had sensed Dual's entrance, but we all turned at his words, and Garston saw fit to answer once more with a partial return of the manner that had characterized his greetings of Semi on the station platform that afternoon:

"Let me get this straight, Mr. Dual. As I see the situation, it is simply this: These people have settled here without any claim to occupying the ground, and they see a danger of dispossession in our presence, as naturally for them there is. They are low-caste folk—many of them little better than beasts—and I suppose they think they can run us out if they make it hot enough. As you say, I don't suppose they would stop at a little thing like killing if it's the only way to succeed.

"I've been urging Lotis to let me appeal to the authorities and make a dean sweep of the whole bunch, for a good many days—but she can't see it my way, and she insists there is more to it than I imagine. I—well, I admit that your coming out here leaves me feeling somewhat dazed. Do you really think there's more to it than appears on the surface?"

"Indeed, yes." Dual came across to where we were standing. There was a slow fire—a dull gleam of the light that I had seen in them before—in his eyes. It was like the smoldering, flame of his spirit. "Mr. Garston," he said, "you may trust to the—let us say for your understanding—intuitions of your wife. There is a great deal more to this affair than appears on the surface—or will.

"What you see there is no more than what one beholds looking into a dark pool in which some evil creature lurks. One may see with the eyes of the spirit or of the flesh. And this creature of the dark wraps itself in a mantle of darkness, woven of illusion.

"There is no mere 'baby trick,' as you call it, in so far as the mind of a Child of Erlik is concerned, in the unrolling before the face of an enemy of a shroud. It amounts to a death sentence—is a tacit way of saying that he to whom the act is performed may expect his throat to feel the kiss of the knife.. And there were five knives to-night, Mr. Garston, used in fastening down the shroud—"

"One for each of us, eh?" said Haddon as he and Bryce appeared. Incidentally, Mrs. Garston, I think I'd better go get that thing you threw away before we came in. I've looked, and the beggars who trussed up Garston's man seem to have taken the sheets off my bed." He crossed the room, opened the door, and went out.

Garston grinned. "Cool," he said, jerking his head toward the door, and then to Dual. "Very well, sir. I'll not dispute your word. The mere fact that I have Lotis with me now would prevent that, thanks to what you did for us both in the past. But—I take it that your presence means we're going to stick it out and fight whatever it is that's coming?"

"Exactly," Dual assented. "We remain here. We fight that force of evil which more than for many generations is at present unchained in the world. Here in the 'urdu'—the camp, as it were, of the children of evil—we set up our toug, thrusting the lance of it deep into the ground of faith in that One who has said that evil shall not triumph, Mr. Garston. For has He not placed for that fight a weapon in our hands, in the person of the woman you love—a flaming sword of the spirit, which, tempered by the fires of hell itself, has been by those fires perfected to a strength that shall not yield?"

War—war—it was to be war—unyielding—a struggle grim to the death, then. I felt it as I heard the slow fall of his words. And Garston felt it, too, in his own fashion. For he did not answer. He simply turned and looked at Lotis as she stood, straight, flame slender, as true as a splendidly tempered rapier indeed—the quivering, shining weapon Dual had called her—a living weapon—a divinely beautiful thing with a strange light of exaltation seeming to bathe her face and leap in her eyes.

Oh, she was glorious in that instant—a glorious woman, a thrilling, magnificent thing of flaming spirit and living flesh and blood.

A clink of dishes, a clatter of pots and pans, drifted in from the kitchen, announcing the labors of Chang.

And then the door opened, and Haddon came back, with a quizzical smile on his lips.

"I guess I'll have to forego my chambermaid duties. That sheet and the hardware seem to be gone," he announced.

"Of course," said Lotis simply. "They are watching. It was because of that I said what I did when I cast it from me. The night is full of their eyes. They slink about us even now like cats. They have taken away the shroud—the one shroud with the five knives. It has borne the message of their threat."

And then her breast swelled and the strange manner she always adopted at such times fell from her. "But, come—Chang just looked in—I think he is ready, and you must be hungry after your ride."

We adjourned to the table beyond the arch. Chang—a slant-eyed Chinaman—slipped in and served us. Lotis presided at her end of the table, no more now, as it seemed, than a smiling hostess. Dual sat on her right. On her left I and Connie. Bryce and Haddon were opposite, and Garston sat with his back toward a window in the end of the room. He seemed rather subdued, I fancied, and I noted that his glance kept seeking the face of his wife.

I have paid particular attention to our positions because I wish it clear in the mind.

Chang withdrew, and we attacked the food. Despite what Garston had called the baby trick of the shrouds and Andy's trussing up, we were not in a talkative mood.

"That Gila monster Andy saw inside the door, now—was it there, or wasn't it? What's the answer?"

"He saw it, didn't he?" said Garston. "That's why he opened the door—unless he lies."

"Oh, he saw it," Jim agreed, nodding. "I ain't doubting he saw it, but I'm wondering if it wasn't put there to make him open the door. I've seen folks who saw things a bit different from what they was." He broke off, lifted a spoonful of a dear soup to his lips, and smiled.

"So have I," Haddon declared with a glance at Semi. "I suppose you think our 'prudent' friend Andy was hypnotized. New way of opening a door. There wasn't any Gila monster really. Andy just thought there was. The reptile or reptiles were outside all the time. By Jove!"

"Of course," Lotis said again. "They made him see it, knowing he would try to put it out. It is an old trick. They deal in illusions. It is so their victims are duped and destroyed."

Haddon nodded. "Quite so. Like the Hindu rope trick. There isn't any rope, or any boy who climbs it—yet until some bright johnny tried to photograph that particular stunt everybody thought there was. Not changing the subject, Mr. Garston, there's a question I'd like to ask. In your wanderings about this particular modem edition of Babel, have you noted anything which might indicate that a part of its activities have to do with the smuggling of drugs?"

Haddon nodded again. "Yes. There's money in that profession, and this pleasant band of joshers seem to have the ordinary fondness of ordinary men for gold."

"Why I don't know," Garston confessed. "I never thought about it. Still—there's a lot of Mexican peons among them. They could easily slip across the border, I suppose. The patrols are not hard to dodge. I—" He broke off, his glance leaping the length of the table to Lotis.

All color had drained from her face and left it deathly white. She was like marble cheek and throat, and her eyes were wide—wide and dark and staring—staring past Garston and beyond him—at the window behind him. She was without motion. She seemed not even to breathe.

Silence came down. It dropped like a pall over our little group about the table. With an actual effort I shifted my gaze from the face of our hostess to Dual.

And he, too, sat without motion. He had put down knife and fork. His eyes, too, were turned straight past Garston—were wide, steady, fixed, on a line with the window.

What—what in God's name? I asked myself. As though drawn beyond my will, my head turned. Haddon was staring, and Bryce—not at Garston, but past him. My own glance sought the window.

It was there before me—pressed dose against the glass, a savage, lip-curled mask. I saw the lamplight strike gleaming on its whitish yellow teeth—on the red of the slavering tongue inside its mouth. I saw its evil eyes glaring in from the night, the bulge of the broad frontal bone between them under its fur—the little twitching ears.

CHAPTER VII.
Lotis Speaks.

Haddon sprang up, the smoking weapon he had discharged gripped by knuckle-whitened fingers in his hand.

"Keep away from the window!" Dual's voice came in direction. "Garston, get down—out of your chair—creep to one side."

"Do as he tells you—you fool!" Haddon barked sharply, standing there rigid as Dual took hold of the situation.

"It was the face of Otho Khan!" the flame-slender girl at the foot of the table cried out.

"To your eyes, yes, but not to mine nor those of the Master. I saw him looking toward the window, and I looked also, and he was there—that fiend out of hell—with his face pressed close against the glass. He was there, behind you, with all his true nature showing at last in his eyes—that Mongol Wolf—who is loosed in God's inscrutable purpose on the world—Erlik's jackal—that thing without mercy or compassion. I looked into his face, and I saw death written within it—and for a moment my soul faltered within me, and then—oh, Ed, Ed!"

And Dual cut him short: "Mr. Garston, it is by the mercy of the One who is not done with you yet in His plans that your body remains alive. Yet if you still doubt, shall not we extinguish the light and look beneath your window for signs of the peril now passed?"

Semi crossed the room and lifted the sash in which still clung a part of the broken pane. "Mr. Haddon, have you perhaps an electric flash?"

"Lean out quickly and turn it upon the dust close to the wall beneath you," Dual directed.

Haddon obeyed. He thrust out over the sill and shot the pencil ray downward, sweeping it back and forth, while we waited behind him.

Presently he drew in. "There are footmarks there, but—they aren't those of a wolf," his voice came grimly. "Well, anyway—-he didn't laugh this time, Bryce."

"He is mortal," Semi Dual resumed as Garston relighted the lamp. "And being mortal, he could have died in the guise he chose to assume, as surely as in his own, had Mr. Haddon's shot struck home. That he permitted that shot at all was due to the fact that the instant he looked into the window he was unfortunate enough to meet my eyes—and the next instant those of Mr. Garston's wife.

"From that time on his attention was locked and held by ours. Had Mr. Haddon not fired when he did, presently the false appearance his will had cast as a mask before your eyes would have faded out, and the man himself would have appeared. That you saw him as a wolf was merely because he had willed that you should—just as the man Andy saw the Gila monster on the floor before we arrived.

"It is an age-long trick possessed by those who know the art—it is the ability on which the legendary stories of the werewolf is based. Those creatures of story where naught but men or women parading to their own nefarious ends under a self-suggested, mentally projected guise, fastened upon the minds of their fellows, to inspire the terror that best served their purpose—put on or off as they chose—and if you will recall, once the werewolf was slain, the semblance departed with the dying of the will that evoked it, and rather than a wolf there remained a man or a woman—who, like the unclean beast they had made themselves resemble, had come to a deserved end.

"My friends, the battle between this legionary of the Prince of Evil and all that mankind should prize most highly is joined."

Lotis was panting as he paused, the sound of her breathing an audible whisper in the room. "The battle," she burst out. "Aye—the battle—between us who know its meaning and them who seek to wreck the world, to drag down, debauch, bestialize, brutalize the race of man—to gorge, glut, surfeit—Erlik, the devourer of souls. And oh"—her eyes—eyes become those of a seeress, an oracle to speak truth—turned from one to another of us, to Connie and me, to Bryce and Haddon—"can't you see what they are doing—how they are testing their power—trying it—tuning it, as it were, like some dreadful engine of destruction—here in this place that was left me by my father—of which they have made a plague spot—an actual colony of the Children of Erlik, gathered together to their purpose—this—this place of prayer, as they call it—Oh, God—a place of prayer!

"And can't you see how they are testing me at the same time—me, whom Otho Khan once held his slave—how they are testing me, trying me—feeling the strength that is in my brain—seeking to discover if they are strong enough to destroy me, before the real battle, the final conflict between us, is joined?

"Can't you see how they are trying to weaken me, shake me, break me down in advance of that time—me, whom they have tempted, seeking to regain me to their obscene ranks—for I tell you that as God is God, I know Otho Khan's plan—that his tougchi, his bannerette, his lieutenant, told me these things, thinking to weaken me and destroy my strength! And I"—she drew herself up, threw back her head with a strange, tense, shaking gesture, hands straight down beside her rounded thighs, arms rigid—"I—Allah—Allah—Allahou! I defied them! For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and yet lose his soul?"

"Amen! Peace, daughter—thou flame of God!" said Semi Dual. a For is it not written that strength is to them who call in faith on the Name, crying Oom, Oom, and again Oom, and are not afraid? Peace—while ye tell us those things that befell ere we heard the cry of thy spirit and came to thee, adding our strength to that of the sword of light that One has seen fit to sheathe in the scabbard of thy flesh."

Lotis Garston shuddered. A tremor shook her. She turned toward Semi—looked into his steady eyes.

"Aye, Master—thou art right, who speak in faith, and so in the greater wisdom. For in truth is he beaten already who admits fear to his soul—and they know it, these devil-spawn. Fear is the weapon they use, since knowing themselves of the damned, once their soul shall bid their body farewell—they are themselves afraid of that final doom. Wherefore am I strong again, and I shall tell thee what came upon me in the mountains—for truly was I taken into a high place and showed the kingdoms of the world, and the Tougchi of Otho Khan—his yellow lieutenant—stood beside me and named them one by one. Let us sit down."

Connie half sobbed beside me. There were lines of tension about Haddon's eyes. Bryce had lost some of his ruddy color. Garston was once more a man seemingly in a daze. Only Dual, as it seemed to me, was unmoved, as we passed silently out of the dining-room and found seats in the front of the house.

And as though minded to prove the strength of which she had spoken, or moved by an impulse to hold herself apart as one appointed to some strange mission, Lotis sank into a great chair alone, sitting straight and slender there before us with her white, white face, in which the only trace of color was the line of her parted lips.

So, it seemed to me, might some dark-haired priestess have sat to voice the inward meaning of the mysteries, long ago, in the days far nearer the time when the cult of Otho Khan, the brotherhood of those who followed the fallen Day Star, had had its birth.

"See," she began again, still speaking in the stilted, somewhat archaic fashion she always used at such times, "it came upon me in this fashion, my friends, and thou, Master. I and my husband had taken horses and ridden afield. We had ridden up into the mountains—since that was his wish, because he fancied there was mineral of value in them, and he wished to look about.

"All morning had we ridden, and in the end we stopped by a spring of water. And I said to him: 'Here I will await thee—for I am weary of the saddle.' And I got down, and my horse drank from the spring.

And I sat upon the ground in the shade of a rock, and it was near unto noon. And my husband went a little ways farther, desiring to examine a certain outcropping of rock he had seen at a distance. I sat in the shadow of the rock, waiting and gazing out over the valley—till a voice fell on my ears.

"'Lotis, Flower of Earth? So he called me, that yellow one—appearing, as it seemed, from the face of the hill and striding toward me. And I turned and looked into his smiling devil face. And he laughed and came and stood laughing down upon me, so that the yellow silk of his jacket rippled across his chest, on which his arms were folded, and my soul quivered within me.

"'Aye,' I said then, 'I am happy, and you have any right to question. Who are ye?'

"And he answered me: 'I am Nak, tougchi to him whom once ye knew as master, before ye turned against him, who had made thee strong in knowledge, and chose to his wisdom the happiness of the flesh, and the arms of a man—and became one with him, thereby cutting thy strength in half?"

Her eyes turned toward him. "And I knew what he meant, in that my love for my husband was a gateway through which fear might enter my soul, now that I was become indeed a woman, and was to bear his child."

I did not blame her. It was a strange announcement—a thing to give one pause. Yet the very simplicity of purity in which it was uttered robbed it of any unseemly flavor—seemed indeed to, in some strange way, wrap a mantle of respect about the one who voiced it—throw about her the aura of womanhood—of maternity—that has dignified her sex in all the ages of the world. But as Connie cried out, for a fleeting instant, Lotis glanced toward her. Her face softened, and she smiled before she went on:

"But I said to him: 'So then Tougchi of Otho Khan, Nak of the yellow shirt—it was Otho himself put those words into thy mouth. Yet, say to him that I am not weakened, but strengthened, being knit together—and my soul no more hearing the whisperings of Erlik the Spider, to whom the Mongol would have cast it when he no longer had for it any use?

"'Thy talk is the talk of the lovelorn, little flower. Thy husband has plucked thee and wears thee upon his shirt. For the time his heart warms thee even as the sun. But what if his heart grows cold?'

"And knowing he had not come idly upon me, I said: 'Enough, Nak. Say what ye were told to say to me, and spare me thy philosophies which, being them of the damned, are lies?

"'This, then," he said. 'Otho has need of thee, little flower; and he is willing to forgive. Let there be no more war between ye. For look you—Otho Khan has it in mind that the time approaches when his toug is to be greased as never was toug anointed before. And them who stand with him shall profit—aye, beyond any dreams of profit—but them who oppose him shall become food for the dogs and the carrion worms to be born in their clotted gore?

"And I said again to him: 'Speak, Nak, Tougchi of Otho Khan, and keep thy threats for the end of the story, when they perchance may count for more?

"'This, then," he said. 'Otho and them with him and behind him are about to move. There shall be unrest among the nations of mankind? He turned and waved an arm before him to all points of the compass.

"'The world shall smoke with the conflict Mankind shall turn on mankind, and man shall rend man, like unto wolves. The light of man's learning shall be blotted out. There shall be fires—fires, little flower, that destroy. Mankind shall set them when we speak—and they shall destroy a large part of that source of man's knowledge.

"'The forests shall burn—the forests of the world. To the north, the south, the east, the west, the smoke of their burning shall rise. And beneath that smoke man shall turn on man—there shall be revolution. Industry shall languish while men turn to combat—mines, means of transportation, shall be destroyed.

"'Already is the influence of the movement beginning to trouble the world. Millions to-day march with us on the other side of the water. Their thoughts are our thoughts, and by us inspired. We say to them, "Slay," and they slay; "Destroy," and they destroy. From the Pacific to the middle of Europe our legions lift their banners, and move into the south.

"'Soon Persia shall be overrun—and India shall rise to join us. And their thoughts, being our thoughts, continue to gain strength—aye, even those thoughts first set into operation in our places of prayer, where the dark banners stand, and the hosts chant about the sheiks kneeling in their midst—even in such places as it was in the mind of Otho Khan to create here, with which ye, little flower, must not interfere.

"'Wherefore I was to say this to thee—withdraw from this our place of prayer, and forget it, and thou shalt live in peace—thee and the man thou hast chosen—or if thou wilt, lend ns of thy assistance, become here our agent, and in that day when the world smokes and the race of man has become again the slaves of our bidding, thou shalt.be remembered, and sit in the midst of our councils, thou woman, to whom Otho Khan, and through him the seven masters of earth, show honor. Thou shalt be as a queen, whose word is law, whose slightest thought is accomplished ere spoken. Much hath Otho Khan taught thee, and he will teach thee more—'

"And Nak the Tougchi scowled. 'Aie,' he said, 'an' ye do not, then shall the one thou lovest be destroyed—aye, even him and the child which comes after him. Their souls shall be cast to Erlik the Destroyer, Thou shalt close his eyes—and the child thou shalt see tom from thy swollen breasts and impaled on the lances of horsemen ere it is flung to the dogs.

"'Thou shalt live to behold it, little flower—for not yet is Otho Khan ready to destroy the child of thy father who served him well—and the wo that shall come upon thee will be as a pleasing sight to his eyes, the cry of thy heart in anguish a gladdening sound to his ears. I have spoken—I, Nak, Tougchi to Otho Khan, who is one of the seven. Little flower, give heed?

"And then I heard the sound of my husband's returning—the sound of a whistle upon his lips—and it was like the voice of the mother to her child. And I stood up; and I said:

"'My husband is coming, Nak the Tougchi. Get thee gone, lest he find thee here and destroy thee. Get thee gone, and say to Otho Khan that I defy him. Say to him that I shall stand and fight him—that I shall stand between him and his purpose—that there is but one God—Him who cast the one he serves into the void where is naught but darkness—and that with neither the blood of my husband nor the child which is to be his shall the toug of Otho Khan, servant of Lucifer, be greased. Go!'

"And I flung up my arm so"—she lifted it now in that strange gesture, extending it rigid, the hand flexed upon the wrist till the palm was vertically forward—"and he left me, and disappeared again into the hall. And my husband came and found me, and I told him nothing, because I was sorely troubled. But that afternoon I laid my body on his bed, and my consciousness left it, and I came and appealed to the Master for strength.

"The Tougchi of Otho Khan surprised my soul returning, and sought to hold it, and I beat him so that he slunk away as he bad slunk from me in the hills—he and those he had with him—and I returned again to my body. Hai! It is finished, and ye are come, and behold before thee is a shroud with five knives. And Otho Khan is come also in person, that his purpose may be achieved."

She paused, sighed, and turned her gaze about the room like one waking from some nightmare-haunted slumber.

"Ignorance! It is their weapon still. Ignorance and the slavery of terror and superstition which it inspires. The burning of the forests means the wiping out of the dissemination of knowledge through the press, printing with the loss of paper pulp. The interference with industry and transportation means famine, and famine makes men as wolves. Follows revolution, ruin. And on that ruin their hierarchy is to rise. Toward this they move.

"Russia, and the teeming millions of the East, steeped in ignorance, already they have swayed. There stalk to-day their end results in lust, murder, rapine, lawless greed—there are the altars of the god of self upraised—and there must they remain if the light of knowledge is to still suffuse the world.

