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Description
Valuable software, realistic examples, clear writing, and fascinating topics help
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A leading innovator in spreadsheet instruction and highly regarded pioneer in
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Information Technology and Academic Director of the Center for Business
Intelligence and Analytics in the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech,
where he has taught since 1990. Dr. Ragsdale received his Ph.D. in management
science and information technology from the University of Georgia. He also holds
an M.B.A. in Finance and B.A. in psychology from the University of Central Florida.
Before pursuing his Ph.D., he supervised benefit finance and qualified plans at the
international headquarters of Red Lobster, Inc. He has served as an information
systems and statistical consultant for a variety of companies and as an expert
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Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Fearful Rock
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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Title: Fearful Rock

Author: Manly Wade Wellman

Illustrator: H. S. De Lay

Release date: July 11, 2024 [eBook #74018]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Weird Tales, 1939

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FEARFUL ROCK

***
 Fearful Rock

By MANLY WADE WELLMAN

An eery tale of the American

Civil War, and the uncanny
evil being who called himself
Persil Mandifer, and his lovely
daughter—a tale of dark
powers and weird happenings.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Weird Tales February, March, April 1939.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
 1. The Sacrifice
Enid Mandifer tried to stand up under what she had just heard. She
managed it, but her ears rang, her eyes misted. She felt as if she
were drowning.
The voice of Persil Mandifer came through the fog, level and slow,
with the hint of that foreign accent which nobody could identify:
"Now that you know that you are not really my daughter, perhaps
you are curious as to why I adopted you."
Curious ... was that the word to use? But this man who was not her
father after all, he delighted in understatements. Enid's eyes had
grown clearer now. She was able to move, to obey Persil Mandifer's
invitation to seat herself. She saw him, half sprawling in his rocking-
chair against the plastered wall of the parlor, under the painting of his
ancient friend Aaron Burr. Was the rumor true, she mused, that Burr
had not really died, that he still lived and planned ambitiously to
make himself a throne in America? But Aaron Burr would have to be
an old, old man—a hundred years old, or more than a hundred.
Persil Mandifer's own age might have been anything, but probably he
was nearer seventy than fifty. Physically he was the narrowest of
men, in shoulders, hips, temples and legs alike, so that he appeared
distorted and compressed. White hair, like combed thistledown, fitted
itself in ordered streaks to his high skull. His eyes, dull and dark as
musket-balls, peered expressionlessly above the nose like a stiletto,
the chin like the pointed toe of a fancy boot. The fleshlessness of his
legs was accentuated by tight trousers, strapped under the insteps.
At his throat sprouted a frill of lace, after a fashion twenty-five years
old.
At his left, on a stool, crouched his enormous son Larue. Larue's body
was a collection of soft-looking globes and bladders—a tremendous
belly, round-kneed short legs, puffy hands, a gross bald head
between fat shoulders. His white linen suit was only a shade paler
than his skin, and his loose, faded-pink lips moved incessantly. Once
Enid had heard him talking to himself, had been close enough to
distinguish the words. Over and over he had said: "I'll kill you. I'll kill
you. I'll kill you."
These two men had reared her from babyhood, here in this low,
spacious manor of brick and timber in the Ozark country. Sixteen or
eighteen years ago there had been Indians hereabouts, but they
were gone, and the few settlers were on remote farms. The
Mandifers dwelt alone with their slaves, who were unusually solemn
and taciturn for Negroes.
Persil Mandifer was continuing: "I have brought you up as a
gentleman would bring up his real daughter—for the sole and simple
end of making her a good wife. That explains, my dear, the
governess, the finishing-school at St. Louis, the books, the journeys
we have undertaken to New Orleans and elsewhere. I regret that this
distressing war between the states," and he paused to draw from his
pocket his enameled snuff-box, "should have made recent junkets
impracticable. However, the time has come, and you are not to be
despised. Your marriage is now to befall you."
"Marriage," mumbled Larue, in a voice that Enid was barely able to
hear. His fingers interlaced, like fat white worms in a jumble. His eyes
were for Enid, his ears for his father.
Enid saw that she must respond. She did so: "You have—chosen a
husband for me?"
Persil Mandifer's lips crawled into a smile, very wide on his narrow
blade of a face, and he took a pinch of snuff. "Your husband, my
dear, was chosen before ever you came into this world," he replied.
The smile grew broader, but Enid did not think it cheerful. "Does your
mirror do you justice?" he teased her. "Enid, my foster-daughter, does
it tell you truly that you are a beauty, with a face all lustrous and
oval, eyes full of tender fire, a cascade of golden-brown curls to
frame the whole?" His gaze wandered upon her body, and his eyelids
drooped. "Does it convince you, Enid, that your figure combines
rarely those traits of fragility and rondure that are never so desirable
as when they occur together? Ah, Enid, had I myself met you, or one
like you, thirty years ago——"
"Father!" growled Larue, as though at sacrilege. Persil Mandifer
chuckled. His left hand, white and slender with a dark cameo upon
the forefinger, extended and patted Larue's repellent bald pate, in
superior affection.
"Never fear, son," crooned Persil Mandifer. "Enid shall go a pure bride
to him who waits her." His other hand crept into the breast of his coat
and drew forth something on a chain. It looked like a crucifix.
"Tell me," pleaded the girl, "tell me, fa——" She broke off, for she
could not call him father. "What is the name of the one I am to
marry?"
"His name?" said Larue, as though aghast at her ignorance.
"His name?" repeated the lean man in the rocking-chair. The crucifix-
like object in his hands began to swing idly and rhythmically, while he
paid out chain to make its pendulum motion wider and slower. "He
has no name."

