Part 2

Cunningham could not explain it, but he knew that he had not mistaken the route to adventure. Coulters was on the way. But there was a mile and a half still to go.

Gray moved suddenly.

“Cunningham, if you want to take up this proposition--”

Cunningham picked up his bags and moved toward the hotel.

“I can’t fill the contract,” he said shortly.

“But it is so simple!” protested Vladimir. “Simply talk to my brother----”

Gray was already up on the porch.

“Can’t do even that,” he said grimly. “You evidently haven’t heard. You’d better get Bendale on the ’phone and find out. Your brother was on the train with us yesterday, it’s true. He went up to the village of the Strangers last night. But his horse brought his body back this morning. They’d killed him.”

Vladimir gasped, and went ashen. Sheer incredulity flashed across his features. Then he believed and was stunned. But there was no grief whatever to be seen on his face. Instead there was a terrible wrath, a rage so beastly and cruel that Cunningham shivered when he saw it.

“They killed him, eh?” he said very softly, like a cat purring. “They dared to kill him, eh? Ah, when I am through with them they will go down on their knees and beg me to kill them! Beg me!”

His eyes were fixed and glassy with fury. Cunningham instinctively looked for the foam of madness to appear upon his lips. But he turned and went softly within the hotel.

“Charming example of family affection,” said Gray. “Why didn’t you take his money?”

“I wouldn’t miss this,” Cunningham told him, “for ten times five thousand. What in blazes is up in those hills?”

“I suggest,” Gray said dryly, “that we go and see. Got a gun?”

Cunningham nodded.

“There’s no time like the present,” grunted Gray. “The sheriff was over here, busily being bribed, when that killing was discovered. Let’s get up in the hills before it’s overrun with deputies. It won’t take a second to get our rooms.”

As a matter of fact it was nearly an hour later when they strode out of the hotel and made abruptly for the mountain-slope.

For another hour they scrambled up stiff slopes among thorny brushwood and small trees. Cunningham was already trying to sort out the hodgepodge of events. Adventure--or mystery at any rate--crowded about him. Romance must inevitably follow. That seemed so certain that he was almost able to discount it. He was sure by now that Gray was not in the hills for any study of dialects, and he contentedly ran over the list to date. A killing and the offer of a bribe. A corrupted sheriff and the threat of ‘unspeakable revenge. And Gray----

Cunningham, you see, was following a definite route which cut across common sense and sanity. Therefore he kept his eyes open more widely than Gray. And therefore he was tingling all over with a not altogether pleasant thrill when Gray turned on him suddenly.

“Cunningham,” he said sharply, “tell me the truth for once. Why did you come up here? Who sent you?”

Cunningham grinned, casting little side-glances at the trees about him.

“Nobody,” he said joyously. “I came up here for adventure and for romance. And I’m finding them. For instance, there are half a dozen people hiding behind those trees and watching us.”

“The devil!” Gray stopped short and stared about him. It was a creepy feeling to realize that they were being spied upon from the woods. Suddenly he saw a furtive movement as a blurred figure slipped from behind one trunk to another. Its figure was that of a man, but he could see nothing else about it. “Creepy, eh?” said Gray grimly.

“There’s a girl with them,” Cunningham told him. “_The_ girl. Maria.”

But Gray rushed suddenly at a clump of brushwood as if to seize something hiding there. A human figure started up and plunged away. And then something came flicking through the air, glittering, and stuck fast in a tree-trunk with a dull “_ping!_” It was a long-bladed knife, and it had missed Gray’s throat by inches.

And without a word or a sign the air seemed suddenly full of the little flickering flames which were knife-blades glittering in the sunlight. And which, also, were death.

5

Cunningham flung himself down on the ground. His revolver came out instinctively, but he shouted, “We’re friends, you idiots! Friends!”