"Despite their former defeat at our hands, it is clear that Otho Khan and his associates still hoped that Mrs. Garston might be used. The result of her defiance of him is that the emissary they sent to stir up strife in this country is present here in person. My friends, it is so the course of destiny, both of men and nations, moves."

"An' I reckon that's a straight tip," Jim said all at once. "Otto th' Devil may need a shroud a lot worse than us."

Haddon nodded. "Possibly. Personally I'd like to get a shot at him with a camera when he's trying that wolf stunt next. It would be interesting to see what the plate showed. I say, Garston, when you drive in to the station to-morrow, ask if there's a message for me at the telegraph-office. I put an operative on his trail before we started, and gave him the address. I'd like to know what he says."

His words gave us all back a partial poise. He had been as much shaken emotionally, I feit sure, but he had certainly not lost his nerve; and, knowing him as I did, I would have been surprised if he had.

Fifteen minutes later we had all followed Semi's example and gone to our quarters for the night, if not exactly for repose.

CHAPTER VIII.
The Flaming Sword Of The Spirit.

BRYCE and Haddon talked. I know, for the rumble of their voices came to us through the thin partition between their room and ours. And I know Semi Dual worked. I saw the evidences of it the following day in the guise of many sheets of paper covered with sign and symbol, the maze of computations involved in checking up astrological charts—and, too, he told me that he had spent the quiet hours in such fashion, seeking so in his own way to forecast the events of the near future, not only for Lotis and Garston, but to wrest the secret of portending events in the struggle by which we were faced.

Yet when I asked him of his findings it was as though a film was drawn across the clear gray depths of his eyes, and then he answered:

"The ways of the Inscrutable One are strange ways, Gordon, my friend, which in His mercy He has seen fit to veil from the eyes of the flesh, lest fear run in advance of the event itself and so weaken the flesh for its enduring when the time appointed arrives."

And it was not until days had passed that I understood the inward, the knowledge-inspired meaning of his words.

As for Connie and me, like Haddon and Bryce, we talked for some time after we had crept into bed and put out the light. Connie began it.

"I'm glad," she declared. "I never before understood what a werewolf was. I've always had a sort of scary feeling about it, and now it seems it's only a man with the power to make others see what he wants them to—just a hypnotist really."

"That need not surprise you," I pointed out. "It's perfectly in keeping with Semi's assertion that no matter how spooky a thing may seem, there is in reality no phenomenon of any sort whatever that is in any way a contravention of natural laws."

For a minute or more she said nothing, and then: "It was Lotis that afternoon, before we started—her real self—and—she is to have a child."

That was like a woman, and, despite everything else, I laughed. "That's the woman of it—changing subjects without warning. From werewolves to children is quite a jump."

"Very well," she said, "I'll change it again. Your friend Haddon seems to be a person of nerve."

"Nerve? Why, he's all nerve," I agreed. "And to look at him, you'd think anything else, or to hear him talk. Still if he wasn't the sort of chap he is he wouldn't be holding down his present job."

And after that we talked back and forth over the whole thing, as people will, or lay and listened to the voices of Haddon and Bryce. They were ribbing up something between them, too, as it turned out in the morning.

Garston was going after Connie's trunk and taking Andy with him, since the chap was still inclined to be "prudent," and Lotis declared she was going, too, as she was not willing to let Garston risk the return trip by himself.

Dual had left his room early, and I had found him talking with Lotis on the front porch when I arose. There was a bearing in that beyond the fact itself, which hinted to my mind at least that Semi had rather taken charge, and that from now on it would be the white magic of his knowledge of universal force which would be brought into play against Otho Khan's black. And the thought that these two, who understood best the nature of the Mongol's machinations, had been in consultation, brought with it a decided change in my mental atmosphere.

Haddon made the announcement of his and Jim's plans for the day, after breakfast, as we left our chairs.

"If there isn't anything special on for this morning, Bryce and I are going to prowl around a bit. Personally, I've a desire to see the exact character of the personnel out of which our Tartar opponent has been building his 'place of prayer.'"

"Go ahead," said Garston. "These folks aren't apt to molest you in daylight at least. They're the sort that work at night, mostly Mexican peons, with some Hindus and Mongolians, Lotis says, and some negroes. If Khan has really been trying to make anything at all of them, it looks to me as if he'd been doing his building with pretty poor stuff."

"With pliable material, Mr. Garston." Dual took up the subject. "Such as they are the more easily swayed by such considerations as will best serve his ends, may be most easily inflamed by the thought of personal license and the possibility of all that license means. Under the control of either Otho Khan or his lieutenants, they will think his thoughts, and almost unquestioningly carry out his work. It is the same type of material his cult has turned to their purposes in the East—they are working with the mind stuff of those who, being ignorant in a degree, think seldom for themselves."

For a moment Garston said nothing, and then he smiled rather grimly. "Admitting that—admitting even that the man or devil or whatever he is has been deliberately trying to establish one of his rotten brain centers or something of the sort here in the United States, and that they are planning revolution, how about the higher-minded class in this country who have been enriching themselves out of the public pocket?"

"Profiteers, eh?" said Haddon. "That isn't a bad question. How about them, Mr. Dual?"

"They, too," Dual said slowly, "are a class by whom Otho Khan's plans are served—the class, even if not, the cult, to which the man himself belongs—men actuated wholly by considerations of self-advantage—who even while in outward seeming, as it may be, profess a belief in God, yet in their daily walk of life flaunt a violation of His law in His face. They, too, are of those who sow the seed of discord and unrest, having set up in their souls the material altar of self. For was it not said that it is more easy for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of the One who created all life—and was there not an inward meaning in those words which predicates the answer to the question Mr. Garston has raised? No man, my friend, may live to himself alone, since each man, being but an atom, as it were in the mass of mankind, must obey the universal law of all living or else become a menace to the race. Hence must the greed of those who seek an unlawful advantage contribute its part, and no small one, to the growing state of unrest."

Haddon grimaced. "At that rate, some of. the financial gatherings would seem to be about as much one of Khan's places of prayer as this local aggregation, if not more so. Come along, Bryce, let's take a look."

They left. Garston and Lotis and Andy drove off. Remained Dual and Connie and I, with Chang to look after our creature needs until such time as the others got back.

Dual went back to his room and his computations. Connie picked up a book from the living-room table. I went out on the porch.

The sweep of the countryside lay spread out before me under a golden sunlight. Here and there scattered about it I could mark the low-set shape of a house—the home, as it seemed, of some farmer or rancher on a small scale—one of Garston's squatters—one of Otho Khan's people—a spore—a seed of the dark growth of dissension, of red violence and spoliation he was seeking to loose like a scourge of destruction upon the world.

Only it didn't seem possible, as I stood there, looking out toward them from the porch of Garston's house. Nor for the instant did the events of the night before seem more than the incidents of some fantastic story. In the clear light of that cloudless morning it some way balked the credulity of reason to dwell on the facts that last night a shroud had been pinned down to the steps before me, by five heavy-handled knives; that the Mongol had dared to stare in through a window of this house, even in the hypnotically inspired guise of a wolf.

As in those days and nights when once before we had battled with him, there came upon me the feeling that the entire situation was beyond the realms of actual occurrence—that it was no more than a phantasmagoria of weird, distorted, unbelievable appearances, rather than the bitter truth.

I turned my eyes toward the hills to the east. They lay there lifting their summits to the skies, unswayed, unmoved as they had lain for ages. And yet—only the other day—Lotis Garston, the little flower, she whose name was the symbol of immortality itself in certain philosophies of mankind, had sat and faced Nak, Tougchi of Otho Khan—he of the yellow shirt, on their flanks.

Illusion—illusion. It all came to seem but illusion. And yet—I frowned and drew a deep breath of the warm, dry air—Dual, the man I had known and respected above all other men for years, said that illusion was the thing in which such as the Mongol dealt—that it was by such tricks that their ignorant followers were duped. And those who were not ignorant? I paused. And then I smiled slightly. The paradox was plain once I looked at it that way. They, too, were duped by the illusion of self.

She was seated on a broad, low couch where the slight breeze of the morning stole in and set aquiver the tendrils of her soft, blond hair.

"See here," she said, as I approached her and held up the book she had taken before I went out.

I saw that it was the "Imitation of Christ"—the undying monument Thomas A. Kempis left to the world when he passed.

"Sit down," said my wife. "It's Lotis's book, Gordon—and there are passages she has marked. I—it's—looking through it is like looking into her soul. It—oh, see. here—it shows there's something more to us than just mere flesh. Gordon—she's been terribly afraid."

"And for herself, too, I think," said Connie. "You can't blame her. The only wonder is she hasn't gone mad in this devil's nest. But she's brave—the bravest woman I ever knew, and she's been hunting for the sort of strength she found in this. Listen." She read a passage I noted was marked on the margin of the page in ink and notated with a date in the previous week.

"My son, thou art never secure in this life, but as long as thou livest, thou shall always need spiritual armor.

"Thou dwellest among enemies, and art assaulted on the right hand and on the left.

"If therefore thou defend not thyself on every side with the shield of patience, thou wilt not be long without a wound.

"Moreover, if thou set not thy heart fixedly on Me with a sincere wish to suffer all things for Me, thou wilt not be able to bear the heat of this combat, nor to attain to the palm of the blessed.

"Thou oughtest therefore manfully to go through all, and use a strong hand against whatsoever withstandeth thee."

She turned her eyes to me. "Gordon—the date is the same as the day before we left home—the day she saw Nak in the mountains. And here are two more she must have marked the same night:

"If thou canst be silent and suffer without doubt thou shalt see the Lord will help thee—

"Give me strength to resist, patience to endure, constancy to persevere—I am racked with grief, I am burdened with sins, I am troubled with temptations, I am entangled and oppressed with many evil passions, and there is none to help me, none to deliver and save me but thou, O Lord God my Savior, to whom I commit myself, and all that is mine, that thou mayest keep watch over me.

"Gordon—can't you see what she went through? Garston couldn't or wouldn't understand. I'm not saying anything against him. He's brave enough in his way—and he loves her, but I think he thought the whole thing was just the results of what she had been through before, preying on her mind, and she knew it wasn't. At first she suspected, and then she saw Nak and ate was certain—and all the time Garston was making light of her positive knowledge she was thinking of the terrible threats Otho's man had made concerning him. And she had defied him. She was racked with grief, troubled with temptations. Can't you see how she must have sat here and read these words until they actually gave her f strength to resist—constancy to persevere'?"

"Good Lord—yes," I agreed. The Imitation of Christ! The thing was an indication of the change that had come over the slender girl who was Garston's wife, since the day I had first seen her—the beautiful tool Otho Khan had forged for his own use.

And I meant it. Mentally it seemed to me I could see her, sitting as my wife suggested, turning these pages, reading these words, finding within them both a solace and a courage to go steadfastly forward; and yet all the time, thinking of the threats against Garston, her mate, and that unborn life, already condemned to death by the brain of the Mongol necromancer—the lips of Nak, his agent—him of the yellow shirt. That hour had been a sort of Gethsemane; an hour of soul travail, I thought, and became conscious of a fullness in my throat.

I looked at Connie, and found her eyes wet, and still she laughed. "Lotis—Otho Khan taught her, and made her a weapon to defeat his own purpose. That, Gordon, is a sort of divinely wonderful joke."

"A cosmic joke, Mrs. Glace, save that the cosmos is not swayed by any humor or aught save the law of cause and effect."

I turned. Semi Dual had left his room and come out. He sank into a chair and passed a hand across his eyes.

He smiled slightly. "It was an ancient custom of the augurs to seek a predication of the outcome of a conflict in advance of the event itself. I, too, have sought through the night to-read that which is written."

"Aye, I have learned," he said, and went on in that cryptic reply I have already set down.

"Meaning that we're in for some rather bad hours," I said, sensing even then a veiled menace in his words.

"Meaning that a cause set into operation must ever produce an effect commensurate with itself. Wherefore, let uptake a leaf from the book of our opponents and create here a place of prayer, which shall support the strength of her who more than any other is become in this hour a hostage for the welfare of her race."

He had a strangely symbolic way of speaking at times, and for a moment his words gave me a mental picture of Lotis, set apart, standing like some guardian spirit, between the forces of good and evil, holding back the hordes of darkness with a sword of flame—which, after all, was no more than a thing itself born of the spirit. It was a weird conceit, and yet I felt that we were dealing with things, forces outside the ken of the average mind.

"I presume," I said, "that you mean we should support her by an unfaltering confidence in the outcome of this affair?"

"Aye," he agreed. "Let your thoughts create for her a staff upon which she may lean."

"She is the effect of certain causes, Mrs. Glace," said Semi Dual—"a thing raised up for a purpose. Such things have occurred in all ages, whether or not die inward meaning of them has been recognized by man."

CHAPTER IX.
Opposing Forces.

HADDON and Jim got back about one o'clock to a somewhat belated lunch. Their clothing was dusty and they looked decidedly warm.

"Whew!" said Bryce, as he flung himself into a seat. "If I felt like praying, this is the last spot in the world to which I would come, which of course ain't got a thing to do with the plain ordinary hellfire horse-power contained in the human mind. Still, I don't know as I much blame Garston for thinking his wife had the collywobbles instead of a straight tip. Just from the customarily accepted standpoint of devils, this aggregation around here are a sort of disappointing bunch."

"Unless one pins his faith to the big black boy," Haddon amended. "He sizes up to the makings of a hundred-per-cent devil, to my mind, Bryce."

"Him? Oh, well—yes." Jim produced one of his deadly cigars and bit off the end. "He's a nasty brute, all right."

"The only honest-to-goodness devil-devil man in the whole outfit, Mrs. Glace," Haddon replied. "The rest are a pretty meek-appearing lot at first glance, unless one happens to turn around after he's passed them and sees the thing that looks out of their eyes.

"As a matter of fact, I scarcely think they appreciated our trip of inspection. They're riffraff—things human in appearance, if you like, but not such a far cry removed from the beasts. They're living in comparative squalor, in little adobe or rough-frame shacks, and so far as we could see there isn't a white man among them, unless, of course, one is inclined to class the peons as white—which, in the fullest sense, ethnologically speaking, they are not. There's one place where there is a regular village, inhabited by blacks, and it was there we found the big negro.

"Heaven only knows how they got here in the first place, but they are Haitians and Santo Domingoans, I think. At least, the big fellow spoke a French patois, and I heard the Spanish of the West Indies on more than one pair of lips.

"The big man seemed to be the head man of the village or something of the sort, whether because he has some powers of leadership or because of his size I don't know; but he'll scale over six feet if he'll run an inch.

"Bryce and I amply walked down between the shacks they've run up, and although they looked at us pretty hard none of them made any move till we came upon this chap.

"He was sitting in the shade of an adobe wall outside what I fancy is his house, and a girl in a dirty red-print dress was milking a goat not five feet from him. She was catching the milk in a cup, and as fast as she got a couple of ounces this fellow drank it. We stood and watched them for possibly five minutes before either of them saw us, and then the chap scowled, got tip, and came out to where we were standing.

"'What you wan' heah, Blanc?' he said, using the Haitian method of addressing a white, by the simple designation of color.

"I didn't let him realize that I understood French, however, unless of course he read my mind—I'm getting so I feel like I had a glass head since I got into this muddle—and I told him: 'Oh, we're just looking over the country.' Which didn't seem to please him, because he didn't say a thing for a minute; and then he put down his head a little and came back at me with an order:

"Pretty good for a black—dr, what? In fact, it was so confoundedly good that I didn't take him at his word on the instant, and the next thing we found ourselves the center of a crowd. I suppose they'd all been watching us, and came along when they saw the big boy talking to us. Anyway, there they all were, men and women and piccaninnies, milling us about in the road.

"I heard one fellow ask black jack who we were, and what do you suppose he told him—in French, of course? He said:

"And then he sort of leered in my face and repeated his admonition: 'Git out, Blanc.'

"And as a matter of fact we got Some way, not even considering their smell, I didn't consider that crowd healthy, and I had a nation that our lingering for any further conversation might very well result in starting a snail-sized mob."

"Don't ask us," Jim responded, grinning. "No matter what he meant he certainly got ours. The gang gave us right of way, and we took it, and I'm darned if the big boy didn't say something, and a coupla the bunch tailed onto us and trailed us back pretty near to the house, and they didn't make any bones about it either—they didn't care if we knew it or not. Take it from me, that big black is the king pin among them, and they do just about as he says. I'll bet a coupla copecks he's a witch doctor or some sort of thing like that if we knew the truth. That would be about the sort of thing Otho Khan could use."

"Possibly—there is a lot of that stuff in Haiti—in the hinterland back of Port au Prince, as I understand."

"Oh, yes," Jim nodded. "It all fits in, Mrs. Glace. I don't know much about it, but I've heard stories, and they weren't exactly what you might call nice."

"It's a rather filthy cult," said Haddon. "As Bryce says, the stories one hears are not pleasant. They range through every stage of bestiality, up to human sacrifice."

"And," Haddon went on, "it is a fact that neither the peon nor the Hindu nor Mongol draws the line as closely against the black as we do. I'm inclined to agree with Bryce that this thing fits in somehow."

Dual, who had taken no part in the conversation thus far, asked a question. "That you were 'friends of the goat' were his exact words, Mr. Haddon?"

"Well," said Bryce, "he said 'goat,' and I reckon he meant it. But he neglected to state who he had in mind, and us not bein' able to pull these mind-reading stunts, it sort of left Haddon and me in the dark. I've been wondering who was elected for the part. They left five knives on the steps last night—but this guy only mentioned one animal—he didn't seem to be thinking of a flock."

"As a matter of fact," Haddon cut in on the tail of Jim's half-facetious comment, "there is a thing that I've been thinking about for some time, and I might as well ask for information while we're here alone. In a situation like this, where we are dealing with almost transcendental forces, how is either side going to make a move? In a general sense, we know their intentions, and of course equally they are informed of ours—or at least they know we are here to oppose them, and are consequently on guard."

"The point is well taken, Mr. Haddon," said Dual. "You may recall that, last night, I likened this affair to a conflict, a battle, a combat—and indeed the situation is not dissimilar, in its way, from that holding two opposing armies, each of which knows of the other's presence and its object; each of which knows that it may very well be by the other destroyed. In such an impasse there is but one solution in either leader's mind. The problem may only be met in a way your question itself foreshadows. One or the other side must find some way in which it may take the other off its guard."

Haddon nodded. "Well, yes—I can see that. But—there's another matter. As far as I can see, this Mongolian was scarcely ready to strike the blow he had planned, and yet it would seem that he deliberately instructed his lieutenant to divulge those plans to Mrs. Garston and precipitate the struggle at this time."

"Mrs. Garston herself is the answer to that," Dual returned. "She had become a danger to his designs he could not afford to ignore. Her knowledge had become a menace to the whole fabric he was building up, which he realized must be either removed or destroyed. Hence he sent Nak to see what he could accomplish, and his bannerette having failed to move her by either promises or threats, he has rushed to the scene of the impending struggle, to take charge of the further course of the matter himself."

"Flushed him out into the open, anyway," said Bryce. "But where is he? Haddon and I had a half notion that we might get a glimpse of him or at least his lieutenant this morning."

Dual smiled without humor. "Scarcely. The wolf lairs not with the jackals, but in his own place. Let us recall for a moment Mrs. Garston's story of her meeting with Nak. She was seated on the side of the mountain, from which, if we are to accept her narrative fully, Nak suddenly appeared, and into which he vanished after the interview was closed."

Haddon laughed. "Quite so. I've been wondering about that. The explanation naturally presenting itself is some artificially constructed hangout or a cave. Is there such a place up there, or does she know?"

"Returning again to her story," Semi said, "you will recall that her husband returned as Nak withdrew, and that she told him nothing of what had transpired in his absence. I have questioned her at more length about it, and she says she did not look for any entrance into the mountain, but she assures me that Nak appeared to her in the flesh."

"In the flesh?" Haddon began and broke off. "Oh, yes, I see. You mentioned that she herself had been in your quarters that afternoon before we left—the intelligent part of her, that is. These chaps can do the same thing, I fancy."

"It is an ability they employ to no small extent in gaining knowledge or communicating with one another," Dual replied. "As for Mrs. Garston, Otho Khan himself taught her the means in the first place."