Enid felt her lips grow cold and dry. "He has no——"
"He is the Nameless One," said Persil Mandifer, and she could discern
the capital letters in the last two words he spoke.
"Look," said Larue, out of the corner of his weak mouth that was
nearest his father. "She thinks that she is getting ready to run."
"She will not run," assured Persil Mandifer. "She will sit and listen,
and watch what I have here in my hand." The object on the chain
seemed to be growing in size and clarity of outline. Enid felt that it
might not be a crucifix, after all.
"The Nameless One is also ageless," continued Persil Mandifer. "My
dear, I dislike telling you all about him, and it is not really necessary.
All you need know is that we—my fathers and I—have served him
here, and in Europe, since the days when France was Gaul. Yes, and
before that."
The swinging object really was increasing in her sight. And the basic
cross was no cross, but a three-armed thing like a capital T. Nor was
the body-like figure spiked to it; it seemed to twine and clamber upon
that T-shape, like a monkey on a bracket. Like a monkey, it was
grotesque, disproportionate, a mockery. That climbing creature was
made of gold, or of something gilded over. The T-shaped support was
as black and bright as jet.

"The swinging object was increasing in her sight."

Enid thought that the golden creature was dull, as if tarnished, and
that it appeared to move; an effect created, perhaps, by the rhythmic
swinging on the chain.
"Our profits from the association have been great," Persil Mandifer
droned. "Yet we have given greatly. Four times in each hundred years
must a bride be offered."
Mist was gathering once more, in Enid's eyes and brain, a thicker
mist than the one that had come from the shock of hearing that she
was an adopted orphan. Yet through it all she saw the swinging
device, the monkey-like climber upon the T. And through it all she
heard Mandifer's voice:
"When my real daughter, the last female of my race, went to the
Nameless One, I wondered where our next bride would come from.
And so, twenty years ago, I took you from a foundling asylum at
Nashville."
It was becoming plausible to her now. There was a power to be
worshipped, to be feared, to be fed with young women. She must go
—no, this sort of belief was wrong. It had no element of decency in
it, it was only beaten into her by the spell of the pendulum-swinging
charm. Yet she had heard certain directions, orders as to what to do.
"You will act in the manner I have described, and say the things I
have repeated, tonight at sundown," Mandifer informed her, as
though from a great distance. "You will surrender yourself to the
Nameless One, as it was ordained when first you came into my
possession."
"No," she tried to say, but her lips would not even stir. Something had
crept into her, a will not her own, which was forcing her to accept
defeat. She knew she must go—where?
"To Fearful Rock," said the voice of Mandifer, as though he had heard
and answered the question she had not spoken. "Go there, to that
house where once my father lived and worshipped, that house which,
upon the occasion of his rather mysterious death, I left. It is now our
place of devotion and sacrifice. Go there, Enid, tonight at sundown,
in the manner I have prescribed...."
 2. The Cavalry Patrol
Lieutenant Kane Lanark was one of those strange and vicious
heritage-anomalies of one of the most paradoxical of wars—a war
where a great Virginian was high in Northern command, and a great
Pennsylvanian stubbornly defended one of the South's principal
strongholds; where the two presidents were both born in Kentucky,
indeed within scant miles of each other; where father strove against
son, and brother against brother, even more frequently and tragically
than in all the jangly verses and fustian dramas of the day.
Lanark's birthplace was a Maryland farm, moderately prosperous. His
education had been completed at the Virginia Military Institute,
where he was one of a very few who were inspired by a quiet,
bearded professor of mathematics who later became the Stonewall of
the Confederacy, perhaps the continent's greatest tactician. The older
Lanark was strongly for state's rights and mildly for slavery, though
he possessed no Negro chattels. Kane, the younger of two sons, had
carried those same attitudes with him as much as seven miles past
the Kansas border, whither he had gone in 1861 to look for
employment and adventure.
At that lonely point he met with Southern guerrillas, certain loose-
shirted, weapon-laden gentry whose leader, a gaunt young man with
large, worried eyes, bore the craggy name of Quantrill and was to be
called by a later historian the bloodiest man in American history.
Young Kane Lanark, surrounded by sudden leveled guns, protested
his sympathy with the South by birth, education and personal
preference. Quantrill replied, rather sententiously, that while this
might be true, Lanark's horse and money-belt had a Yankee look to
them, and would be taken as prisoners of war.
After the guerrillas had galloped away, with a derisive laugh hanging