There was no answer, but the knives stopped their silent rush through the air. It seemed as if the hidden men in the forest were debating in whispers, and the stillness was deadly. Cunningham lay still, gradually worming his revolver around to a convenient position for firing. He was tingling all over, but he found himself thinking with a supreme irrelevance that he thought he had seen the girl whose picture crackled in his breast pocket as he moved. He was quite sure of it.

He stood up suddenly and began to dust himself off. It was taking a chance, but it was wise. A young man stepped out from among the trees near by.

“You are our friends?” the young man demanded skeptically. “We have no friends.”

His speech had but the faintest of slurs in it, a teasing soft unfamiliarity which pricked one’s curiosity but could never be identified in any one syllable, much less put down in print.

Cunningham felt an abrupt relief, and quite as abruptly wanted to swear. He knew that this was the end of the route to romance and that the girl, Maria, was peering out from the tangled underbrush. And he had dived head foremost into a patch of loam and looked most unromantic. Therefore he said wrathfully, “If we weren’t your friends, don’t you think we’d have plugged into you with our gats? We saw you. You know that!”

The young man stared at him and Cunningham tried to rub the dirt off his nose and look dignified at the same time, thinking of the girl behind the trees.

Then the young man said skeptically, “What is a gat?”

“A revolver. A pistol. A handgun,” snapped Cunningham. “We’d have wiped out the lot of you.”

The man searched his face unbelievingly. A murmur came from somewhere behind him.

“Show me,” he said. He came boldly out from the brushwood and faced Cunningham squarely.

He was no older than Cunningham, but Cunningham instantly envied him his build. He was magnificently made and splendidly muscled--as were all the Strangers, as Cunningham learned later. He met Cunningham’s eyes frankly, yet defiantly.

Cunningham turned to where Gray still lay sprawled out in a heap of brush. Imperturbable puffs of smoke rose in the still woodland air.

“Go ahead and charm them, Cunningham,” said Gray’s voice dryly. “I’m under cover and I’ll start shooting if they start anything.”

“Show me that you could have killed us,” repeated the young man, facing Cunningham. “Use this thing you have.”

Cunningham held out his revolver. The Stranger looked at it curiously but impassively. He seemed totally unfamiliar with its nature or use.

“Great guns!” demanded Cunningham in exasperation. “Don’t you know what it is?”

The young man hesitated and then shook his head.

“No. I do not know what it is.”

He waited defiantly as Cunningham gaped at him. People in these United States who had never seen a revolver! He grunted.

“All right, I’ll show you, then.”

He picked up a bit of weather-rotted rock and set it up for a target. He drew off ten paces and leveled his pistol. He fired, and half the rock flew to fragments. It was seamed and cracked by the freezings and thawings of many years.

The young man flinched at the sound.

“It is like a shotgun,” he observed calmly. “You can use it twice. And then?”

He tapped the hilt of his knife suggestively.

“Then this,” snapped Cunningham.

He fired again and again and again. The rock was splinters.

“And I’ve still two shots left,” he observed grimly. “My friend yonder has six more. If we were not your friends would we have waited for you to chuck rocks at us?”

The young man debated. He inspected Cunningham’s face again.

“N-no,” he admitted. “Perhaps not. But why did you come here?”

Cunningham reached into his pocket and flipped the torn-out pages of the magazine article to him.

“Look at the pictures. That’s why I came,” he said grimly. “And if you want to know more----”

The young man had cried out in astonishment. He turned and beckoned to the woods behind him. A second man appeared. Then a third. They stared at the pictures, fumbling them with their fingers.

The young man turned once more to Cunningham with a very pale face.

“Tell us,” he begged. “How did these come to be? Tell us! If you are our friends, tell us everything!”

For all his blank astonishment, Cunningham realized that he had made a bull’s-eye.