Jim chuckled. "An' now he finds he can't control th' woman he taught. But—if he's such a .good little devil, why does he fool around with all these threats and promises and things like that—why doesn't he simply get busy and bump her off?"

"As a matter of fact," Dual said slowly, "Otho Khan, in my opinion, finds himself in a somewhat peculiar position. If you will think back, we have opposed him before, although his presence behind those things we combated in the case of the opium dealer Lee and his white consort, and the later instance of Lotis Garston's father, was something I myself at the time did not fully realize. And Otho Khan has lost five agents of his bidding.

"Lee and the woman and Popoff died. Pitrininski is restrained of his personal liberty, and Lotis herself, possibly because of her nature the strongest tool of them all, has proved a thorn in his side. The selection and training of agents is no easy matter, and it is in my mind that, rather than destroying her utterly, Otho Khan still seeks to bring her to her knees. You must recall again the words of Nak and the fact that last night there were only five knives."

"My aunt!" Bryce exploded. "And we are seven, as the little girl remarked in the graded school reader when I was a kid. Lotis is out of it, at that rate—and who's the other immune party? Whoever he is, it's pleasant for the rest of us."

Haddon smiled rather grimly. "Well, old thing—a gun in the pocket ought to be worth a knife in the shroud, even with their sort of people."

"Only," said Semi Dual, "provided it can be used against them in surprise, Mr. Haddon—otherwise they would not permit its use. Material weapons are of no avail against the employment of such forces of the mind as these we are opposing are wont to use. You fired last night, as I have already explained, only because, despite all his knowledge, Otho Khan was for the moment, through the same force which I and Edward Garston's wife threw against him, taken off his guard."

"An' th' moral of that," Bryce decided, as Semi paused, "is that we'd better take care not to be caught off our guard ourselves. Hadn't we ought to do a sort of sentry-go at night?"

"Last night," Semi told him, "I maintained a vigil which I shall repeat to-night It is a task for one who best understands the things that we oppose. To that end I shall now seek a few hours' rest." He rose and disappeared into his room, leaving us lost in a somewhat tense silence, which Bryce finally broke in a characteristic fashion.

"Surprise, eh? I'd about as leave try to surprise Dual as I would to catch a weasel asleep. How in time is Otho goin' to surprise a bunch in a house set down in open country with nothing around it except a shed for a gasoline buggy and a stable and horse corral? He can't rush us, can he? No matter what he is, this bunch around here are strictly flesh and 'blood, an' I'll gamble on bullets taking effect on them if they try to start a mob. How's he goin' to make th' grade?"

"God knows," Haddon said more seriously than he had spoken yet. He left his seat. "The trouble is, Bryce, Semi Dual is right. We're up against things none of us know anything about, except him and this little wife of Garston's, whom Dual thinks the yellow fiend is trying to reenslave. Just the same, I wouldn't balk a chance to go up and pull him out of his cave or wherever it is he's holed up at the present moment."

"I'm with you." Jim got up quickly. "There's horses out there in the corral. We can take a couple and—"

"Eh?" Haddon stared at her and suddenly he laughed. "Quite right, Mrs. Glace. Bryce, old thing, I fancy we're a bit keyed up. Hello "—as the sound of a horn drifted into the room—"there's our host and hostess. Let's expend our energy in bringing in Mrs. Glace's trunk."

He turned and went out, and the rest of us followed, quite as a matter of course.

Garston was just bringing the dust-covered car to a stop in front of the house. He sprang down and lifted Lotis out.

"Hello—all serene," he recognized our presence. "We left Andy in safety, and I got your telegram, Haddon."

Haddon took it and ripped it open. For the moment, at least, he appeared to have forgotten about the trunk.

I watched him as he drew out the enclosed sheet, read it, and thrust it back into its cover in what might almost have seemed an absent-minded fashion, save for the little characteristic lines of tension that appeared at the comers of his eyes.

"Help any?" I questioned, and he laughed without sound as he put the envelope in his pocket.

"Not much, Glace. My man simply announces that he can't find the party I asked him to cover. The chap seems to have disappeared."

Lotis's lips twisted stiffly into the semblance of a smile, and she spoke before Haddon could answer: "If confirmation were needed, Mr. Glace. It is a long time since I looked into Otho Khan's eyes and found them the open door cf hell, but I have not forgotten his face."

"And there's that," said Jim, as she passed on and began mounting the steps. "Come on, Haddon, let's carry in this trunk."

CHAPTER X.
The Drums.

HADDON and Bryce carried the trunk into the house and set it in the room Connie and I used. She had gone into the room with Lotis, and, presumably at least, Dual still slept. Garston drove the car around to the shed in which it was kept, and put it away, remarking that it had been missing on the way out from the station and he would have to look it over the next day. He came back and joined Jim and Haddon and me on the porch, and we talked. Haddon asked him about the big black, and he scowled.

"I don't know much about him," he said. "I rode down there once or twice. Those blacks are a surly bunch. You'd have thought I was trespassing on their lands, rather than they on ours. I spoke to the sheriff about them, with an eye to driving them out, but Lotis wouldn't have it. She seemed to see farther into this affair than I did, right from the first. For that matter, it all seems impossible to me yet. I don't believe I could swallow it at all if it wasn't for knowing what that Tartar hound tried to lead her into in the past, and my complete respect for Semi Dual's word. He doesn't speak lightly, so I suppose it must have been Khan who looked in through that window last night. Both he and Lotis say so, but—good God!"

For a time there was silence, and then Haddon spoke: "Bryce and I were down there to-day, and the big boy ran us out."

And Garston considered that once more in silence before he replied slowly: "Well, I don't know but you were wise to leave."

"Gosh!" said Jim. "I feel like just before the battle, mother. Gordon, unless we mind our step it's curtains for the firm of Glace & Bryce. What's that play where th' guy yells 'There's some devil fighting here!' just before he gets stuck?"

He grinned and lighted a cigar. Nothing ever served to subdue him for long. He was a creature not much given to nerves. And yet, despite his seeming levity, I am inclined to think that, along with the rest of us, he felt a trifle subdued.

Because, as we sat there in the light of . the late afternoon, we were really in a sense on guard. Both our party and that of Khan, of whatever it consisted, were very much, I thought, like two opposing armies, each in its chosen position, each waiting for the other to make some move. And if I read aright Dual's attitude in the matter, he who was in all seeming our leader was determined that his opponent should move first.

The thing, after all, would seem, then to have narrowed down to a battle of wits, as it were. At least, the weapons to be used, rather than anything of a material nature, were thoughts—the dynamic lances and swords and spears of the human mind. He held them as much things as any other manifestation of force, as I knew, and certainly I had seen them produce some weird effects already—change a pair of axes into seeming serpents that time Lotis had been with us in Semi's own quarters; cause a dagger in the hands of a slender girl to appear a tongue of leaping flame that seared both reason and any semblance of caution out of the brain of a man; and—so far as I knew—it had been responsible for making the face of a man pressed close to a window seem, last night, the head of a wolf staring in through the pane.

They are strange things, thoughts—the things that set into motion by the ionic vibration of the convolutions of the brain—and we live in a sea of them. Sometimes I have even caught myself wondering in how much the things we think we think are the variants of other thought waves impinging against our mental perceptions, and how much wholly our own—if a man is not frequently caught up in a strong current of concentrated thought and swept off in its direction, quit unconscious of the fact that he is being so borne along.

And if you'll look closely at that notion, you may perhaps see how such things as the places of prayer—brain centers, as it were, automatically thinking thoughts inspired by the will of another, creating a very maelstrom of mental force projection—might well contrive to set up some such current that should carry the minds of men to shipwreck, and so serve the ends of those behind the movement—of such creatures as Otho Khan.

There was that remark of Jim's about taking horses and riding up to the mountains in search of the Mongol's bang-out, of the afternoon. More than once I have wondered if it were Bryce individually speaking, or merely his lips automatically responding to some spindrift of the current set up against us by the Mongol's plans. But that's running ahead of the story, and of course I did not suspect, as I sat there with my companions, until Haddon asked a question: "And what did the sheriff say about it?"

"Give me a cigarette," said Garston, and put out a hand for Haddon's case, and ignited one of the paper rolls before he answered: "Why, from the way he talked, I rather thought he'd be glad to clean them out if I asked him. Of course, I'd have had to ask him directly before he could make a move, and I'm not sure even yet but I wish I had. He said if I needed any help all I had to do was to let him know, and we let it go at that. Damn it, it would have been a lot better than this living on your own property in a state of siege."

I glanced at Haddon. It was in my mind that the situation was getting badly on Garston's nerves. Haddon shrugged. "Well, buck up," he advised. "It can't be so long now till the enemy makes a move. The stage seems to be set for the big show."

"That's it," Garston made gloomy rejoinder. "I can't seem to fit into the picture. I can't seem to grasp it. I can't understand the man who brought you out here. And dam it all, I can't even understand my own wife. And at the same time I'd gamble my eternal soul they're both sincere."

"You'd better believe they're sincere," said Bryce. "We had a talk while you were away, and Dual says we gotta be on our guard."

Jim eyed him. "Well, in your instance, Garston, I'd say mainly yourself. You're getting sort of peckish. The way I dope it, Dual's trying a little watchful waiting on Otho. He's making that guy bring anything he feels like starting to him. I've seen him play that sort of trick on more'n one occasion, and believe me, m' son, it works. The hardest guy in the world to fight is th' one that doesn't do a thing you can get hold of, but just gets ready and then holds it, and makes you feel him out."

"Oh, hell!" Garston got up suddenly, tossed away his cigarette, and went into the house.

"Just the same, I think you called the turn on Semi's tactics, Jim," I said at last.

"Somewhat Fabian, eh?" smiled Haddon. "The man's an enigma to me, I admit. He is the greatest theorist and at the same time one of the most practical individuals I ever met."

Jim grunted. "Which is all right, too, Mr. Man, provided always that your theory's correct to start with."

Haddon frowned. He jerked his head toward the living-room door through which Garston had disappeared. "If we've any real weakness in our ranks—that's where it is. And the worst of it is that if I were a devil bent on smashing up such an opponent as the girl herself, it's the point where I'd strike.

"Dual's right when he says all this stuff is nothing more than a certain use of certain laws. The argument is reasonable. It appeals. Consequently it follows that no matter what they pull, it's going to be based on natural law to begin with, and there are certain fundamental principles in life by which we may assume they as much as any other form of life are swayed. They know of them, of course; and why, since they hold nothing under heaven holy, should they not try to turn them to their ends the same as anything else? Those things, as I size them up, are hunger, physical and mental exhaustion, fear, hate, and sex attraction, which we denominate passion on the physical side, and, on a mental basis, love—"

"I was coming to it, old chap," Haddon accepted. "That's true—and it affects both the physical and the higher phases of life. Now, as I take it, these necromancers, sorcerers, devil-worshipers, or whatever they are, have put themselves in a position where in so far as they are concerned the physical existence is about all there is.

"Death for them is death, and nothing else, if we're to accept our friend Dual's words. Well and good. Self-preservation for them then becomes the highest motive in life, since in the day that they die, as the Psalmist puts it, 'in that very day his thoughts perish.' Well and good again. They've raised self-preservation to the nth degree of importance, since anything else means to them a literal blotting out—"

Haddon grinned. "Wouldn't that explain Khan's attitude in regard to Mrs. Lotis Garston? If a man can no longer think beyond self-preservation, the maintaining of his physical welfare and existence, is he capable of assuming that another might prefer actual physical death to the continuance of a certain phase of life? Isn't he banking on that in the final equation to—as Dual suggested this afternoon—whip her back to her knees, cowed, rather than resist him to the bitter last?"

"My Gawd!" said Jim, while I fdt a strange thrill of understanding run through me. "An' if he is—is he overshooting the mark?"

"What do you think?" Haddon countered. "The woman is fey, as die Scotch would put it—she is exalted, as I see it. She feels that the destiny of her nation, her race, is in her hands, and frankly I'm not sure but it is. There's an intangible atmosphere of menace lurking about here, which I can't exactly define. But I can feel it, and—I'm getting to a place where I'm ready to believe it is a thing built up of inimical thought. One can feel the damned things boring into the brain. Well—there goes the sun! Watchman, what of the night?"

We went inside. Lotis, Connie, and Garston were talking together. Dual was standing in front of a phonograph at the other end of the room. He was fond of music, as I knew, and I was not surprised when he selected and put on a record and started the machine.

In a moment the sound of singing filled the room. It was one of the great chorus numbers from "Cavaleria," as I remember, ending in a massed admonition: "Let us think of the Lord!"

It died, and after it there was silence until, as usual, Bryce capped the climax with a comment: "An' I reckon that's good advice in the present circumstances."

Chang appeared and announced supper from the dining-room arch. We filed out for the meal and took our places. Conversation became general for the moment as the food was served.

Garston began a half-humorous relation of some of Andy's comments on the ride to the station that morning, which Lotis suddenly interrupted: "Hark!"

Silence followed her word. We were all on edge, more or less, and that single admonitory caution was enough to cause every tongue to pause.

Into that pause there cut a dull-toned throbbing—a steady, deep, rhythmical thing, like the distant beating of a heavy drum. It crept into and filled the room, till it seemed that the very air we breathed was set athrob by the thing—that not only were we hearing it with our ears, strained now for its falling and rising cadence, but that we actually drank it in.

It was insistent. It rose and fell like the slow beat of unseen waves of sound beating on an invisible beach. But it never ceased. It went on and on. There was an odd quality about it, sudi as I had never heard before in my life. It repelled, and yet in some subtle, inexplicable way, at the same time, it called.

I saw Lotis glance at Semi. Her breast swelled, lifting her bust beneath the masking fabric of her dress.

And Haddon answered: "Tomtoms, Mrs. Glace. I fancy they're in the negro village. I've heard them in the West Indies more than once. They are frequently a concomitant part of a sort of dance. Thrum, thrum, thrum—" His words died and gave place to the voice of the drums. He turned and glanced at Jim, and I knew as well as though he had spoken that he was thinking of the big black they had seen in the morning.

Thrum, thrum, thrum—as regular as the beating of our hearts, as we sat there, as the ticking of a clock. It was eery—there was a vague note of menace in their voicing as it carried to us through the night. There was a primitive note about it that seemed to get into the blood, and in some strange, not-to-be-understood way, actually fall into step with the rhythm of the pulse—or rather to regulate that rhythm to itself, whipping it with a lash of sound, stroke on stroke as it sank and rose, so that in the end it was as though the thud of the drums, the hammer of the heart-beats, became intermixed and blended in the brain, till it was hard to tell whether it pulsed with the thrust of the leaping blood or the tempo of the drums.

On and on, without cessation—on and on. There crept over me a strange sensation; a feeling of being caught up, seized, held helpless in a strange vortex of sound. On and on in a deadly monotony of unending repetition—on and on. It was growing actually painful. It was no more a thing of one sense alone.

I glanced at Bryce, and saw him sitting motionless, the edge of the table gripped by one heavy-fingered hand. I turned my eyes to Haddon, and found him also motionless, tense. Connie shuddered. Her eyes turned toward me, wide-lidded.

And suddenly I understood. That deadly repetition of a short series of rising and falling notes—there was the same hypnotic quality about it that lurked in any other monotone. By an effort I steadied myself and considered the point.

Drums they might be, beating in a negro village, as Haddon said; but they were more than that. They were the drums of the devil; of the cohorts of evil. They were the drums of Otho Khan, the Legionary of the Dark Star, beating the advance. And even as the realization came upon me, the slender girl at the end of the table opened her lips. Words crossed them:

"My friends, in the name of the Long Suffering One, defend yourselves. Nak—Tougchi of Otho Khan—the fingers of his mind and those of his creatures, of the black worker of unclean wonders and them with him, are thrusting against my brain."

Our eyes turned to her. She was sitting rigid, her eyes wide as they were always wide when she faced those things born of the interplay of forces we were less able to understand, translating them to our comprehension in a measure at least through the medium of her tongue.

"Resist them," she went on. "They are gathered together in the place of the drums. Their minds are being gathered up by the mind of Nak and his unclean priest—they are being knit together—made as one. And it is against us the thoughts of it are turned. They are seeking to break a passageway into our minds—to reach to our souls and affright them. Their minds are become in this hour the mind of Nak and Otho Khan. It is giving off numbing force. They are turning it upon us. May God veil His face from them for ten thousand times ten thousand years. Stand firm!"

Thrum—thrum—the voice of the drums. They were beating, beating. It was like the sound of some monstrous club—some battering-ram woven out of sound. It was beating, beating against our brains, even as the girl there, with her dark hair and eyes, had told us—it was seeking to break them down, numb them with its damned hypnotic suggestion—or at least to tune them to the rhythm of the thoughts behind them—the force of the things born in evil minds. My breath clogged—I felt my muscles tense as though to resist some test in a physical fashion. And all at once I felt that—there was something in the room.

Lotis was panting. I watched the rise and fall of her white throat above her gown in something like fascination. In a way it seemed to me that she struggled against something, to be felt even though it were not seen. And I sensed it, too. I can't find other words to express it. There was nothing to see or bear or touch, save the ordinary objects all about me, and the throb of the drums—and yet it was as though we sat there enveloped in some dogging influence—some deadly lethargic vapor, caught up and hurled toward us, wave upon wave, with each fresh propelling pulse of sound.

I struggled against it. I put out a hand and took that of my wife and held it. This—this, I found myself thinking, was the power of thought. We were caught in, beaten against by a consciously directed current of it, which we might either resist or yield to. And if we yielded—then unseen, unrecognizable save in its effects, but none the less deadly, it would carry us to a purposed doom. Thought. Never again might one tell me that thoughts were not things.

I looked at Garston. His face was white. There were drops of moisture on it—beads of perspiration. His lips were parted. He stared dully before him. His expression was that of one caught in some dazing spell.

"The Angel of Jehovah encampeth round about them who fear Him. What, then, is the hand-beat on the head of a drum?"

Dual spoke calmly, almost, it seemed, without emotion. His words fell steady, in nowise shaken.

Garston turned his dulled eyes to him. He passed a hand across his face, and laughed in a somewhat nervous fashion, sat up sharply in his chair.

I looked at Semi. He sat as he had sat from the beginning—but there was a spark, a leaping fleck of light, in the depths of his gray eyes, and on his firm lips there rested a half smile.

It was like a dash of cold water in the face of one half asleep. What was the hand-beat on the head of a drum? In a manner the question seemed to tear away the entangling coils of thought from about me. What was it—what, after all, but the beat of a hand on the head of a drum? Illusion—it was all illusion.

I tore myself loose from the last dinging tentacle of thought that had held around me. I took a long, deep breath. I became conscious of an utter silence. It baffled me for a minute, filled me with a sense of something lacking. And then I knew what it was.

The drums were no longer beating. Their voice had died, and it was as though with the cessation of their rhythmic measure we were lost in a soundless void. And it was into that utter stillness Garston's wife spoke in sudden warning: "They come!"

CHAPTER XI.
A Duel Of Minds.

"WHAT'S that?" Garston stood up at his end of the table, staring at her. "What do you mean—who's coming?"

"They who were gathered together where the drums beat—they run toward us like a pack of wolves. They are led by the black worshiper of devils, and"—her lips curled in what seemed scorn—"Nak lurks behind them."

"My mind sees them." She turned toward him. "The drums have wrought them to a frenzy. If perchance they can, they will destroy us by one quick thrust now that, as they hope, they have weakened us by their concentration upon us, while Nak stood in their midst and chanted the prayers for the dead."

The thing struck me as unbelievable. That they would attempt to rush us, would resort to plain, every-day material force, was the last thing I had expected; but—there was no mistaking her words, and Haddon and Bryce were up. I rose also.

Haddon looked to see that the magazine of his was full as he asked the question. No doubt but he meant to fight.

"They will not be needed, Mr. Haddon," she said. "Come and await them." She turned and walked into the living-room in a strangely deliberate fashion, stopped beside a small wicker basket on the table—a work basket—took from it a ball of pure white jam, crossed to the door, opened it, and went out onto the porch; and I noted that her eyes were no longer wide, but somewhat narrowed, and that there was a little smile on her mouth.

"Close the door and remain in the shadow," she directed, seeming, save for the oval of her face, little better than a shadow herself in the deeper darkness cast by the roof above us.

Bryce complied and left us standing there facing nothing save the empty, moonlighted expanse of the rolling terrain.

"Well—where?" he began, and broke off at the suddenly upsurging rush of a mass of human forms across the top of a bit of rising ground before us.

It was dark, that body of men—a black, forward-sweeping crowd. And it came silently, swiftly, moving with amazingly little noise. Bare feet were the reason, I suspected—feet that ran with no more than a whisper of footfalls in the dust and sun-dried grass. They bore straight down upon us like the shadow of some cloud, wind-driven under the round wheels of the moon. Only as their mass came closer could one pick out the individuality of racing bodies, the play of moving limbs.

Before them ran a giant—a huge hulk of a man. He seemed clad in a sort of robe that flapped out behind his shoulders like the wings of some dark bird, beating the air beneath them, and made his great size a doubly weird and monstrous thing.

"Wait," Lotis stayed him. "This thing is to me. For did not Nak tell me that it was not in the mind of Otho Khan that I should be destroyed? Mr. Bryce, will you open the door again?"

Jim complied. Light streamed out. It ran over the porch and down the steps in a golden flood, to mingle with the silver of the moon.

And Lotis stepped into its yellow path. She stood there, straight and slender, head thrown a little bit back. Her voice rose.

"Hai! Nak, Tougchi of Otho Khan, who runs behind the pack like a jackal waiting for scraps of offal, bid its leader stop and thyself stand forth!"

But it was scarcely needful for her to cry Nak to check the rush of his party. The thing had been partly at least accomplished by the opening of the door, the outpouring of the stream of light, with its tacit message that they were cheated out of the advantage of any surprise in their attack.

They lost pace, as it were, faltered, and as Lotis's words whipped across the space between them and herself, they came to a jostling pause. In the Tight of the cloudless moon they stood there. The sound of their breathing became a panting. I saw they were negroes, in so far as I could judge.

"Nak! Must I call thee twice?" Lotis spoke again and addressed the giant negro. "Well, blade servant of Otho Khan, where is his lieutenant?"

How she was so certain that Nak was with them I never knew, unless, as she had already said, she felt him, sensed his presence; but certain it is that as she asked the question the huge black half turned his head behind him, and that a man's voice answered:

The mass of men gave way, and a shadowy shape strode through them and advanced toward where Lotis stood. As it came nearer, it assumed the guise of a man wrapped in some dark muffling cloak.

He neared the bottom of the steps, and Lotis threw up her arm in its rigidly, palm-forward, arresting gesture.

Nak halted. It came to me that things were not going exactly as he had hoped. Already his plans had miscarried, in that his attack had been held up at the instant it was being driven home. But he carried it off badly nonetheless. He bowed.

"Nak hears and obeys, Lotis, sometimes called Little Flower," he said in an ironical tone which Lotis ignored.

"What," her voice came again in question, "is the meaning of this? I am surprised at thee, Nak—yet not in the manner thou didst hope. Didst rate me so poorly, then, that ye thought to take me offguard and overwhelm me by a mere rash of man bodies—which, failing to take me unawares, paused at the hint of a light, not knowing what might lie behind it? Thought ye, Nak, to conquer me by means of such a force?"

"They will advance again, and I give the word, thou foolhardy one," Nak rejoined, with the sound of a snarl of rage in his throat. "You are playing with fire, sorceress—take heed lest ye be burned. Know you not that I have it within my power to call other forces to my aid—aye, to summon the legions of the air to do my bidding and I have need of their assistance?"

"Aye! Dost doubt it? Then behold!" The man stooped suddenly and caught up a bit of sun-dried weed-stalk from the ground at his feet. He had been held up, balked. It must have been in his brain that the men behind him had weakened in their morale—that they could best be strengthened by a demonstration of his powers, I think. At least it is the only explanation I can offer of what followed.

He caught up die brittle stem of the dead plant, and as he straightened he broke it in two in his hands. Lifting them to the moonlighted heavens, he waved them, and cast them from him—and as they left his grasp they were no longer bits of vegetation—they became two spots of faintly luminous light—light that seemed to spread, to quiver, contract, draw into itself, solidify—assume the shape of evil-visaged men. They stood there on either side of him who had called them into being, dose to the foot of the steps, and Nak stood between.

A whisper of outrushing breath came from the press of human bodies behind ten. It was a thing between amazed unbelief and a startled groan. They stood tee dark statues without motion—storing, staring at the two apparitions that glowed on either side of Nak as with inward flames.

I felt a cold chill shake me, even though I knew I was beholding no more than a further demonstration of the powers of the human mind. For the thing was uncanny, and the things beside Nak seemed real beyond any doubting. They were like men incrusted in a shimmering armor. They shone; they sparkled under the moon in a sort of silvery glitter.

And then Lotis laughed. The sound bubbled out of her throat. "Thou trickster," she said tauntingly, "thou builder of moonbeams—thou callow standard-bearer of Otho Khan—thou Mongol follower at heel—think ye to affright me with the pretty toys of thy brain? A sign, Nak—thou hast given me a sign. And I answer it thus—"

Swiftly she unrolled a bit of the ball of yarn she had taken as she passed through the living-room, and broke it off. She extended it before her. It was a thread of white wool one instant, and the next—it was a serpent, a writhing thing of flame in her hands!

"Thou sayest I am playing with fire!" she cried. "And thou sayest truth, Nak—for once the truth falleth from thy tongue. Here is my answer. Take it!"

She flung the serpent from her. Full into the face of one of the thought-forms Nak had materialized she flung it, and it took hold—or seemed to. Even as a snake flung into the face of a man, it seemed to fasten upon the face of the thing before her and hang there swaying by its fangs.

At the contact the creature of the Mongol's brain was shaken. It quivered, seemed to slowly expand. It became again no more than a nebulous cloud of luminous light—faded, more and more—dissolved—trailed away on the air of night like a thread of vapor—was gone—it and its fellow. For the two forms faded out at once.

"And as for thy men—thy jackals—" Lotis's hands were plucking off other bits of yarn. She began hurling them from her. And each, like the first, became a writhing thing of flame as it left her hands. The air grew full of them, twisting, darting, writhing shapes of fire thrown out beyond her toward the huddled press of men.

"As for thy men, Nak—let my serpents deal with them. Let them take care lest my serpents bite them and make of them food for worms."

It was as though the dark mob shuddered, not singly but altogether—as though it were possessed of a single form. It gave back, swayed, yielded, broke utterly apart and fled, panting, mouthing, crying out as it split asunder and ran, leaving Nak standing there alone before her under the moon. It vanished over the rising ground, and Lotis spoke again:

He answered her hoarsely. "Thou she-devil—thou sorceress—may Erlik seize thee!" he screamed. "May thy bones rot and thy flesh! May the worms make of thee a corruption!" Suddenly he leaped toward her.

And then—Lotis cast the ball of yarn straight at Nak. It passed over his shoulder and fell behind him as she held the end of the woolen strand. It curled about him and—it burst into flame. Half up the steps he came again to a stand.

Her laugh came tauntingly once more. "Hold, Nak—for the fingers of my mind have seized and are pressing your brain—else why stand ye now thus ringed with fire? Thou yellow dog—thou art beaten—and ye know that thou art beaten—and that there remains naught for thee save to slink back with a report of thy failure to thy master, whose soul is foredoomed to Erlik, and say to him—to Otho Khan, who taught her—that she against whom he sent thee is yet strong, and that though she held thee within her power, with the ability to slay thee, she spared thee in order that thou mightest return and say to him these things."

"Thou art a fool," said Nak; "and strong though thou be, think not but he who made thee—him thou once called master-r-is stronger than thee or Nak, his servant!Wherefore tempt not too greatly his strength."

"Go!" Lotis said, and lifted her arm, pointing. "Get thee back to him and say that to-night thou wast beaten by a girl whose fingers held some bits of string, which became serpents at her bidding, because once Nak faced her he was not strong enough to combat the will of her brain—wherefore those who came with him to destroy saw things it was not best they should have seen; saw Nak beaten down before her; saw the serpents destroy the things he had formed to renew their courage, because Nak was no longer able to hold the balance of his-mind. And say to him to teach thee better before he sendeth thee again. Get thee gone, thou lick-heel—thou yellow snake—thou one already damned—thou worm!"

"I go," he answered thickly, and retreated down the steps. Turning his back, he went swiftly off across the level stretch before the house, a darkly moving shape that topped and disappeared beyond the ridge of rising ground.

And as he vanished Lotis turned and walked into the house, to sink limply into a chair and grip fast hold of its arms.

Bryce closed the door after we had entered. "Well—anyway, we've won the first battle," he declared.

Lotis turned her eyes toward him slowly. She was pale, panting. Momentarily she appeared on the verge of collapse.

"I'm afraid it was little more than a skirmish, Mr. Bryce," she replied. "They—they are still feeling us out—testing our strength. If—if we liken this struggle in which we are engaged to a battle, then this was a sort of demonstration of force."

"And it was forced back," Jim persisted. "You certainly had the whole works nicely hypnotized. When I saw that Nak party take that stick and make them—those—"

"Well, whatever they were, I knew it was a trick, but just the same it gave me a cold chill, and then bingo—you began to fling around snakes."

Lotis smiled faintly. "You are right, Mr. Bryce—both Nak's demonstration and mine were, at least in a measure, tricks—mentally projected pictures. That is why, when he saw my little snakes and realized the effect they would have on his ignorant negroes, it broke the concentration that was holding his false angels together, and they disappeared. Still"—she frowned slightly knitting her brows in a perplexed fashion—"I am surprised that he should have sought to employ so material a force as a mob."

"Don't you think," Haddon suggested, "that he may have had a double purpose? Isn't it possible that he felt that even if they didn't succeed in rushing us, some of those men might get hurt, and the whole thing, in so far as they were concerned, be converted into a blood feud between them and us?"

"I think, Mt. Haddon," said Dual, who had not spoken since we left the table, but had acted the part of a spectator throughout the entire encounter, "that you are very possibly right. It would be quite in keeping with the Mongol's plans to engraft a variety of guerilla warfare of a purely material nature upon all else. Wherefore are we victors, in that no one was injured and the attacking party has become imbued with a wholesome respect for the powers they now know Mrs. Garston to possess. My child "—he approached the chair in which she was sitting and stood behind her—"thou art weary."

"Aye. He was strong—Nak, Tougchi of Otho Khan, was strong," she answered him slowly. "His mind and mine grappled one with the other. And the force of his was like a sword seeking to beat down mine before it."

"Lotis!" Garston took a swift step toward her. "You don't mean he nearly beat you?"

Her eyes widened swiftly in her white, white face. Into the latter there crept an expression of startled horror. "I—" she began, and turned swiftly to Semi. "Master—he was strong. It was all I could do to beat down his mind and destroy the forms it had created. But I beat him—I beat him!" Her voice quivered as tense as a breaking string. "Nak and his creatures fled before me. I—"

"Peace." Dual's hands came down and framed her face, swept upward across her temples. "Peace, Lotis—when one is weary, should he trouble his soul with problems? Nay, rather cast all doubt from thee and rest ye—sleep." His eyes bent upon her. He leaned above her. "Sleep—Lotis—thou weary one—sleep—rest."

The breath seemed to sigh out of her as he spoke. She relaxed. Her body sank down in all its slender length.

"Come," Semi then addressed Garston; "carry her to her room, nor seek to disturb her with any further question. For the time her labors are ended. I shall watch through the night."

Garston took her up. She lay like a child in his arms. He carried her to the door of their room and through it.

"And this is the modem twentieth-century world," Haddon said as they disappeared.

You bet. And that's why what they'd have called witchcraft a couple of hundred years ago is simply hypnotism now," said Jim. "She certainly handed it to Nak." "And it nearly wore her out." Haddon turned on Semi. "Mr. Dual, are these fiends exhausting her completely? Is she going to break?"

Into the eyes of the man he questioned I saw leap the strange pin-point of fight they sometimes held in their depths. "Nay, not so, Mr. Haddon," he said m a way that made me feel sure he was no more than voicing the results of his study of Lotis's own astrological chart. "She is a sword of flame in a fragile scabbard. Yet I think not that either sword or scabbard shall be destroyed. If there be any weakness about her it is not of the spirit, but of the flesh. Hence it is not the spirit of her that is weary, but the flesh that did its bidding, and in so doing drove back the forces of evil to-night at no little cost to itself."

"I ain't denyin' that," Bryce declared quickly. "It must have took some punch to put over that stunt."

"It is an old trick," said Semi Dual, "and one employed for ages by those who knew the art. The sorcerers of Dai Nippon use it, the magicians of other lands—call it mass hypnotism or conscious thought-form projection, as you please, it is a deliberate employment of mentally transmuted force. There is a duality in all things, Mr. Bryce, even in the serpent she chose as her weapon. On the material plane its meaning is material, wholly of sin and death, but on a higher plane it stands as the symbol of that wisdom which, rightly employed, shall lead to a higher life, and man interprets it according to the light within him.

"Hence were the men of evil driven this night before it, and she who used it to confound them, and those who stood behind her, preserved—even as the same force called Nak's thought forms into being and enabled her to destroy them. For all force, being one, the results of its employment depend wholly upon the manner and purpose for which it is used.

"This, then, my friends, is the dividing line between what we call evil and good, the dual aspect of the eternal quality by which men may become ennobled, uplifted, or by their own acts utterly destroyed."

Dual rose. "Otho Khan," he said slowly, so that each ward took on its fullest meaning, "was created by, and may not too long defy, the laws of universal force." He was as calm, as unmoved by the deadly forces that played like unseen lightnings about us as I had ever seen him. There was that quality which had first induced the girl now sleeping the sleep of exhaustion to call him Master, about him as he stood there. It came to me that in standing back, in permitting her to meet the issue of this night unaided save by his supporting presence, he had been but as one about to engage himself in a conflict—one trying the strength of the weapon given him to use—that if, as she said, Otho Khan had been testing the strength against him, then Semi Dual also had made a test—had weighed and appraised anew the metal of her he likened to a sword. The thought was arresting. In what guise would the Mongol sorcerer next move? And all at once there came again the sound of drums.

CHAPTER XII.
Attack.

Thrum, thrum—the voice of the drum. The night grew full once more of the rhythmic beating sound.

He paused a moment and went on: "If we were down there now I suppose we'd find them holding a sort of devil dance around a fire. But between you and me, after what they got up here this evening, they're a good deal like boys whistling through a wood. Naturally die big chap is trying to whip them back into line. He'll work spells, mumble incantations, make ju-ju against the thing that made 'em run. He's got to save his face somehow, and I fancy he's at it. There's a lot for both him and that chap Nak to explain about the failure of their plan."

"Well," said Bryce, "that's up to them. And here's a funny thing. When they started them drums earlier this evening it rather got on my nerves, but now—it ain't nothin' but a sound."

I nodded. I felt the same way about it. The ceaseless thudding was as plainly audible as it had been before, and yet in some subtle fashion it had lost its first effect. Save for the slight annoyance of its continuation it no longer disturbed me in the least. It had become no more than the concomitant accompaniment of a primitive racial dance. I could even picture mentally the scene called up by Haddon's words—a fire, and the dark bodies of men and women leaping about the flames in time to the tempo of the drums.

"One might explain that, Mr. Bryce, by the fact that their thoughts are fastened no longer upon our affairs, but on their Own," said Semi Dual. "Nak or their leader, or both, are working not upon us but them. They will dance themselves into a frenzy—the result of which will be a sort of physically induced auto suggestion, out of which they will emerge when the accompanying exhaustion shall have passed with their courage in a measure renewed. It is one way in which the lower grades of devil-worshipers of all races bring about their results. The dance produces for the time being an intense mental excitement, an actual erythema of the brain, inside the duration of which the individual may do and say strange things."

Semi Dual's lips twitched into a slight smile. "Why not, Mr. Haddon, since all creative force is one and man himself is no more than the thought form projected from the creative mind?"

"Eh?" Haddon stared. "The same sort of thing as Nak evoked to-night, only more enduring, do you mean—actually—or comparatively speaking?"

"Actually. And again why not, since as it is below so it is above, and the microcosm is but the tiny cosmos?" Dual replied.

"Whoa!" Bryce exploded. "Micro means mightly little. Come along, Haddon, let's go to bed before he gives me grounds for calling you a germ."

He was irrepressible, as always, and even Semi smiled again. "It is as well," he agreed. "After all, we gain little by discussion. Man is—in the eternal scheme of things—a light set within a lantern. And it is within his power to elect whether the light within him shall be even like the brain shapes Nak called into being, shall become as though it had never been, or bum with a steady radiance that shall dispel the darkness of illusion from his mind. Good night, my friends."

He turned toward the door of his room. Bryce and Haddon sought their own. Connie and I went into ours.

But I could not sleep. Long after the soft breathing of my wife told me she had sunk to slumber I lay listening to the throbbing of the drums. They did not disturb me. Rather they became merely a background against which my brain built pictures, relived all that had been up until now—recalled Lotis from the time I had first seen her until to-night when Bryce had opened the door at her bidding and she had stepped into the pathway of the yellow flood of light, had called Nak from behind the attacking ranks of his brain-slaves, to his confounding, and ran on into the future in vague conjectures of what was yet to be. No, I could not sleep.

In the end I gave it up and rose. Moving slowly, I opened the door of our chamber and passed out. Save for the moonlight now streaming into it from the west, the living-room was dark. But there was a thread of light beneath Semi's door. I stole toward it and rapped.

He had doffed the garments of everyday modern man—the gray suit, the soft dove-colored shirt of silk, the shoes he had been wearing—and put on again his white and purple robe. Seen so with the light of the lamp behind him, he seemed more than ever the Master Lotis called him. It came to me that before I rapped he had been sitting there a silent watcher, in a posture of repose. A watcher—yes, surely a watcher indeed—he whose strong mind reached out and read the meaning of the very stars. I voiced Haddon's remark, of hours before. "Watchman, what of the night?"

And he answered, "The wheel turns and the potter thumbs his clay, my friend. And some of it shapes into useful vessels, and some of it into shards."

The wheel turns. It was like him who spoke so of the round of human life to say that. And I thought it hinted at a knowledge far beyond any I possessed—based on the predications he had himself deduced from his study of those astral charts upon which I knew he had worked.

Into the silence that followed nay words came the throb of the drums and then he spoke. "That which is written upon the wheel one may read with the eye of knowledge. He is a fool who seeks to stay the wheel in its course. For what is written is written by the hand of IBn® by whom the wheel was set into motion and toward whose ends it works. Wo unto him who stands in its path, for him it shall crush."

"It is in my mind that before this matter is ended I and the Legionary of Evil shall stand face to face, yet net before other things have come to pass."

He spoke with a calm assurance that gave me pause. He expected to stand face to face with the Mongol necromancer—even as Lotis to-night had faced Nak. At least that was how I interpreted his words. And—that would be a meeting worth seeing tad one in which the Legionary of Evil, as Semi called him, would need ail of his unclean arts. I found my heart beating with a quickened pulse.

"Man," he said, "being given knowledge beyond certain things, were like a child set in the midst of living coals—or like one affrighted rushing upon destruction through seeking to evade his doom. In naught is the wisdom of the Creator more manifested than in the real. He has hung between man and the future, that veil era which is written 'Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,' my friend, yet which as man's wisdom increases, is steadily unrolled before him like unto an infinite scroll."

I gave it up m the major sense. "At least," I said, "what of her you call a sword of flame?"

"She approaches the supreme test," he told me. "Wherefore I have bidden her rest."

The supreme test. Again I sat silent and sensed the throb of the drums. The supreme test. His words hinted at vague, unknown things, But they said to me more. They spoke to me of a knowledge that inspired them—carried with them, as it were, the assurance that whether he chose to speak plainly of those things that were to be or not, he himself was aware of their nature, was convinced that they themselves were the steps by which he would be brought at the last face to face with Otho Khan. And then—

So that was it. The supreme test was to be a test indeed in that whatever it was, it would be of a nature to affect Lotis herself directly—a thing which, if she knew of it in advance, might lead her toward the moment when it should come upon her, shaken, and unnerved by its contemplation. And because of that Semi Dual was withholding ail knowledge of it from her, and from the rest of us.

I looked again into his face. It was inscrutable. It told me nothing more than has words. And I was so blind as I sat there that, in spite of all I knew and had seen of the situation since we came to this place, I felt no least suspicion as to the nature of the test to which he referred.