For ten minutes he talked to them, at first in commonplace speech, and as he realized that the most ordinary of technical terms meant nothing to them, he spoke as if to children. He watched their faces and explained until he saw comprehension dawn. And he became filled with a vast incredulity. These people spoke grammatical English, better than the native New Englanders. But they knew nothing of revolvers, though they had seen shotguns and rifles. They knew nothing of cameras, though they could read and write. And they were in a civilized state of a civilized nation! Only the most passionately preserved isolation and an incredible ignorance to begin with could account for it.

They listened intently. Now and again another figure crept out of the wood. They were sitting in a semicircle about him now, watching his face as he spoke. Old men, young men, but no sign of the girl. Presently the younger men began to comment to one another on what Cunningham was saying. Gray got up and sat down more comfortably with his back against a boulder. The comments of the younger men were low-voiced, and sometimes one or another of them smiled. Presently a little chuckle ran about the circle.

Cunningham stammered. He felt like a fool, explaining that he was here because of an article in a magazine, and then having to explain what a magazine was, what a camera was, and all the rest. It was when the feeling of folly was strongest upon him that the chuckle went around. And then he noted that the young men had been quietly retrieving the knives they had sent flickering through the air. Everyone now had his knife back in his belt and was fingering its hilt while he gazed smilingly at Cunningham.

The smiles were bland and friendly, but a feeling of horror came to him. They were playing with him! They were pretending to listen to him, but actually they were toying with him as a cat toys with a mouse. They ringed him about, now, thirty or more of them. From time to time they edged closer to him. And one of them would ask a question in that teasing soft unfamiliar dialect of theirs, which you could not put your finger on. And he would edge a little closer, and smile.

Sweat came out on Cunningham’s forehead. He felt as if he were in a nightmare. The smiles were terrifying. They masked a sinister purpose, a deadly and unspeakable purpose. Cunningham was remembering the dead man he had seen that morning. Some of these men had done him to death. Now they were edging closer to him, feigning to listen and feigning to smile.

He turned and found half a dozen of them very close to his back. He whirled back again and saw that they had edged closer while his back was turned. They sat upon the ground with their eyes fixed intently upon him, and smiled when he looked at them, and asked questions in their soft and unfamiliar accent. And always they moved closer....

Cunningham felt that his teeth would begin to chatter in an instant. And suddenly a look of intelligence passed from one to another. A signal!

6

Cunningham suddenly swung his pistol out. He was sweating in the horror they had inspired. Once they came for him he would be calm enough, but this ghoulish waiting until he should be momentarily off his guard was ghastly. He flung out his pistol in a wide arc.

“I’ll show you some target practise,” he said suddenly. “Clear a lane over there.”

He waved his hand and they parted reluctantly. Now and then they exchanged glances. He could see some of them peering about, as if looking to make sure that no one else was within sight. Cunningham managed to snatch a glance at Gray. Gray was staring at him with a queer distaste, and Cunningham tried to explain what he planned with a significant look. He’d clear a path for a rush, and then they could stand these people off.

He slipped fresh shells in place of the exploded ones.

“Now I’ll hit that tree-trunk over there,” he said sharply. Gray should understand and be ready to leap up. “Watch the bark fly.”

But Gray was sitting quite still. He was regarding Cunningham suspiciously.

“Like this,” snapped Cunningham. He glanced at Gray and made an almost imperceptible motion for him to jump up. They’d have to run for it in a moment.

He pressed on the trigger, and his eyes came back to the sights just as the hammer was falling. It was too late to stop the explosion and his heart stood still. From behind the very tree-trunk he was aiming at a girl’s face had peered.

From sheer instinct he jerked at the weapon almost before his brain had registered his impression. It went off with a roar, and as the echoes died away he heard the rattling of several twigs falling to the ground.

Cunningham gasped and the revolver nearly fell from his hands as he saw her still standing there, gazing interestedly at him. He rushed toward her, his terror of an instant before all forgotten.

“I might have killed you!” he gasped. “Are you hurt? Are you?”

Her eyes opened wide and she flushed faintly. She moved as if to flee. Then she glanced at the Strangers grouped about the place Cunningham had left and stepped out into the open.

“You--you made a very loud noise,” she said uncertainly. “That was all.”

It was the Girl. It was Maria, whose picture Cunningham had treasured and about whom he had day-dreamed. At another time he might have risen to the high heroic moment. He might have appeared in better guise. But in the transcendent relief of finding her safe his wrought-up emotions found escape in the form of rage. He whirled on the Strangers.

“Why didn’t you tell me she was there?” he demanded furiously. His horror of a moment before had vanished completely. He was angry enough to have waded into the bunch bare-handed. “You knew she was there! Damn it, I might have killed her! I might have shot her! Idiots!” he cried, half sobbing from relief; “you let me come close to killing her!”

Gray was still staring at him curiously.

“If you really mean these people well, Cunningham----” he was beginning curtly, when Cunningham turned to the girl again.

“Please forgive me,” he begged, still white and shaking from his scare. “I didn’t know you were there!”

Her eyes met his wonderingly. Then the expression in them changed. She read the terror and understood its cause. She smiled shyly.

“I was safe. My friends were there.”

She meant the thirty or more Strangers, staring puzzledly at Cunningham and bewildered by his evident horror. Cunningham’s head cleared with a jerk. He felt more than ever like a fool. All men are tempted to feel that way in the presence of a pretty girl, if only to keep the pretty girl company, but Cunningham saw that the Strangers were honestly at a loss. There had been no secret purpose. They were as incredibly uninformed as they had seemed and they had been listening with all the attention their actions had displayed.

“Look here,” said Cunningham abjectly, “I guess I seem like a fool to you, Maria, but I did come here only to see you. I--I’ve been day-dreaming about you. Let me show you why I was scared and you’ll understand what it would have meant if I had hit you.”

He took her hand and fitted it to the pistol-grip. He put her finger on the trigger.

“Now, point it off that way,” he went on anxiously, “squeeze on this thing....”

There was the swift thudding of horses’ hoofs. A nasal voice cried shrilly, “Halt in th’ name of th’ law!”

Cunningham started and instinctively held fast to his revolver, which someone seemed trying to jerk away. He caught a glimpse of flying figures melting into the woods. Then he saw two men on horseback plunging up to the spot. One wore a bright star on his chest and the other carried a rifle.

“There, naow!” the sheriff of the county exclaimed, panting. “I got one of ’em, even if it was a girl.”

He lunged from his horse and seized Maria, who was wrenching frantically to get her finger out of the trigger-guard Cunningham had held tightly.

She flashed a glance of bitter hatred at Cunningham.

“Easy,” said Cunningham with sudden heat. “What are you arresting her for? I was showing her how to shoot a revolver.”

“No thanks to ye for that, then,” panted the sheriff. “Here, Joel, come an’ help me get the cuffs on her.”

Cunningham brought down a heavy hand on the sheriff’s arm.

“What’s this for?” he demanded hotly. “I didn’t hold her for you!”

“I’m arrestin’ her for murder, that’s what. She’s one of them Strange People, she is. An’ they killed that furriner last night. You know that. You saw him this mornin’. Mr. Vladimir told me. Joel, come here an’ help me. Help me get her hands in these cuffs.”

Cunningham wrenched the sheriff’s hands free.

“Don’t be a fool,” he snapped angrily. “That killing was the work of men! This girl had nothing to do with it!”

“I warn ye not to interfere with the law!” growled the sheriff.

“I’m not interfering with the law,” said Cunningham hotly. “I’m interfering with your doing what Vladimir’s bribed you to do! This girl would never get to jail. Vladimir’s much too anxious to get some of the Strangers in his hands. Hands off!”

He thrust the girl behind him, where she cowered for a moment.

“Get out of here,” snapped Cunningham. “And you start something about my resisting the law and I’ll start something about your taking bribes! Clear out and leave this girl alone!”

“Ye better not shield a murderer----” whined the sheriff uneasily.