Still there was a confidence inspiring something about the very calm in which he seemed wrapped, a calm, born of knowledge as I now felt assured. In his words, his expression, his entire demeanor, there was that subtle quality of the man who quietly awaits the approach of an individual or an event he personally knows he is strong enough to meet. It seemed to radiate from his very presence—that subtle aura of strength. It steadied me. I got up.

"Very well," I said. "At least I feel better for our talk. I'll go back to bed now and see if I can catch a nap. Good night."

"Good night, Gordon," he responded, half closed his eyes and settled back in his chair with folded hands.

And it was so I left him, sitting, his face turned away from the lamp light as I retraced the way to my room.

And I slept until morning. The sun was bathing all the world in its golden glory when I opened my eyes and realized the night was passed. Another night, and this was another day, I thought, as I rose and began to dress before waking Connie. And I wondered what this latest day would bring forth.

That it would bring forth anything at all there was nothing to indicate save my own knowledge of the reason for our presence in this house. I heard the muffled sound of Chang's banging his kettles and pots. I heard Haddon's voice addressing Bryce. Everything was commonplace enough. In fact, there was an element of the commonplace in the whole thing from first to last that was hard to harmonize with those periods when the play of almost transcendental forces blazed forth.

Lotis appeared very much herself and smiling. Her sleep seemed to have done her good. Indeed, I fancied that if anything she greeted us all that morning with a renewed confidence similar in a way even not due to the same causes that had given me a kindred feeling. In fact, when Bryce asked her after breakfast if she had heard the renewed sound of the drums, she shook her head.

"I heard nothing. Did they start them again? I suppose they were trying to overcome the effect of my little snakes," she said and laughed.

In fact, of all our party, Garston was the only one who might have been said to seem in any way depressed. And as far as that was concerned, he really said nothing. Perhaps that was what gave the impression. He was more than usually silent and took little part in our talk.

After some half-hour spent in the living-room he referred to the need for looking over his car and announced his intention of attending to it at once.

I heard the sound of the motor, turning over, as the machine was run out of the shed that served as a garage.

Now and then the voices of one of the three drifted in from the rear of the house.

Connie and Lotis were talking together on the living-room couch, where they had established themselves.

I found a book and settled myself to read. The work proving of an interesting nature, I confess that I completely lost myself. Otho Khan and all his works of any kind whatever—demonology—necromancy—the endeavor to set up one of his places of prayer here in this corner of the nation, slipped for the time being completely out of my mind.

By degrees, though, the sound of the women's voices attracted my attention. It was a chance word that first told me they were discussing the afternoon before we left home—the afternoon when, as Connie had declared, Lotis appeared to her.

"I—felt that I had to see you, Connie darling," she said. "And—I really hoped that after you knew, you would come—and you did—and I never can thank you. But I'm so glad to have you here. There are two ways in which .the thing can be done. One may do it for himself after he has learned, or another may do it for him—some one he trusts enough to allow him to control his mind. It begins as an ordinary hypnosis under those conditions. The one to whom you have surrendered your mind puts your objective brain asleep, and then sends your other mind anywhere he wishes, and—you can hear and see things as plainly in that condition as though you were in the flesh. Everything is equally as real. I saw you that afternoon as plainly as I do this morning. Myself I began in the second way after I went to live with Otho Khan at the time of my father's death. As you know, I thought Him my friend. And I let him send my consciousness anywhere he wished. Afterward he taught me how to do the same thing myself, but—you can see how before that he had gained the complete mastery of my mind."

"He tricked you in that as in everything else," I cut in. "The man's a fiend—and he had plenty of reason for wanting you in his hands."

She nodded. "He meant to use and destroy me. I—thought of that the day Nak came to me in the mountains. I thought of it and knew that in all he said he was speaking with a lying tongue, save in the threats he uttered. And I knew then he would carry out if he could. I—listen!"

"Why—no, I don't," I returned, conscious that in the interval between her bid for silence and her question no slightest sound of voices had reached my ears.

Lotis's lips parted. Her eyes widened swiftly. She rose—not suddenly, but slowly, the motion starting at her hips, running up the slender length of her torso, extending downward through her thighs in a sort of increasing muscular ripple that brought her to her feet at last.

But Lotis paid her no attention. For a moment after she had risen she stood leaning a trifle forward with a strange, a dreadful sort of startled horror beginning to form in her face.

And then she began running, darting across the living-room and into the hallway that led to the rear and through it.

I moved to follow. Connie hurried to my side. Together we ran into the hallway and emerged through a rear door.

Lotis stood there beside the machine. Its hood was raised. Several of its plugs had been taken out and lay on the foot-board. But of the men who had been at work upon it there was no sign. They had disappeared.

CHAPTER XIII.
The Sword Unsheathed.

"ED." Garston's wife whispered the word as we joined her and turned. "He isn't here," she said dully. "He is gone. They are all gone."

"Sure," I agreed. "They're all gone. At that rate they've gone somewhere together."

Because frankly at the moment it appeared to me as the most probable explanation, and I never dreamed what had actually occurred.

"Where?" Lotis turned her head slowly, sweeping the rolling country with wide-lidded eyes.

I followed the direction of her glance. I saw nothing save the horse stable and the corral beyond it.

Chang appeared to consider. "Him lide af'er man wha' took one horse," he declared at length. "I think maybe so him mean for steal 'im. Misser Glarson say 'damn he hide,' an' run for horse; Misser Bryce, Misser Haddon, him run, too—catch horse an' ride like debbil. Not come back yet, I not know."

And even then it was hard to understand, hard to believe, that Garston, Bryce and Haddon were gone, that our party was cut in half; that we who had been warned to be instantly on guard; had been, as it were, caught napping; had fallen victims to the machinations of that devil worker, Otho Khan; had been tricked by so simple a ruse as the sending of a seeming prowler to steal a horse out of the corral in broad daylight. Yes, the thing was so fiendishly simple, and at the same time so diabolically clever that even as Chang made his statement and stood watching us out of his emotionless brown eyes, I found it hard to believe. For what owner of property would not seek to retrieve it if he beheld one taking it off? And Jim and Haddon had gone to help him regain it, of course. I found myself balking the accepting of the thing as other than it seemed.

Not so Lotis, however. She was deathly white as she stood there, and I noticed that she swayed. For a moment her lids closed, quivered. And then her voice came brokenly:

"Otho Khan! It is thus he strikes at my soul." Her head went back. She lifted her face to the cloudless sky above it. "Allahou—God!"

And in that instant I think she forgot all—everything except her loss and the possible means of retrieving it, of course.

Lotis moved before us slowly, like one feeling her way. I saw one of her hands groping along the wall of the passage, as though it were serving to guide her. She reached the living-room and passed inside it.

Dual stood there. We were on her heels and I saw him. He had left his own room and had come out. It was as though he were waiting for Lotis's coming, I thought.

She went toward him, still in that strange, almost mechanical fashion, and before she reached him she paused.

"Master," she said. "He has beaten me. Otho Khan—may Erlik seize and devour his soul; may God see that he suffers the torment of the damned in hell—he who worships Satan has taken my husband while I sat talking in this room. And not until he was within the accursed one's clutches did my soul speak to my brain saying that he was lost, so that I rose and went outside and found him gone, and the men—Bryce and Haddon—with him, and learned that my soul had not lied to me in that Otho Khan had sent one to lead them into a trap of his setting. Thus is it, Master, that the servant of Satan has carried out the threat Nak, his tougchi, made against me on the mountain. Master—he is crushing my brain. In the name of the Compassionate One—help me!"

She choked suddenly. Her hands wait out toward the man before her, and the gesture was a gesture of supplication.

"Peace—child." He reached her in a single stride, catching her fragile shoulders into the grip of his strong, yet gentle, hands. "Peace and those things ye pray for are to come upon Otho Khan. For and they are to come to pass; there must be not only a reason, but a means. Peace, thou troubled one, thy test has come upon thee."

"Test?" she faltered, still in that deadly monotone she had used from the first, which some way seemed more wholly dreadful than any cry of anguish, any evidence of hysteria would have been.

"Aye, test! That test of thy strength which has been ordained since the instant in which the Mongol servant of all evil was by thee defied; that test he has designed to place upon thee if thereby perchance he may beat thee down, break thee, bring thee suppliant to him on thy knees; that test, that choice."

"Choice, aye, Lotis. Think ye not that thy husband is a ransom for thee in what this Sheik of the Silent Towers plans; the whip by which he has it in mind to scourge ye again into a subservience to his designs?"

Looking into his face she answered, "Bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh. He has stolen my mate, and it is so he thinks to once more trap my soul and slay it. Nak—Nak, tougchi to Otho Khan, him of the yellow shirt, spoke truth when he said that in giving myself to a man I had cut my strength in half. Aye, he the deceiver, the unclean one, the trickster, the liar and cheat, spat forth the truth from his blasphemous mouth. And they are thrusting the fingers of their will into my brain and seeking to destroy my power to resist them through him, since in gaining him, to whom my heart is as a flower given to hold in the hand, it is as though they held a part of me already and have but to crash that part which remains. They are strong, Master—very strong—"

Dual spoke the words calmly, and yet as they fell from his lips there was something about them which affected me strangely; some subtle quality not of the senses so much as the brain, the mind. They were like the clarion call of a bugle; like a draft of heady wine.

And as he spoke Lotis started back, freeing herself from his hands. Into her face there crept such an expression as I hope I may never five to see on the face of a living being again. It was anguish such as I had never seen. It was horror; passing all pain. It was realization. It was renunciation. And it was more than that; more than I have the power to name.

While it passed across her features she stood as straight, as slender as a reed, and then she seemed to fold together, rather than sink down before him on her knees. Her hands came up and caught her temples between her palms. She shuddered with bowed head.

"Allah, Allah, Allahou! It is finished," she not so much spoke as intoned—for the sound of it was the cadence of a moan. "It is finished, Master. A test! A choice! Yet no choice indeed for her ye so name; her who thou hast saved from the clutches of the Mongol devil; whom thou hast in so saving made wife and mother; her who knows what Otho Khan plans; those things he seeks to bring about in Ins places of prayer, wherein he looses against all righteousness, the dark swarm of thoughts in the brains of evil men; her who knows the prayer they utter for the triumph of evil over all goodness in the world of man; no choice for her, since it is not a choice for her alone, though her soul should be given to Erlik, or suffer the torments of hell for a thousand years. But a test which sets the name of names upon her lips. Master"—she lifted her head to where he stood before her—"they are strong; Nak and Otho Khan are strong, and their wrath is turned against me, and I have not any longer the strength with which to resist them—"

Inwardly I gasped. It was a dreadful thing to see her kneeling there, confessing her weakness in a voice out of which seemed to have been wrung all feeling, all power for feeling or any gentler emotion—a voice of dead anguish wrung dry of tears. It was a dreadful thing to hear her admit that Otho Khan, the Mongol sorcerer was possessed of a greater power—that she was beaten down before him, and knew it—to see her kneeling there before Dual confessing her lack of strength.

This, then, I thought was what he had meant when I had spoken with him the night before, and he had said that this girl was approaching the supreme test. And with that thought came another: he had known! I could not doubt it; he had known that this ordeal was coming to pass; in his own inscrutable way he had waited.

He had said, too, that before this thing was ended, Otho Khan and he should stand face to face, but whatever he knew, whatever he planned, he had withheld it because he deemed it best. In a flash I saw it. With a whirling brain I asked myself if, after all, this dreadful moment were but a step in the course of the whole complex matter; but another example of the way in which He whom Dual called the Inscrutable One, moved.

And yet, even as all this passed through my mind, Lotis rose slowly and once more stretched forth her hands. "Thou hast called me a sword, and if there be any way in which ye can use me to drive this Wolf of Erlik to his lair and slay him, take me and do with me as thou wilt."

"Aye," said Semi Dual. "I have called ye a sword, and thou art indeed a sword, forged to a purpose, and tempered. And I say to ye now that he who loses all for righteousness' sake shall find it returned again to him." He extended his arms and took her hands into his.

"Nay," he denied, "let not the sword question him who holds it, since so may it best be used, and they of the damned find its point an irresistible thing on which their minds shall be impaled."

A glance passed between them. The face of Lotis subtly altered, and I thought that she understood.

"Allahou, I am ready to thy purpose," she said, stepping back again a pace from him. "I resign my soul to thee. Take it and thrust it into the darkness of their minds. Let it thrust deep, Master—deep."

She smiled, actually smiled, as she turned and walked from him across to the couch and reclined upon it. And as she folded her hands the smile still lingered upon her lips.

Lotis closed her eyes. Her body relaxed in all its slender length, all semblance of life fled from her. I could not see that she breathed. Dual crossed and stood beside her.

"Sword of Flame, I have taken thee into my grasp; thou hast the strength of ten thousand of such as Otho Khan, or Nak, his servant, or any other of the creatures of him who was hurled from Heaven to dwell in the depths of hell. Against the darkness of their souls thou art become as a piercing ray of light. Out of thy scabbard I draw thee. Thou are ready?"

Connie's fingers were gripping into the flesh of my arm. We were like spectators. I glanced at her and knew she understood; that this was the very thing of which she and Lotis had been speaking before we knew that Garston and Bryce and Haddon were lost; that Semi Dual was literally drawing the conscious part of the woman out of her physical form and sending it out a flaming thing to contact the minds of Otho Khan and his agents and learn the full scope of their plans.

And the thing was between them. For the time being I am positive that though we stood there watching, we were as though we had not been. Brain of the man and the woman were centered wholly upon the work in hand.

Absolute silence came down in the room. Dual waited, standing without motion. The woman lay before him. I noted a tendril of her dark hair, loosened and resting against the whiteness of her cheek. A little breeze fanned in through the open window above the couch and whipped the vagrant strand of living silk into a gentle stirring. And that was all. I watched in a breathless fascination, Dual the Master, the sunlight of the outer world beyond him and the body of the seemingly lifeless girl on the couch. And there was nothing else; nothing on the surface that is; but under that I could feel I hardly know how, the stirring of undreamed forces, the lightning play and pass of the vast, incalculable issues as it were through which the consciousness of the girl was moving, mingling as a thing freed momentarily from the restraining bonds of the flesh.

Into my mind there crept a recollection of Semi's words concerning the duality of existence. She was here and she was not here. Her body, the beautiful tenement of her soul, lay before me, but the tenant was somewhere else.

"It is dark—there is a dark cloud. It is a cloud of thought. It is flung over the world and I cannot see plainly. It is a cloud of evil thoughts born from the minds of many, thinking the self-same thought; from the minds of men praying to Erlik for the triumph of evil. It is like to a dun-colored smoke. The eyes of my soul cannot pierce its pall. It hangs before them like a curtain, and all beyond it is dark.

"Otho Khan is behind it. He covers himself with it as with a cloak. But I can feel his thoughts within it and the thoughts of Nak, his tougchi. It is they who are weaving the thoughts of their followers into the cloud that blinds me. It is like a wall against which my soul beats like a rampart."

"Thrust in! Thrust in! The hand of my soul is behind thee; thrust into it deeply," Dual made answer. "Shall darkness stand before light?"

I knew that Connie had spoken; that she had staggered to a chair and sunk into it limply, unable to longer support herself on her feet.

"It yields," said Lotis. "It is become as the fog of the sea when the sunlight strikes upon it. It grows thinner before me, it rolls up, and within it there are horsemen; I see my beloved. He rides with bound hands, and beside him are his companions, the men called Bryce and Haddon. Nak, the servant of him who worships Satan, is with them, and certain of his men; there is a Hindu, one long sought as a stirrer-up of dissension, but never found; there are Mongols, slaves of his and Otho Khan's bidding. They are moving toward the mountains—"

CHAPTER XIV.
Thrusting In.

"IT is as Chang told us," she said. "They are speaking together and I can look into their minds. One was sent to lead them in pursuit after he had stolen a horse, and riding over a rise in the ground, they came upon other men who awaited them with ropes which they cast about them, dragging them from their horses, and leading them to the village of the blacks, where Nak awaited; now he is taking them to a place of which he knows—"

"Nak is laughing at them," Lotis continued; "he is goading them with taunts. I can look into their minds. That of my beloved is filled with thoughts of those things I have told him, which he found it hard to believe. He is dismayed to think with what ease he was led into their trap, but he is not afraid. And the thoughts of the man Bryce are red thoughts of rage, like that of a trapped creature. But the mind of Haddon is directed steadily upon one point. He is thinking of escape. He is foolish, for Nak reads the thoughts that are his, and calls a Mongol horseman to ride beside him, with a weapon in his hand, and looks at him, and laughs in his face.

"'How now, spy of Washington?' he speaks to him. 'Is it not in your mind that you had been safer to have kept your hands out of this? See you not that your thoughts are to me as a written page? My man will shoot you at the first move you make. It is an old trick, baiting a trap with a living bait; one we of the East drink in with our mothers' milk, and you are a man grown with hair showing on your upper lip. You should have watched more carefully after you saw the shroud and the knives. Behold, I shall show you another!' And he leans over and lays a kerchief upon the horse in front of Haddon, and he maketh it seem to expand till it is a shroud indeed—and he strikes a knife through it into the flesh of the horse so that it flinches .and rears, and once more he laughs.

"But the man Haddon is brave. And he answers, 'Keep your hell tricks to yourself, you damned imp of Satan; your gunman is enough! You've got us; three fools who didn't have sense enough to keep out of your net, but you were singing a different tune last night after your dogs ran away and left you to get home by yourself.'

"And the man Bryce speaks also. 'Hold on, Nak; lend me that handkerchief a minute till I blow my nose.' Allahou—they are men; they are brave. The Wolf of Erlik hath seized them and they spit in his face; yea, even into his fangs bared to rend them.

"And because they are brave, Nat scowls. 'Thou also shall sing yet another tune as ye say it,' he makes answer. 'Listen, dog of the government and ye who wouldst pollute a shroud of the Hassani, thou shalt pray God for death ere this is finished, and he shalt not hear thee. And before ye die ye shall cry to Erlik—aye, thou shalt lift thy voices to him—to the end that he shall give thee surcease from the pain of the flesh at the price of thy souls. On thy bended knees ye shall appeal to him. I, Nak, swear it?

"But the man Bryce speaks again. 'Interesting if true. You've got us, Nak, but why act so set up about it. I can't see that it counts. When it comes to fighting your way, we're nothing but a lot of dubs. What you ought to have done was get the girl that used to work with Otho Khan, or the big man that busted up George Pitrininski and took her out of your cherished devil worker's hands. If you'd grabbed them now—'

"'Peace, fool!" Nak cries, and strikes him with the knotted whip he keeps to the goading of his horse.

"Yet the man Haddon takes up the matter. 'He's right, you know, Nak; before you make us kiss Erlik's big toe, you want to remember our friends.'

"And it seems that his words lash Nak to a frenzy, for he screams aloud in his anger, 'By Erlik himself, we are not forgetting them, government prowler. The girl is already broken in our taking of this man,' and he points to my beloved. 'Think ye we would have troubled with you had it not been for him? He is her weakness.'

"And—and—ah—my beloved lifts his head and turns it toward him. 'You're right,' he saith. 'I was her weakness; her one weakness, and, thanks to you, it is removed. Numerically, you've cut our party in half, but—you've grabbed off the wrong end, my friend of the devil. It's the other part that holds the sting.' He speaks so, my beloved, and he speaks truth, and the truth that he utters gives me back my strength. His words are like wine to my spirit they are like acid poured into a raw wound in Nak's brain—"

"Peace," said Semi Dual, "seek not to look into his mind at this time; these things are of the surface. Thrust further into the cloud; seek its source; the place wherein is Otho Khan."

"Aye, Master, I hear and obey thee. The cloud is thick beyond me. It is like the smoke of a fire in the mountains. It is between me and them, but I shall pierce it. It gives way before me; I am on the mountain, at the spot where Nak appeared to me. There is an opening in its side before me. It is the lair of the wolf; the cloud of his dark thoughts issue from it, like smoke from the ground. It is the place from which Nak appeared to stand before me, and to which, after leaving me, he returned. There are many footprints in the dust before it; the footprints of many who have passed within it and have not yet returned."

"Thrust in and report to me what lies within it." Dual spoke in direction, and there came again a silence.

I leaned back against the jamb of the door. A quiver shook me, not of fear, but rather of impatience. It was as though my very soul was racked for the consummation of this thing; this demonstration of the undreamed powers that lurk in the human brain. For not for one single instant, as I stood there, did I doubt the truth of what the lips of Lotis uttered. There was a cave. It was the lair of the Wolf of Erlik. Into it Semi Dual was thrusting the subliminal self of the girl who lay before him. I stiffened.

Once more words were falling with the precision of a printed tape from Lotis's tongue:

"I am within the cave, Master. For a time the thought cloud withheld me. It is strong. Its force is the force of the current of a dark stream. It is the force of many minds timed into unison like an engine. But I am like to a strong swimmer. I am not sure if the place be a cave really or the entrance to a mine. There are timbers supporting its walls, as it seems. They fall away, they widen, I am come into a larger place, a room, as it were, dug out of the ground. It is large and there is light within it; the light of many torches. Yet there must be a vent to the chamber, for the air is pure.

"The light falls upon the faces of many people, men and women gathered together within it. They are of many races. They are the people who have dwelt upon the land left me by my father. They have left their homes and gathered here together by the bidding of Otho Khan. This—now I understand—this is the Temple of Erlik; the shrine of Otho Khan's Place of Prayer. He has gathered them within it. He—he is here.

"I can see him. He is clad in robes of black and scarlet. There is an altar, and a figure, like the figure of some-obscene god. The giant black who led the party of Nak against us in the night stands beside it. He is nude. His naked body glistens in the light of the torches, like a figure of black bronze. He holds a sack of goatskin and an earthen jug in his hands.

"And Otho Khan, the servitor of Satan, kneels before the idol, and before it he has unrolled his shroud. It lies white between him and the image. He is praying to Erlik and the people within the chamber are praying with him. He is taking their thoughts and weaving them into a cloud. He rises and makes obeisance to the idol. He is chanting the prayers for the dead in hell, and those in the chamber are chanting with him; their thoughts pulse in time to the chanting. Master, he is playing upon them as on an instrument of evil.

"It is finished, and now Otho Khan throws off his robes and kneels naked before them, and the black advances and kneels, facing him, and opens his sack. It contains earth. He piles it in front of Otho Khan and pours water upon it, and it becomes as clay of the potter. And Otho Khan takes it and molds it.

"He has made an earthen image of a goat. He stands it before him, he is stroking it with his hands, and it moves. It turns its head and looks at him who has made it—O God of long suffering—it is alive! It takes a step—that thing of mud—

"And there comes a woman, a negress. She wears a scarlet robe. She leaps forth in front of the idol and hurls her garment from her, she dances; she flings her arms and bends her naked body faster and faster ; there is a froth upon her mouth. The eyes of all are upon her; she falls.

"And the black takes a knife from the altar and strikes off the head of the goat, and blood gushes from it and it falls down, and the woman rises and dips her hands in the blood of the goat, and smears the face of the idol, and the giant black lifts his voice and cries aloud:

"'Behold, the sacrifice in which this goat created by Otho Khan through the powers bestowed upon him is given back to the bestower of power as a sign of a greater to come, wherein shall be offered up to him the goat without horns!' And a murmur runs through the crowd. They turn their eyes widely upon Otho Khan. They have beheld him create life, and he is become to them as a god—Master—"

"Peace." Dual stayed her. "Seek not to look either into the brain of Otho Khan at this time; let it remain centered upon those things which are his own, for the rest let it not disturb thee; thou knowest how it was done. The dead alive create nothing, though at times they work illusions to the confusing of mortal minds. Were it harder to make a bit of earth dampened with water appear as a goat than to form a serpent of flame from a bit of string? This were but a form of the dance of the Black Virgin, the unholy rite of the Voodoo worship, which the servitor of Satan has seized upon to the carrying out of his plans. Peace, and seek ye those plans in the brain of the giant black, to whom they are doubtless known."

Voodoo—the dance of the Black Virgin—the Black Virgin—sacrifice—the goat without horns. The words ran brokenly through my mind a part and parcel of the picture raised up by Lotis's words to which I had listened; that picture of the unclean rites over which Otho Khan, servitor of Satan, presided in that foul Temple of Erlik underground; that dreadful obscene reality on which the eyes of her soul had looked, while Otho Khan knelt before the eyes of his slaves and further enslaved them through the hell-inspired trickery of the goat he had made of mud.

All at once it seemed to me that in part I understood the subtlety back of Dual's caution to the girl soul he was so strangely employing, not to look into his mind; not to let him sense her presence ; to seek elsewhere for his plan. For Otho Khan—be he what he might—had sometime been a man, he was of human birth. He was mortal, nay, he was less than mortal—an inhuman monster. But no matter what he was, he could not do two things at one time.

Now, as Lotis had said, he was busy; concentrated wholly upon turning against us the force of his horribly compounded artificial brain, that sexless, amorphous, composite thing he had built up to serve him, out of the minds of the men and women he had perverted, played upon with his diabolical cunning; of whose inherent weakness he had taken advantage until they had become partly, because of him at least, damned.

He was too busy building that smoke screen of their thoughts against us, welding the power of their brains into a weapon for our utter destruction, to do more than sense vaguely the counter-thrust Dual was making against him, if at all—to suspect how his own devices were being tom asunder by Semi's slender Sword of Flame, whose almost waxen lips were speaking:

"l am looking into his mind; it is a thing of unspeakable loathing, in which the thoughts writhe like serpents caught in a filthy slime. They are red thoughts—of sacrifice—slaughter—the blood of the slain—the blood of the goat—the goat without horns—that is to be brought before him. I can see it—the goat—it has a face—the face of—a—man—it is—it is—it is the face—of my—beloved—"

It seemed that my heart stopped beating. The giant black had called Bryce and Haddon friends of the goat—human sacrifice! Haddon himself had said such things were sometimes done by the Voodoo priesthood, and Dual had asked him particularly concerning what had occurred at the time.

Connie uttered an inarticulate sound between a scream and a groan. I glanced toward her. She was pallid, wide-eyed, gasping, gripping the arms of her chair with her hands. I half staggered to her.

"Enough," Dual repeated. "Sword of Flame, I am drawing thee back—yet keeping thee in my hand. I am giving thee back power of motion and understanding in thy body—return."

Her form stirred. She sat up on the couch, put up her hands and once more gripped her temples. "Oh, God—thou Name of Names, that such things should be as I have seen," she intoned. "Master, I have told thee truly; must I drink this cup? Is there naught that can dash it from me?"

"Aye," Dual said slowly. "Thou hast told me much and thereby thou hast placed much within my hands. Not yet hath Otho Khan turned his mind wholly on thee as it is in my mind he shall after a time. And in that time thou must harken to him; thou must seem to resist him, yet yield to him slowly; for did not Nak say to ye in the mountain that thou shouldst dose the eyes of thy beloved, wherefore this sacrifice shall not occur until Otho Khan knows that ye stand before him in the unholy shrine of his false worship as a witness.

"It is so he means to crush ye, and thy beloved has become the lure by which he will call thee, knowing that thy thoughts shall be upon him, and his on thee, and in that time thy soul must strike into his eyes as a light that blinds him, once he has brought thee to him as against thy will."

For a moment more she sat staring into his face with widened eyes, and then she answered:

"Allahou, thou are mighty. Master, the meaning of thy words flows out of them and enters my mind. In that time my soul shall throw itself upon him—aye, even upon Otho Khan. My soul shall be locked with his—and it corned to me now that in that hour my weakness, upon which he counts, shall become as a fountain of strength. Hai! I am ready. I shall seize this Wolf of Erlik—in the Temple of Erlik's worship—and I shall hold him."

There came the sound of a horn. A dust-covered car slid past the window and stopped in front of the house with a whine of brakes. Lotis rose slowly.

CHAPTER XV.
Sheriff Cory.

The door was pushed open to reveal two men. One of them was Andy, and the other a stranger—a tall, gangling, sunburnt individual, who pulled off a wide-brimmed hat as he entered and advanced holding it in his hands.

"You needn't say it thataway, ma'am, even if I am th' sheriff," he returned. "I admit I'm lookin' fer your husband, but 'tain't 'cause I got anythin' on him. Fact is, Galt here come into town with a purty lurid story, an' be seemed to think I ought to drive out here and take a look around. An' bein' as I knew th' sort of folks you had squattin' on your property here, I thought it couldn't do no harm to find out what was goin' on."

"Which was exactly what I asked him to do before he left here," said Semi, speaking for the second time. "That the request was justified, you may judge by the fact that Mr. Garston and two others of our party were carried off this morning."

"Th' hell they were!" Cory exploded, while I pricked my ears at this fresh evidence of the way Dual had been playing his hand.

He checked himself and glanced at Lotis. "Beg pardon, ma'am. Carried off, how do you mean?"

"Your coming was not unexpected by me, since I had asked Mr. Galt to endeavor to bring you here about this time."

"Well, I'll be da—Mrs. Garston, I beg your pardon." Cory turned to Andy. "Played me, did you, Galt? I didn't think you had it in you."

"Mr. Dual here seemed to have an idea somethin' was goin' to happen, an' it looked prudent for me not to take any chances." Andy shuffled has feet and grinned.

"Semi Dual—myself." Dual inclined his head. "Besides Mrs. Garston—my friend Mr. Gordon Glace and his wife."

"Pleased to meet you." Cory accepted the introduction and returned to business. "Well, then, at that rate I reckon I'll hop into my machine an' take a look around."

"It will do no good," said Lotis slowly. "The people are not in their houses—they have gone to the mountains, and taken Mr. Garston and Mr. Bryce and Mr. Haddon with them. There is a cave there or an abandoned mine."

"Oh, sure." Cory eyed her as though surprised by the extent of her knowledge. "There's an old coal-mine up there. If you know that much, ma'am, it will save a lot of time, an' I'll need a few men, I reckon. But"—he frowned again—"are you meanin' this whole bunch are in on this deal? Andy had a lot to say about bedsheets and knives, but I figured that was jus' a trick to scare you. What's back of this here thing?"

"Far more than appears on the surface, Mr. Cory," Dual returned. "And too much to explain at this time. But we are dealing with both strong and dangerous men, of whom those you call squatters are but the agents. One of those they have captured—the man called Haddon—is a Federal agent who came out to look over the ground."

"Whew!" Cory whistled. "See here, Galt, you hop into the old bus an' git back to town. Find Jack Strock, my dep—you know, him—an' tell him to get up a bunch of boys an' bosses an' hit it back here as quick as th' Lord 'll let him. Tell him to have plenty of extra shells for his guns. "Drive like hell—" He glanced at Lotis in apologetic fashion and flushed under his tan.

"Guns?" she said dully, without meeting his eyes. It was as though she summed up the futility of such weapons against what we were facing.

"Why, yes, ma'am." Just as plainly Cory didn't understand, and attributed her manner to anxiety for her husband.

"Guns are an essential part of the equipment necessary for the work Mr. Cory will perform," said Semi Dual.

"That's right, ma'am," the sheriff declared." We'll smoke 'em up good and plenty once Andy gets back with the boys. Git out of here, Galt."

"All right, Bill." Andy left the room and clattered across the porch. A moment later the engine of die sheriff's car roared. Out of the window I saw it gather headway in a doud of dust.

"Andy's a funny cuss," said Cory. "I reckon ef I hadn't 'a' come out here with him, he'd 'a' come by hisself; an' yet, leavin' here the way he done, you'd 'a' thought he was scared. But he said he figured you ought to have help, an' it was up to him to come and get it, though now you say you told him to do it, and that makes it look different, of course."

"Not necessarily," Semi returned. "As a matter of fact, when I asked him to induce you to come out, he said he had it in mind, so that I merely availed myself of his intention and impressed the importance of obtaining your presence at this time."

"Well—yes. Don't stand up on my account, Mrs. Garston." Cory found a chair and sat down. "He certainly was set on getting me to come. Just what did that government feller have in mind in coming out here?"

"He fancied that it was quite possible these people were smuggling opium across the border," said Semi, bent, as it seemed to me, in keeping on a strictly material basis with the man.

"Hell—Excuse me, ma'am." Cory slapped his thigh. "By golly, they could 'a' done it, too, I reckon; an' your comin' out here to live wasn't none too good fer their schemes. No wonder they wanted to run you offen your land. I been keepin' an eye on 'em now an' again sence before you come, but—well, I never got wise to that opium game. What about them sheets an' knives? Andy said they called 'em shrouds, an' told him he was likely to get knifed if he hung around."

For a moment Dual made no answer, and then: "Mr. Cory, it is an actual fact that the men back of all that has happened belong to a certain cult or order. With them the unrolling of a shroud before another is as the serving of a death sentence."

"Death sentence," the sheriff repeated. "Well—my Gawd!" He gulped. "Th' way you talk, you seem to know quite a little about it. Just who or what are you, Mr. Dual, if I might ask?"

I felt Connie press my fingers, and then she went over to the couch and sat down and slipped her arm about Lotis's waist. But Lotis seemed scarcely to notice. Three times she bad spoken of her own volition, and yet there was about her an air of abstraction, of one who is present not so much in the mind as in the flesh. It was as though she listened to or for something far beyond mere spoken words. I found myself wondering if she were not listening, indeed, for the call of Otho Khan's fiend-ridden soul to hers.

"I am one, Mr. Cory," Dual began, "who knows, as you have guessed, whereof I speak. I am one who seeks to undo a wrong in so far as it may be undone—to combat evil; one who believes in the final dealing out of justice upon the wrongdoer, the evil-worker, in the preservation of established law, and a, harmonious observation of those laws which govern the universe. I am one glad at any time to lend my hand to the safeguarding of those things essential to the betterment of man's estate. I am in the fullest sense a friend of both Mr. and Mrs. Garston."

Cory nodded again. "Your sentiments does you credit. I'm a sort of socialist in theory myself, but on practical workin' lines I'm a Republican, I guess." And the man was serious. It was enough to make one laugh—or weep.

"This here order, now," he continued. "Accordin' to your notion, Garston an' the department man, an' th' other feller—I hate to say this, Mrs. Garston, but I guess I got to—they're in a pretty tight fix?"

"Exactly, sheriff," Dual replied. "This cult of which we are speaking stop at nothing. From a remark made to Haddon and Bryce prior to their abduction, there is reason to believe that they are in grave danger."

"Yes. From my knowledge, Mr. Cory, I have no longer any doubt that these men are facing death unless we release them, and that Mr. Garston himself is being held as a human sacrifice."

"What? What's that?" Cory half rose. His jaw sagged. A peculiar color developed under the bronze of his cheeks—a sort of pasty pallor."

"Erlik?" Once more Cory glanced at Lotis. There was that in his expression that seemed to ask if this discussion in front of her was wise. It came into my mind that this man, in his own way, regardless of his ignorance of such matters as we were discussing, and his ready profanity, was a good deal of a man with a very human heart.

"Absolutely, Mr. Cory. They pray to Satan as we pray to God, and to Erlik, whom they regard as his regent with power over the earth."

Again Semi Dual fastened the man with his steady, unwavering glance that seemed to drive home his words.

Cory licked his lips. He seemed puzzled, baffled. But after a moment he spoke a trifle thickly. "That big black—I know him. I've been suspicious of him. What is he, or do you know?"

"An' we're goin' up against a bunch like that?" Almost unconsciously the sheriff's hand crept under his coat as though seeking a weapon. "Well—migosh, I reckon it's time we cleaned 'em up if they've been workin' that sort of stuff."

"Against them," Dual said slowly—"against the leaders, that is, Mr. Cory, your weapons would avail you little."

"No?" Cory's eyes contracted slightly at the comers. His tone was one of doubt. "Well, as it happens, I ain't no slouch of a shot."

Before him on the carpet of the floor was a writhing, flat-headed snake, swirling swiftly into pyramidal coils.

For a moment he eyed it, and then his weapon leaped out, exploding, as it seemed, in the instant it appeared.

And there was nothing where had been the serpent, save a bit of white string upon the carpet, cut neatly in two by his bullet. The sheriff sat staring at it—staring, staring, gripping the heavy automatic in his hands.

"The leaders are capable of doing such things as that, Mr. Cory—of making one see things that do not exist. It is a form of trickery, of course."

Very slowly Cory put his weapon away. His breathing was somewhat quickened. "Then—how are we goin' to get to 'em?" he asked, with no hint of balking the issue in his voice.

"I intend to get to them, as you put it, Mr. Cory. As you have seen, I am able to create the same illusions myself."

"Your men will merely be used against their agents—these squatters, as you call them—now gathered in the abandoned mine they are using for their unclean rites of worship. They will guard it and prevent their, escape—against them your weapons will be potent as against any flesh."

Cory nodded. He bent forward and took up the two bits of string, thrusting his finger into the hole the bullet had cut in the carpet beneath them, and sat holding them in his hands. Presently he folded them up and put them in his pocket.

"There ain't nothin' to do, then, but wait till Andy gets back with Jack an' his men, I guess," he said at length.

He got up, put on his hat, and stalked out. He went straight down the steps and around the house; possibly, I thought, to examine the horse corral, or possibly to talk with Chang. His expression was that of a man with food for thought.

I glanced back at Dual. In a way now I knew his plan. He was going into the lair of the Wolf of Erlik before this thing was finished. And in a way, too, I felt that I knew the plan of Otho Khan. Even now that was being carried out in this waiting and the consequent strain upon Garston's wife, which should wear out her resistance, break down her strength, prepare her for the time when he should call her subliminal self before him, and cheat and trick her, no matter what he should promise. For surely not even Otho Khan himself would dare to cheat the giant, black and the men and women assembled in the underground shrine of darkness of the promised sacrifice to the unclean idol.

"It is in my mind, Mrs. Glace," Dual answered her instinctive flinching, "that he will come to thee again."

And after that there was nothing. Cory didn't come back. I don't know what he did, how he filled in the time as the sun sank slowly into the west. I let my gaze wander in the same direction now and again for the first sign of the coming of his men. An hour passed, and another, and another. The light of late afternoon was throwing a golden glory into the room.

"Aye, be to him as a fish hooked, yet not exhausted to the landing. So shalt thou best blind the eyes of his mind to other things."

I rose and signed to Connie. We went out on the porch and stood there. She drew dose to me without speaking. Semi's voice came faintly from the room behind us, then ceased.

Cory had appeared from somewhere. He was standing staring into the west, where was a dust cloud on the horizon. He turned, saw us, and waved a hand.

CHAPTER XVI.
Lotis Goes.

AGAIN Connie caught her breath. I knew she was thinking of what the coming of the posse meant.

The dust cloud came onward swiftly. Dark specks showed within it, became the forms of mounted men, before which ran the sheriff's machine. The whole group swirled toward us dark against the sinking sun. It dropped a ball of red fire. Twilight came down.

Andy began tooting his horn. He flashed up and ground to a stop, and leaped out, grinning. The riders jostled to a stand about him, sprang down amid a creaking of leather, a pound of hoof-beats, a jangle of stirrup and rein.

One of their number advanced to meet Cory. "Hello, Bill," he said. "I got fifteen of th' boys—best I could do at a pinch."

"Hello, Jack," Cory responded. "That'll be enough, I reckon. Come inside a minute."

Dual appeared on the porch as the two turned toward it. I saw that he carried a paper-wrapped parcel in his hands.

Cory and Struck came up the steps to meet him, as their men waited lounging beside their horses, and there were introductions all around.

"Well, we don't exactly sleep on the job when Bill gives an order," the deputy sheriff began, and broke off as a dark-clad form flashed past us and down the steps, darted toward the nearest horse, flung itself into the saddle and dashed off to the east in the gathering dusk at the top of the startled animal's speed.

It was Lotis. I had recognized her slender figure. For a moment my brain reeled. It was Lotis, and she was riding toward the mountains; riding alone and unguarded toward then, and I did not doubt that, having resisted as long as she was able, she was riding now straight to him, straight into the grip of the merciless fangs of Erlik's Mongol Wolf.

And then Cory let out a shout of consternation. "Hey, that was Mrs. Garston! Up you go, boys!"

"Hold!" Dual spoke as they sprang to their saddles. "She is riding to the mountains. Mr. Cory, you will leave three men to guard the house and Mrs Glace. Mr. Glace and I will need horses."

He started down the steps. I caught Connie into my arms. I knew that all at once she was sobbing. I kissed her and ran down after Dual.

"Aw, hell!" A young wind and sun bronzed stranger thrust the reins of his mourn into my hands.

Dual was mounted still with his bundle in his hands. He whirled his horse beside that of Cory as the sheriff ran out, vaulted into the saddle, and flung up his hand.