“If you want murderers, look for men,” said Cunningham coldly. “Then I won’t stop you. But stick to the law, Sheriff, and forget about Vladimir.”

He drew back with the girl behind him and his eyes blazing. The revolver that had snared the girl was still clutched in his hand. The sheriff gazed at him venomously.

“I’ll tend to ye,” he said uncertainly.

“Try it,” Cunningham growled as he watched the two men ride slowly away. He watched until they had disappeared. Then he turned to Maria.

She was gone.

Cunningham stared blankly, then grinned sheepishly at Gray.

“I guess that was foolish, maybe,” he apologized, “but he made me mad.”

Gray was white as a sheet, but he tried to smile as he got up stiffly.

“You did good work for me,” he said grimly. “Look at my coat.”

He turned and showed a little rip in the back.

“When those chaps made for the woods,” he said grimly, “one of them dropped behind my own particular boulder and stuck the point of a knife in my back. If the sheriff had taken that girl off, the knife would have been sunk in me. Ugh! Let’s go back to Coulters.”

7

The hills rose until they blotted out half the stars, and the moonlight on their tree-clad slopes was like a screen of opaque lace against the sky. Utter solitude seemed to surround the little summer boardinghouse. No other house was in view. No lights burned in the houses the Strange People must occupy in the hills. All was silence.

Gray stood up and tossed away his last cigar.

“I’m going to turn in,” he said at last. “It’s too much for me. By the way, I may be gone before you get up in the morning.”

“Leaving?” asked Cunningham.

He and Gray had been talking fruitlessly, trying to piece together what they knew of Vladimir with what they had seen of the Strangers, and attempting to figure out the connection between the two. They had decided that the Strangers’ attack upon them had been due to Gray’s rush at one of the hidden figures. That their hiding was due to the fact that they had killed Vladimir’s brother and were afraid of arrest. But they could concoct no theory as to why Vladimir had sought them out, or where he could have known them, or why he was willing to spend any amount of money to have a free hand with them. Certainly they could not understand what he would gain besides revenge, or even how he could set about taking that in a civilized country.

“No, not leaving,” said Gray. He yawned. “You don’t care to confide in me, Cunningham? About your real reason for being here?”

Cunningham grinned. The route he had followed had not misled him. Adventure and romance were certainly about him. He had seen Maria, and she was perfect. And there was promise of more excitement.

“I’ve told you,” he said cheerfully. “I came here for fun. Why not tell me why you came?”

Gray smiled.

“Dialect, of course.” His tone admitted that he did not expect Cunningham to believe it. “I’ll send some wires and be back by noon. Watch your step while I’m gone. I think Vladimir would feel happier with you in jail.”

“I know he would,” said Cunningham. “But there’s something crooked going on. I shall object pretty strenuously to being arrested.”

Gray laughed.

“I think you will,” he admitted. “But today I thought you were just trying to hold the Strangers in talk until the sheriff could reach them unheard. I think they thought the same.”

“I didn’t hear the son-of-a-gun,” said Cunningham.

Gray yawned again on his way to the door.

“I knew it when you fought to keep that girl from being arrested. Didn’t you notice I told you about the knife at my back right away? So that the Strangers would hear me? I wanted them to know you’d kept her free on your own hook, not to save my life. That ought to make them believe in you somewhat.”

“But why did you want to make me solid with them?” demanded Cunningham.

“Oh, you might help me later,” said Gray dryly, “in studying their dialect.”

He disappeared, and Cunningham frowned out at the darkness for a long time. It was a puzzling mix-up, and it might prove a dangerous one. Gray had been close to death that afternoon and one man had been killed. But Cunningham could not find it in his heart to dwell upon anything, now, but Maria. She was--different. Cunningham dwelt upon her image in his memory with increasing contentment. Sometimes a man sees a woman and without even any feeling of surprize realizes that it is she whom he has been waiting for all his life. It is more of a recognition than a meeting. Cunningham felt that way about Maria.