We were off. The horse beneath me surged into motion, nearly taking my breath with its lunge. It snorted and stretched out Others were racing beside it on either hand. There was a pound of hoofs, a scream of leather. We rushed off on the heels of her who had gone before us, a smother of beasts and men. Cory and Strock strung out in front, taking the lead. As I remember, no one spoke. In the gathering night there was naught but the thud of hoof-beats, the whistle of the horses' breathing.

I settled myself in the saddle, clenched my jaws together, and rode. Why, I asked myself, had Lotis run out? To what new devil's trick had Otho Khan resorted to bring such a contretemps about? By what exercise of his damnable powers had he succeeded, as it would seem he had succeeded, in upsetting all our plans—in dragging not only the soul of her, but the very body in which it dwelt, into his filthy hands? I rode in that mad pursuit of her through the night with little save a baffled consternation in my brain.

But by degrees it seemed that the rhythmical reach and gather of the horse beneath me crept upward through my limbs and steadied the futile conjectures of my mind. I began to think more calmly—to review, analyze. Dual had answered Cory's startled bellow of recognition by a statement that Lotis was riding to the mountains.

It had been a self-evident thing. It had carried to the minds of Cory and his posse the thought that she had rushed forth to seek her husband, through and past any and all things. But there had been no least hint of surprise nor a lack of full understanding in Semi's tones. And just before Strock had arrived he had sent Connie and me outside that he might speak with Lotis alone. What had he said to her after we were gone?

My mind seized on that thought and held to it. I began to seek an answer to the question as we galloped up a slowly rising trail on which, in the night that had now come down upon us, there was no sign of her we pursued.

What had he said to her after we left them alone? Something, reason whispered, which he did not wish even Connie and me, whom he trusted, to understand, and therefore something which must be known to none save her and him. Where did that bring me, if not to the explanation of what Lotis had done?

Dual's plan—a vague conception of it—began stirring in my brain. After all, what was it save to reach to the presence of Otho Khan; to stand face to face with him, to confront him, and some way—in what manner he himself knew best—overcome him, beat him down?

And toward that end, in the only way, perhaps, in which the thing could be accomplished, he was seeking to take the Mongol off his guard; to arouse in him the full belief in the triumph of his own schemes. He himself had said that in such a seeming impasse as that which bad faced us on our arrival this was the only way in which the thing could be done.

And she had done it. She had gone. She had dared that appalling thing. Even now she was mounting to that meeting with the one who had once enslaved her and was seeking now to bring her within his power again. She was riding up voluntarily—even though with a simulated resistance—to literally place her physical self at least once more in his hands.

"Daniel in the den of lions." The words leaped into my mind. What was it that had made Daniel strong? What but the inward fire of the spirit that had sent the beasts about him cowering back from the man? What but faith in the eventual triumph of right over wrong?

After all, I asked myself, was there not a strange parallel between the hero of the ancient story, and the girl, the slender sword of flame Semi said he was taking into his hand, and was now sending among the inhuman monsters in human shape, who waited her coming for a horrid purpose in the bowels of an abandoned mine? Was there not back of it that same faith in the triumph, the invincible quality of right when opposed to wrong?

We were rising. We had reached the foot of the hills, and were mounting with them in the lead. Plainly, the men knew the road. Even in the darkness that lay now like a pall around us they evidenced no hesitation. Our pace perceptibly slowed, but it was due to the nature of the trail we traversed, and to no other cause. We crawled up with a creaking of leather, a sighing of girths to the heave of straining animal bodies, an occasional slip in soft soil, an occasional soft-toned oath from a rider. And presently we stopped. My horse stood panting beneath me.

"Dismount, boys," the sheriff announced. "Come along. Well make the rest of it on foot."

I let the bridle trail and pushed on after a shadowy shape, over sun-dried earth and stones. Once or twice I stumbled before I became, accustomed to die change from the saddle to my own means of locomotion. And then I passed the last horse, standing with heaving sides, and came into a little group ahead.

A whitish blur showed in its mass as I came up. For a moment I was filled with a vague surprise, and then I understood what it was Semi had carried in his paper bundle. He had brought along his white and purple robes. And he had put them on. They gave him an almost apparitional appearance in the night.

"Yes, sir," Cory's voice gave assurance. "We follow behind you two till you get inside. Then I post half of my men around the entrance and bring the other half in behind you myself. When we get to this chamber you mention we're to wait till you give the hands-up sign an' then we're to come in on th' crowd."

For a time we walked in silence before I Ventured a question: "Khan—won't he have out-guards?"

Of course. After all, I had asked an almost puerile question. Khan's men would pass the girl Khan had called to him, of course. I plodded on with my heart beginning to hammer dully in my breast. As I recall it, I felt no actual fear of the venture, but I was decidedly on edge, with a strained sensation of the nerves.

By and by, as we went on, I became aware of a lightening of the darkness. There was a line of silvery gray above the tips of the hills. It was the rising moon. It swam up, brighter and brighter. I began to see dimly the outlines of the ground across which we moved. Dual's garments took on a greater whiteness as we advanced, and came at last to a small, almost level table on the shoulder of the ridge we had climbed.

I obeyed, but my eyes ran past him, across the little tumbled level, and fell upon a horse. In the growing light I saw it standing there, with head hanging, close to the face of an uprising cliff.

It was saddled. The moonlight glistened on the riding-worn leather of the saddle. It was the horse Lotis had seized and ridden away from in front of the Garston house. She had arrived.

But there was no sign of her as Dual stalked, a tall, white figure, and I followed in his steps. There was no sign of anything—any life, that is—before us, save only the head-hanging horse.

She had arrived and gone into the lair of the wolf, then, I thought. And the entrance to the thing must be close. It was. Straight past the hard-ridden beast we went, myself scarcely more than Semi's shadow as I kept pace behind him—and. all at once, turning a shoulder of rock, there the thing was.

It yawned darkly before us, a roughly framed doorway to the old-time mine. Ordinarily that is what I or another would have named it, and been right in the naming. But it took on a different seeming to my eyes. It was the entrance to the Wolf of Erlik's lair, gaping there darkly in the light of the moon that had risen above the ridge of hills completely and was flooding down their western slopes.

Dual strode toward it, a white and soundless shape. From the earth beside it two men rose. Their figures showed as moving things of shadow.

Semi's arm lifted. In his palm was what seemed a spot of pure white light—a scintillating, gleaming thing as he turned it toward them—a tiny mirror, as I was to learn later, in which was reflected the light of the moon; yet another illusion caught their eyes and held them as he advanced a little closer, when he addressed them:

"Silence I Control your tongues. Death if you make an outcry—at the hands of those who follow behind me, if I am banned."

Sight of the white-robed man who so calmly bade them forego the duty for which they had been posted seemed to have a most peculiar effect on Otho Khan's guards. They stood staring as we continued our approach, still with the little spot of light which was the mirror in Dual's palm. They were like cowed dogs as we reached them, and Semi spoke again.

"I would hold speech with thy master, Otho Khan—with him of the silent towers. Go—lead me to him!" He lifted an arm and pointed.

Heaven knows what they thought. But whatever it was—I fancied that had they looked for an attack, they had expected it in far different guise than that of one who appeared and spoke to them in calmly peremptory tones.

If, however, I were to hazard an opinion, it would be that they accepted him as some powerful member of the same group, to which Otho Khan belonged.

CHAPTER XVII.
At Satan's Altar.

IT was dark. Instantly as we left the moonlight, we were enwrapped with a stygian gloom. One of the two granted in an inarticulate fashion, produced an electric torch, and held it in his hand.

Its ray made a tiny circle on the flow of the abandoned entry before him, and we stumbled on. The passage was thick in dust—and there were footprints in it. I saw it as the light picked them up and lost them, and recalled what Lotis had said of the marks left by the feet of many who had entered here and not returned.

And it was down this same way that, not so very far in advance of us, she herself had gone.

What was ahead? I asked myself. How far was it to the room whore sat the idol of a false god, where were gathered together the duped servitors of inhumanly evil intelligences, awaiting the sacrifice to it of the goat without horns—that Temple of Erlik, where Otho Khan spread his shroud and prayed to Erlik, inconceivably established in a mine?

For mine it was. Cory had said so, and the light of the torch striking up from the floor showed the old, in some instances half-fallen, timbers of the tunnel on either hand.

And yet within it, using it now for his own obscene purposes, was a member of that strange, dreadful, unthinkable, age-old cult which had existed for generation after generation—that thing that had fed itself, vampirelike, through all the ages on the brain-stuff, the souls of man; that, dark and hideous, was seeking to plunge the western world into the same seething crucible of materialism into which it had already plunged western Asia and eastern Europe; into which it was seeking to draw, all around it, Persia, India, Egypt, Afghanistan, all the races, be they yellow or black or white or brown.

In it was Otho Khan, one of the men seeking to establish among men a social and mental chaos, out of which ignorance rather than enlightenment should be born, and over which should rise a hierarchy of terrorism and superstition in which, as of the inner circle, they should be supreme.

Before me I saw a light—not that of the electric-light flash any longer, but a yellow glow creeping into the narrow bore we traversed from a wider place.

The men ahead of us paused. "Him you wish to see is beyond. Also as well there are others—many others," said he who had carried the torch, in the English and accent that stamped him an East Indian Babu.

"Proceed," Dual directed. "And listen, Hindu—preserve yet the seal upon your lips. For this night the law of man and of God have come upon you, and those who came with me to the mountains are in the' tunnel behind you, and the mouth of the tunnel is sealed. Yet may one who employs the wisdom within him live."

Then and then only I thank did they realize that in the task set them by Otho Khan, they had failed. A glance passed between them. The one who had spoken to Semi Dual snapped out his torch, and we advanced.

So at last we came into that weird underground Temple of Erlik—that place of unbelievable worship, more like the imaginings of some drug-distorted brain than an actual place of earth.

On either hand the walls of the tunnel widened out—swept to right and left to form the circumference of a roughly, circular artificial cavern, filled with light, and a strangely silent, breath-bated, staring-eyed crowd.

My eyes, straining before me, took it in at a glance, the flaring torches, the tense, set faces of men and women, revealed by the flicker of their light.

On three sides of that place in which they were assembled they stood packed together, looking over one another's shoulders. For in making the chamber the floor had been sloped in three ways from the entrance toward the farther side of its irregular circumference, where was the idol and the altar before it, with the result that those closer to the center were on a lower level than those at the rear. It was almost as though they stood on the curving bottom of a shallow bowl.

The smoke of the burning torches rose. Somewhere under the roof of the underground chamber it spread out. It formed a blue-white canopy above the heads of the crowd. It swirled above them. It eddied and writhed. It kept up a continual billowing and shifting—as some draft through a hidden vent caught it and drew it out.

But they gave it no attention. I think not one of them lifted his eyes. They were like people under a spell, fascinated by what they were beholding. There was a whisper of their breathing—a rhythmic, almost automatic thing, and that was all.

They were staring, staring at a group in front of the altar, above which the idol squat, black, hideous of form and feature, leered in a lewd carven grimace from its place against the farther wall.

The light of two monstrous torches like the candles in some temple of hell itself shone upon it, and the altar—no more than a roughly oblong rock, on which was a thing that glistened in the flickering radiance with a menacing luster—the sacrificial knife.

That same radiance fell, too, on the group at which the assembled crowd was staring and picked them out. Six men and a woman. I knew them in part at least, and at the rest I could very well guess.

There were Garston, Haddon, Bryce—they stood to one side of the altar—their hands drawn back and trussed behind them, their fair skins white and faintly shining, each one of them naked to the waist.

And beside them, standing a monstrous shape, close by the end of the altar, was the giant black—a thing of ebon skin—huge, uncouth, like some vast fiend inspired anthropoid ape. The torch light fell upon him, picked out every hideous feature of him; the heavy lips, the broad spandril flattened nose with its animal4ike nostrils, the retreating forehead, the heavy prognathic jaws, the mighty sweep of shoulder, the too long arms, the massive pillars of his thighs.

So he stood there, like some obscene human butcher; the devil worshiper, the Voodoo priest, die executioner, stripped for his dreadful task, waiting to perform the sacrifice.

And on the other side of the altar, balancing that heart-slowing group, which held the attention of the watchers to the exclusion of all else was Lotis, Otho Khan, and Nak.

The girl stood straight and slender, her head thrown a little ways back. Straight, with a hint of rigidity in her posture, she stood there, her attitude and expression saying as clearly as words that she had not broken, but was resisting the purpose of the high priest of this unholy underground temple of evil even yet. And rather than on Otho Khan her eyes were turned on Edward Garston.

It was an odd, a terribly fascinating sight. Her dark hair had become loosened and fell about her head and shoulders, a frame for her white, white face.

And Khan stood beside her. I knew him at a glance, even though I was seeing him now for the first time. There was no mistaking him who seemed in a subtle way to dominate that place. Like the giant negro, even if in a different fashion, he seemed a thing supremely evil, inexpressibly gross. He was heavy-set, or appeared se, in his robes of black, and scarlet, above which was his savage Mongolian face, with its thin lips, its strangely sallow rather than yellow skin, its dark eyes underneath the barest penciling of jet black, brows on a flattened forehead that sloped back through his temples to dose set, pointed ears which, even as I glimpsed them, suggested vaguely to me the ears of the wolf.

It takes time to picture all this, but then I saw the whole thing, gained an appreciation of each and every detail I have mentioned in a flash.

Dual and I simply stopped back of the mouth of the passage and stood looking down the slight declivity of the stoping floor at what I have described. We were not perceived. Not a head turned in our direction. It came to me that the spectacle on which they were gazing held the attention of the slaves of Otho Khan as firmly as though they were actually hypnotized.

They were each and every one centered on what that scene portended, the latent savagery of their natures inflamed by it, until they were blinded by all else, bent on missing no dreadful detail of its consummation, their entire mentality focused for the time being upon it, through their eyes.

It was so he commanded their thoughts and actions, had woven them into the artificial brain that moved as he elected, thought as be thought. And even as Dual and I paused, he spoke to Lotis:

"Traitress, I give thee a final choice. Advance and kneel before the altar of the Mighty One! Lay thy soul ransom upon it for that of the man who stands yonder, whose soul shall be given to him unless ye return to the bindings of the oath ye swore unto Erlik in the past."

And Lotis answered, "Thou best, Mongol worshiper of Satan! Thou best in thy throat. No oath swore I to Erlik, or if so, it was when my mind was chained by yours and knew not the words it compelled my soul to utter. And I say to ye now there is no god save God—the Compassionate One—the Long Suffering—wherefore my soul may not stand ransom for his, nor can Erlik seize upon his soul though ye slay his body. Wherefore I say again that thou liest."

"Nay." Otho Khan's merciless bps twitched slightly. "Among themselves the Hassani speak truth."

"I am not of thee!" she denied tom. "Behold, Allah, Allah, Allahou! In the Temple of Erlik himself I name the Name of Names, and spit in thy unholy one's face!"

Haddon leaned forward as the words broke from him. He was white, set of face, straining.

The giant black put out a massive hand against his bared chest and buried him back.

Again Otho Khan's thin lips sneered. He lifted an arm in a signal—a sign as it appeared that the ritual should proceed. He spoke words I could not understand.

So much I heard of the man's answer and then the throb of beating tomtoms drowned him out.

From somewhere a lithe-formed negress appeared. She leaped out before the idol—a dark-skinned, wonderfully supple shape—and began to dance, with a flinging of naked arms, a writhing of naked body, an almost eye-defying play and shifting of naked feet and limbs. It was the dance of the black virgin again.

The time of the tomtoms quickened. Faster and faster they boomed. The chamber became filled with their rhythm. Faster and faster the naked dancer leaped and spun. Faster and faster, while my heart filled my breast to a sense of suffocation with its throbbing—faster and faster to the sound of the drums. It was incredible—inconceivable—that any human form could long sustain the madness of that motion and live. In the midst of her mad contortions she lost step and swayed. She stumbled, broke time with the tomtoms, staggered, sank slowly forward upon her knees.

Silence! It dropped like a muting thing over all the scene. The tomtoms died. In all the mass of close-packed bodies standing, staring toward the idol and the altar, not one appeared to breathe. They were caught in the spell of impending death—the death that stood waiting there beside the rough-hewn block of stone, an intangible, invisible yet none the less real presence to claim the life about to be placed in its hands.

"Give me blood! Blood! The blood of the goat!" the voice of the dancer lifted into that silence in a shrill, unnatural scream.

CHAPTER XVIII.
The Battle.

DUAL had spoken. And yet so centered on the scene before me had I become that I scarcely realized it before I beheld him advancing straight down the slope of the chamber floor with uplifted hand.

But I followed. I went with him, a step behind him, as he moved at last to his meeting with Otho Khan, the Wolf of Erlik, in his white and purple robes that marked him out like the one thing of dean and unsullied purpose in all that underground room.

From it the startled crowd gave back, permitting us a passage. We went down between them. They were on either side of us a living wall. And yet save for that giving way before us, they made no motion or sound.

"In the name of the true God," Dual said again as he reached the lower part of the floor. "Otho Khan, Prince of the Hassani, worshiper of Satan, who was stoned, and of Erlik, dweller in the dark star and devourer of souls, I have long desired speech with thee, and at last I stand before thee, in the place of thy own choosing; in the midst of thy own servants, and I challenge thee to a test of strength between thee and me, wherein one of us shall be wholly overthrown."

And again there was silence—a silence in which, as it seemed, no one breathed or moved. Otho Khan's eyes met and gripped those of the man before him, and they gleamed—gleamed under the flicker of the torches like the eyes of a cornered beast, indeed, were filled with swift hatred, raging defiance, unspeakable, unnamable things.

"Oh, God" It was a whisper. Lotis sank slowly down upon her knees. "Oh, God—Thou Long Suffering One—victory is mine, saith the Lord!"

It came to me that now she was herself wholly and had been for some time; that Dual had withdrawn his control of her subconscious self as he prepared to strike, and that the duel from now on would be between the Mongol and himself.

"Thou art a fool," said Otho Khan. "But thou art a brave fool. For as thou sayest, ye stand in the midst of my people, who perform my bidding and mine alone. I have but to give a word and thou diest."

"Yet will that word remain ungiven," Dual returned in wholly unmoved tones. "For though I die by thy command, what is that to me, save the undergoing of a change. Knowest thou not, Mongol, thou barren fruit of a woman's womb, thou blight on life, thou who art even though living as a smut on an ear of com, that we are born out of darkness, and return again from the body through darkness, save those only who remain in darkness because of those acts they have performed? Wherein is the difference between thee and me—in that through self-seeking, thou knowest thyself foresworn—that with death thy soul goes to Erlik and thy body to the worms. And I say to ye now that this night thou art come face to face with the law of God and man—that those who came with me fill the gateway that leads to this place, and thou, Otho Khan, knowest that thou

art born of a woman and mortal. Wherefore wilt thou seek to have thy people seize upon me, or grant me this duel in which we shall employ the weapons of the mind?"

I thrilled to Semi's answer as I sensed how it turned the verbal point of the one before him back into his own brain.

In all Dual had said he had spoken slowly and distinctly. The straining crowd about us had heard him declare Khan no more than a man, and Heaven knew how he had posed before them till this time, as one possessed of supernatural powers. And now I thought, seeing him thus confronted at the very climax of the sacrifice they had expected to witness, it could hardly fail of a decided effect on their ignorant minds. Too, I think that the Mongol himself must have sensed the same thing, and have known that he faced a test before them out of which he must come discredited and beaten, or rise supreme; must have realized himself trapped in the very instant when it had seemed he stood triumphant—have realized, even if dimly, how the thing had been done. For a moment he remained silent before he accepted. '

"Tis well. He who fears is half beaten in the beginning," said Semi Dual. "Yet were a combat without a prize idle. Should I beat ye, let it be toward the freeing of these men, and the woman called Lotis, whom thy Tougchi calleth Little Flower, Otho Khan."

A whisper, a sighing of many breathing bodies, ran through the watchers for the first time.

For a single instant Otho Khan turned his eyes toward them and it died. "So be it," he said quickly. "Guard thyself—thou who art also born of a woman."

"Hold, yet a trifle longer, prince of the prince of darkness," Dual returned. "Let us make dear the ground between us ere we begin. Thou hast said it. I, too, am the fruit of a woman's womb, the source of man's physical being in the plan of the Creator. Male and female created He them in keeping with the law of the duality of all things; wherefore are light and darkness, justice and injustice, righteousness and evil—each but the opposing pole of that operative force which alone is one.

"Yet is there a difference between us, in that while that force flows by my own intent through, me freely, thou standest in the position of one opposing a current, thwarting, its ordained direction; of one who dams and diverts a stream to his own ends, since those things ye accomplish ye bring to pass not in harmony with, but as against the eternal plan. Hence, and I move directly to my purpose, ye attain to yours in a manner more roundabout. Because of this the issue between us becomes as to whether thou canst continue to divert the thrust of that current into which I shall cast the force of my mind against thee, or not, at this time. For and ye fail, I shall surely overwhelm thee. Defend thyself, Mongol, if ye can."

He ceased, standing there in his white and purple robes, his gray eyes fastened on those of the Wolf of Erlik.

And Otho Khan's glance met that steady, unfaltering menace with a swiftly leaping gleam.

They engaged. Like two swordsmen, they stood there face to face, and again there was no sound.

But though there was utter silence one knew that they were locked in a none the less deadly struggle, that at the last Dual had attacked, even though in the strange, the implacable duel between them, the means of attack and defense were the invisible forces capable of being set into operation by the human brain.

Minutes passed and neither man gave ground. Still they stood there, eye locked to eye in an unshifting staring, whereby mind reached out and seized upon, struggled with, sought to beat down and conquer opposing mind. Yet as time went on one came at last to a point where it seemed possible to sense that struggle; the deadly nature of it, to appreciate the lightning-like thrust and parry of thought, playing rapier like back and forth between them; to find one's self affected by the terrible strain of their generation in each throbbing brain, so that it was with no feeling of surprise that presently I noted a tiny dew of perspiration beginning to glisten faintly on the forehead of Otho Khan.

"Curse you!" he muttered without lowering for a single instant the guard of his glaring eyes. "May Erlik seize your soul when I shall hurl it to him."

"There is but one God, call him Allah, Elohim, Jehovah, or Oom, what does it matter, servant of Yam, the accursed of Him," Dual intoned.

For the barest perceptible space Otho Khan's eyes wavered. It was as though Semi had touched him, made him flinch. And then he recovered. But his thin lips parted and he licked them with his tongue.

Slowly I glanced about me. Haddon, Garston, and Bryce stood where last I had seen them. Lotis still crouched upon her knees. She was watching, watching. I saw her lips move. It came to me that she was praying—not to Erlik, as Otho Khan had suggested, but to the one God Semi Dual had named. Nak stook behind her, and he, too, was watching out of thin-lidded, darkly staring eyes. The giant black had come down in front of the altar, from which, as I saw, he had taken the sacrificial knife. He Stood with a puzzled expression on his heavy animal-like features, waiting, with the haft of the terrible weapon gripped fast in his hand.

"There is no god but God—the long suffering—the inscrutable one—who moves in an inscrutable fashion to the accomplishment of his ends." Semi spoke again.

And as he spoke, Otho Khan lifted an uncertain hand and drew it across his face. It was as though he would thereby shut out if only for a moment the unswerving regard his adversary held upon him—that steady, unremitting regard which one could imagine as entering his brain through his own straining eyes, with a force that numbed and seared.

Under his black and scarlet robes his broad chest heaved. His lips parted, but emitted no sound. He might have been about to speak and changed his mind or found he could not.

"Too long hast thou diverted the pure stream of His life to thy impure purpose, Otho Khan."

The Mongol shuddered. I saw the tremor shake him. I think that as Dual voiced that accusation, he knew himself opposed to a greater strength, knew himself beaten, and read into the words his own doom. He swayed slightly upon his feet. His lips came open again and gave vent to the sound of a moan.

Yes, Otho Khan, sorcerer, necromancer, black magician, moaned. His glance shifted, fell away from Semi's. He sought to drag it back by sheer force of will. He broke utterly in the moment he knew he was beaten.

"Take your eyes off of me, sorcerer!" he screamed. "Turn them away—they are burning my brain in my skull! Aie!" His hands rose and covered his face. He bent over, writhing. "Curse ye! May God send your spirit to hell. Ye are tearing my brain to tatters with the fingers of thy will. Remove them! Torment me not any longer. Aie! Aie!" His knees bent, he sank down upon them and began a slow, horrible rocking to and fro like that of one in the grip of some terrible physical pain.

"There is but one God—the Compassionate One," said Semi Dual again, without altering the expression of face or voice in the slightest.

"Mercy! Mercy!" he cried out. "Mayest thy bones rot, and thy flesh be eaten of dogs an ye show not mercy to me. Thou hast beaten me—thou art the stronger—wherefore take them who were to be the prize of victory and leave me—and let there be peace between thee and me in the future. Peace—thou art slaying me—my brain is being destroyed—I hear my soul bidding my body farewell. Aie! Withdraw thy will from me."

His voice had become a whimper of supplication, the voice of one who, crushed and beaten, yet begs on his knees in a fear-wrought frenzy for the boon of life—the mere permission to live. What little dignity he may have once possessed, what pride or arrogance of power in whatsoever way gained, he may have held, were stripped completely from him, tin in the hour of his downfall, Otho Khan knelt before him who had overcome him, no more than one of 'his own tricked and cheated slaves.

"Nay," said Semi Dual slowly, "thy fate lies beyond me, and comes upon thee not through any act of mine, Mongol, but as the result of thy own acts. For it is written that he who lives by the sword, by the sword shall he perish, nor is it more true than that he who lives for himself atone shall by himself be destroyed. Wherefore, arise and give command, as it was agreed between us, that the men and the woman be surrendered to me."

Otho Khan staggered to his feet. His face was tense, drawn, distorted, and yet, as I fancied, filed with an almost dazed relief.

He flung out an arm in a gesture. "Thou dearest? Release the men. Give them and the woman to him," he cried.

"Set free the goat." It was the giant black questioned. I saw rebellion awake in his glance, his fingers tighten on the haft of die sacrificial knife.

"Hai!" Otho Khan lashed back in a tone of unbridled fury. "Thou earth worm, wouldst dare to defy me? See ye not that it is their lives for mine, thou black spawn of hell! And do you speak of a sacrifice at such a time?"

Looking back on it now it seems to me that Otho Khan in those last few moments was very much afraid, and knew not how to extricate himself from the position in which he found himself, save by getting Dual and us out of the chamber and then dealing with its other inmates as best he could, despite the fact that they had seen him discredited before them, completely overpowered and beaten to earth.

Something of all that, too, must have been in the mind of the black, for a strange expression grossed his face. I could not read it, however, and he made no response as he walked behind the three men and cut their bonds with the blade of the knife he carried, came back to his place before the altar and watched in a sullen faction while Haddon and Bryce came toward Semi and me, and Garston ran down to gather Lotis into his arms.

Yes, I think that even his animal-like mind must have realized how completely the one whose orders he had obeyed was shorn of his powers; that now in the last equation, he to whom be had attributed an ability transcending that of all others, was no more than a man indeed.

And without any other warning he launched himself forward, springing as a huge black panther might spring, from beside the altar. The knife in his hand came up in a full-arm swing, and was buried in the breast of Otho Khan.

What instinct made Nak leap forward I do not know. Still he was the Tougchi of Otho Khan, and perhaps it was impulse more than any other thing. Be that as it may, as Otho fell, he hurled himself on the Hack and drove a slender blade that glinted in the torchlight for an instant, straight into his body beneath the arm.

He was quick, was Nak—as quick as a snake striking home. But even so he was not quick enough to escape his own doom. The negro stiffened as the knife bit into his flesh, and Nak sprang aside from the attack. And then the giant black shot out one of his terrible, long-reaching apelike arms.

It caught the tougchi and drew him back screaming. It held him as it might have held a child—held him while he writhed and fought and struggled, while the same Hade that had accounted for Otho Khan was drawn across his throat. Then and then only it dropped him; the negro straightened, turned half-way toward the grinning idol of which he was the priest, lurched drunkenly in the turning, staggered, and fell back above the bodies of the men he had slain.

A babble of tongues broke out with his fall, as though by the death of those who had bound them to silence, they were instantly unchained. Men and women cried out in a rising clamor.

"Peace. There is no escape from this place save as I command. The entrance to it is filled against him who seeks it, with men and guns."

It was the signal he and Cory had mentioned. And as he spoke the end of the passage was filled by men with ready weapons in their hands.

"Hands up, all of you!" barked the sheriff. "Keep 'em covered, boys. Shoot to kill if they make a move. Now you open up there. I'm going down."

They broke away from before him as he advanced. They were trapped and knew it It was an odd sight to see them reaching toward the billowing cloud of the torches above them with uplifted arms. I glanced at my companions. They were watching, all save Lotis, who stood with her face buried against the naked breast of her husband as though to hide her eyes fpm where in the shambles just beyond us lay the thing that had once been Otho Khan.

Cory came straight down and glanced toward it. "Good work, Mr. Dual," he said. "I reckon that's done."

Abruptly Haddon laughed. "He's done," he agreed, "and I take it you're the sheriff."

Turning, he ran back to the idol and laid hold of it, wrenching and tugging at it until at length it yielded to him and he hurled it down.

The flare of the torches showed a dark opening behind it He seized one of them from the bracket that held it and plunged in.

The torch winked and blinked in the place he had entered, and then he was back with a couple of small tin boxes in his band.

Haddon glanced at the huddle of lifeless bodies. "As a matter of fact, I asked the chap who brought us up here about it, and he told me, while he still thought I wouldn't be able to use the knowledge." He laughed again.

CHAPTER XIX.
Triumph.

THAT laugh, and the words that went with it, seemed to break up the straining atmosphere which had held us since the tragic instant of the Voodoo priest's attack on Otho Khan.

"Gosh, m'son, but I'm glad to see you again," he exclaimed. "It knocked me dean off my pins when Mrs. Garston showed up, 'an then darned if you an' Mr. Dual here didn't come walkin' in an' I felt better. Th' minute I seen you I sort of knowed Otto th' Devil was done."

At his words, Lotis lifted her head from Garston's breast, and loosened herself from his arms. She stretched out her hands. "Jehovah hath triumphed," she said, looking into Semi's still well-nigh emotionless face with the light of an inward exaltation on her own.

There was something almost ritualistic in her declaration and his answer. It came to me that this instant in which they who had wrought together toward it, was the real climax of the whole affair, the final moment before, for all time to come, Semi Dual should relinquish again to her husband the one he had called Sword of Flame. It was the end of that strange, weird, almost unbelievable association between them, after which she was to become no more an instrument of justice to his band, but all woman again.

I felt it, but Cory missed its inward meaning, read into it nothing more than reference to what had been.

"That's right," he said, clearing his throat as though to attract our attention to more present things, "but i reckon this ain't no time nor place to discuss it. Somebody's liable to start somethin' almost any minute, an'—" He turned to Haddon. "If they've been runnin' in hop, I guess you want 'em held till you can sort of look 'em over an' decide which ones you want to hold."

"I guess so. This looks like a pretty good place to hold them, too, doesn't it, Mr. Sheriff?" Haddon ran his eyes about the place that had so nearly proved the scene of his death, and grinned.

"It does." Cory nodded. "But that means I gotta stay here till Strock can get back with a few more men. If you folks will tell him to go get 'em, after you get out, I'll sit tight till he comes. So let's get along." He lifted his voice. "All right up there boys, we're coming out."

We delayed no longer. After all, he was right. We started toward the exit from the chamber once more through the living walls of close-packed human bodies on either hand—Dual first, then Lotis and Garston, Bryce, Haddon, and I, and the sheriff last.

But as we got into motion I glanced for the last time at the lifeless bodies we left—all that remained in a material way of the giant black, and Otho Khan, and his Tougchi, Nak, and I caught my breath. For, close beside that heaped-up death was life.

The black virgin, she who had danced before the idol, who had cried out for the blood of the goat, had dragged herself to the huge nude form of that idol's priest, and drawn the monstrous head of it into her arms, to lie against her breast.

I touched Bryce on the arm and pointed, and he nodded. "Same girl Haddon an' I was tellin' you about. I knew her th' minute I lamped her, just before die begun to dance. She's th' one was feedin' him goat's milk th' other mornin'. This bunch seems to have been strong on goats all right. As fer me, I been th' 'friend' of one once, an' once is enough. I reckon she was his."

She was his. I made no comment as I walked at his side. I went up the sloping floor toward the exit from the scene of Otho Khan's gruesome ending, through the mass of Otho Khan's slaves, held no longer quiescent by his will, but by the more material force of Sheriff Cory's men and their guns.

"Why, yes," Haddon agreed with a chuckle, "I could do with a few more articles of that sort myself."

"Thanks, old dear," he accepted. "'Tis not so warm as a wardrobe, nor so smooth to the skin as silk, but 'twill suffice."

Dual dropped his robe for an instant, removed his own gray garment and handed it to Jim.

Bryce took it in silence, a most unusual action for one of his irrepressible spirits and tongue, but as he slipped into it I heard him mutter something about Elijah, and I fancied I knew what he meant; that it rather overawed him for the moment to think that Semi Dual should lend him his coat. He was Irish, one must remember, and for all his bluff and bluster, there was in him a deep and truly sensitive strain.

Cory surrendered his coat to Garston with the remark that there was no reason why he should remain as the only example of September Morn.

Indeed, there was a somewhat facetious tenor to the whole affair in those last few moments before we set off along the tunnel, which, after all, was no more than the reaction from those soul-gripping moments through which we had passed, a swinging back of the pendulum through the arc from the sublime to the ridiculous before it took up the normal beat of routine existence.

"And tell Jack to get a wiggle on him—an' you might send us up a snack by one of the men we left at your shack when we started up here," the sheriff made an ending. "I'll have a man outside waitin' to bring it in."

Garston nodded. "You'll get it as soon as I can wrangle Chang out of his bed—and we'll talk tins over later, Bill."

One of Corey's party had a flashlight and we followed its circle back along the tunnel, as we had followed that in the hands of Otho Khan's man in. We came out at last to where Strock's men drew a cordon about the mine entrance under the light of a westering moon.

The deputy nodded to the sheriff's instructions. We set off at once for the point where the horses had been left, after Garston had lifted Lotis to the saddle of the animal she had ridden, and placed himself at its head with the reins in his hand.

He led it down the trail in a quite needless fashion, which I do not think he realized at the time. There was an odd possessional, protective quality in his action, a thing inspired as it were of no outward need, bat born of more subtle causes, a material expression of inward things, a tacit promise that the man's soul was filled with vast, inexpressible emotions, that between him and the slender girl, the woman, the mate who rode behind him, there was a far, far greater bond now in this return to a life together than there had ever been.

He had seen her stand atone in the Temple of Erlik and hurl defiance into the teeth of the Wolf of Erlik as he sought to rend her with his snarling fangs. He had seen the Wolf of Erlik overthrown. He had glimpsed, if even in part, through a rift in the veil of objective life, that vast and little known country of the subliminal self, in which dwells the soul of man, and I think that for the time being his attitude might have beat likened to that of one who gazes upon the image of some star of the limitless heavens, caught in the bottom of a pure and limpid spring, so that perhaps while the influence held him, that leading down of her horse from the mountain was akin to the action of one who brings back with him something from the heights to preserve and cherish against all time. And not till we reached the horses, and Struck called on him to mount one of the three he selected for him and Bryce and Haddon, did he surrender the reins.

We rode down then, under the last rays of the moon. We went in silence; The mood of it held us still, a tongue enchaining thing. Nor did it lighten before we had reached Garston's house, where Connie was waiting, white-faced, for us, and had gone in, leaving Strock to continue the ride on his quest for additional men, and my wife had caught Lotis into her arms, sobbing:

And all at once Garston grinned. He strode toward the door of the hall that led to the kitchen and disappeared. His voice drifted back to Semi and me as we stood there, calling out loudly: "Chang! Oh, Chang!"

"Aye." He turned to sink into a chair and rest his head upon his hand. "The end of the present conflict, Gordon, yet not of evil, nor of the struggle between righteousness and wrong; that conflict which must continue between man's higher and lower natures, so long as man is man."

He spoke slowly. It was seldom in my life I had seen him wearied, and yet he seemed wearied then, as though the stress of those strange, incalculably freighted moments when he had faced the Wolf of Erlik, had left him m a measure spent, more than I had ever seen him worn.

"At least," I said, "it's the end of Otho Khan's place of prayer and Ins fiendish artificial brain. Haddon's got this opium charge against the whole community, more or less, and that means he can dean them up without any mention of other things."

"Ah, yes." He lifted his head. He was smiling. His deep gray eyes met mine. There was no longer any light of menace in them. They were warm. "The end of Otho Khan's place of prayer; the end of a perverted thing. But the real place of prayer—that which endureth forever—abides in that tabernacle of the spirit, which is the soul of man, my friend."

THE END

J.U. GIESY AND JUNIUS B. SMITH

WOLF OF ERLIK

Serialised in Argosy All-Story Weekly, 22 Oct-12 Nov 1921

This e-book edition: Roy Glashan's Library, 2025
Version Date: 2025-09-10

Produced by Paul Moulder and Roy Glashan

All original content added by RGL is protected by copyright.

Click here for more books by this author

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.
A Call From Afar.

CHAPTER II.
"C'est la Guerre."

CHAPTER III.
Norman Haddon, D.J.

CHAPTER IV.
A Call For Help.

CHAPTER V.
The Shroud.

CHAPTER VI.
The Wolf.

CHAPTER VII.
Lotis Speaks.

CHAPTER VIII.
The Flaming Sword Of The Spirit.

CHAPTER IX.
Opposing Forces.

CHAPTER X.
The Drums.

CHAPTER XI.
A Duel Of Minds.

CHAPTER XII.
Attack.

CHAPTER XIII.
The Sword Unsheathed.

CHAPTER XIV.
Thrusting In.

CHAPTER XV.
Sheriff Cory.

CHAPTER XVI.
Lotis Goes.

CHAPTER XVII.
At Satan's Altar.

CHAPTER XVIII.
The Battle.

CHAPTER XIX.
Triumph.

THE END

J.U. GIESY AND JUNIUS B. SMITH

WOLF OF ERLIK

Serialised in Argosy All-Story Weekly, 22 Oct-12 Nov 1921 This e-book edition: Roy Glashan's Library, 2025 Version Date: 2025-09-10 Produced by Paul Moulder and Roy Glashan All original content added by RGL is protected by copyright. Click here for more books by this author

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. A Call From Afar.

CHAPTER II. "C'est la Guerre."

CHAPTER III. Norman Haddon, D.J.

CHAPTER IV. A Call For Help.

CHAPTER V. The Shroud.

CHAPTER VI. The Wolf.

CHAPTER VII. Lotis Speaks.

CHAPTER VIII. The Flaming Sword Of The Spirit.

CHAPTER IX. Opposing Forces.

CHAPTER X. The Drums.

CHAPTER XI. A Duel Of Minds.

CHAPTER XII. Attack.

CHAPTER XIII. The Sword Unsheathed.

CHAPTER XIV. Thrusting In.

CHAPTER XV. Sheriff Cory.

CHAPTER XVI. Lotis Goes.

CHAPTER XVII. At Satan's Altar.

CHAPTER XVIII. The Battle.

CHAPTER XIX. Triumph.

THE END

Serialised in Argosy All-Story Weekly, 22 Oct-12 Nov 1921

This e-book edition: Roy Glashan's Library, 2025
Version Date: 2025-09-10

Produced by Paul Moulder and Roy Glashan

All original content added by RGL is protected by copyright.

Click here for more books by this author

CHAPTER I.
A Call From Afar.

CHAPTER II.
"C'est la Guerre."

CHAPTER III.
Norman Haddon, D.J.

CHAPTER IV.
A Call For Help.

CHAPTER V.
The Shroud.

CHAPTER VI.
The Wolf.

CHAPTER VII.
Lotis Speaks.

CHAPTER VIII.
The Flaming Sword Of The Spirit.

CHAPTER IX.
Opposing Forces.

CHAPTER X.
The Drums.

CHAPTER XI.
A Duel Of Minds.

CHAPTER XII.
Attack.

CHAPTER XIII.
The Sword Unsheathed.

CHAPTER XIV.
Thrusting In.

CHAPTER XV.
Sheriff Cory.

CHAPTER XVI.
Lotis Goes.

CHAPTER XVII.
At Satan's Altar.

CHAPTER XVIII.
The Battle.

CHAPTER XIX.
Triumph.