in the air behind them, Lanark trudged back to the border and a little
settlement, where he begged a ride by freight wagon to St. Joseph,
Missouri. There he enlisted with a Union cavalry regiment just then in
the forming, and his starkness of manner, with evidences about him
of military education and good sense, caused his fellow recruits to
elect him a sergeant.
Late that year, Lanark rode with a patrol through southern Missouri,
where fortune brought him and his comrades face to face with
Quantrill's guerrillas, the same that had plundered Lanark. The
lieutenant in charge of the Federal cavalry set a most hysterical
example for flight, and died of six Southern bullets placed accurately
between his shoulder blades; but Lanark, as ranking non-
commissioned officer, rallied the others, succeeded in withdrawing
them in order before the superior force. As he rode last of the
retreat, he had the fierce pleasure of engaging and sabering an over-
zealous guerrilla, who had caught up with him. The patrol rejoined its
regiment with only two lost, the colonel was pleased to voice
congratulations and Sergeant Lanark became Lieutenant Lanark, vice
the slain officer.
In April of 1862, General Curtis, recently the victor in the desperately
fought battle of Pea Ridge, showed trust and understanding when he
gave Lieutenant Lanark a scouting party of twenty picked riders, with
orders to seek yet another encounter with the marauding Quantrill.
Few Union officers wanted anything to do with Quantrill, but Lanark,
remembering his harsh treatment at those avaricious hands, yearned
to kill the guerrilla chieftain with his own proper sword. On the
afternoon of April fifth, beneath a sun bright but none too warm, the
scouting patrol rode down a trail at the bottom of a great, trough-like
valley just south of the Missouri-Arkansas border. Two pairs of men,
those with the surest-footed mounts, acted as flanking parties high
on the opposite slopes, and a watchful corporal by the name of
Googan walked his horse well in advance of the main body. The
others rode two and two, with Lanark at the head and Sergeant
Jager, heavy-set and morosely keen of eye, at the rear.
A photograph survives of Lieutenant Kane Lanark as he appeared
that very spring—his breadth of shoulder and slimness of waist
accentuated by the snug blue cavalry jacket that terminated at his
sword-belt, his ruddy, beak-nosed face shaded by a wide black hat
with a gold cord. He wore a mustache, trim but not gay, and his long
chin alone of all his command went smooth-shaven. To these details
be it added that he rode his bay gelding easily, with a light, sure hand
on the reins, and that he had the air of one who knew his present
business.
The valley opened at length upon a wide level platter of land among
high, pine-tufted hills. The flat expanse was no more than half
timbered, though clever enemies might advance unseen across it if
they exercised caution and foresight enough to slip from one belt or
clump of trees to the next. Almost at the center of the level, a good
five miles from where Lanark now halted his command stood a single
great chimney or finger of rock, its lean tip more than twice the
height of the tallest tree within view.
To this geologic curiosity the eyes of Lieutenant Lanark snapped at
once.
"Sergeant!" he called, and Jager sidled his horse close.
"We'll head for that rock, and stop there," Lanark announced. "It's a
natural watch-tower, and from the top of it we can see everything,
even better than we could if we rode clear across flat ground to those
hills. And if Quantrill is west of us, which I'm sure he is, I'd like to see
him coming a long way off, so as to know whether to fight or run."
"I agree with you, sir," said Jager. He peered through narrow, puffy
lids at the pinnacle, and gnawed his shaggy lower lip. "I shall lift up
mine eyes unto the rocks, from whence cometh my help," he
misquoted reverently. The sergeant was full of garbled Scripture, and
the men called him "Bible" Jager behind that wide back of his. This
did not mean that he was soft, dreamy or easily fooled; Curtis had
chosen him as sagely as he had chosen Lanark.

Staying in the open as much as possible, the party advanced upon

the rock. They found it standing above a soft, grassy hollow, which in
turn ran eastward from the base of the rock to a considerable ravine,
dark and full of timber. As they spread out to the approach, they
found something else; a house stood in the hollow, shadowed by the
great pinnacle.
"It looks deserted, sir," volunteered Jager, at Lanark's bridle-elbow.
"No sign of life."
"Perhaps," said Lanark. "Deploy the men, and we'll close in from all
sides. Then you, with one man, enter the back door. I'll take another
and enter the front."
"Good, sir." The sergeant kneed his horse into a faster walk, passing
from one to another of the three corporals with muttered orders.
Within sixty seconds the patrol closed upon the house like a twenty-
fingered hand. Lanark saw that the building had once been
pretentious—two stories, stoutly made of good lumber that must
have been carted from a distance, with shuttered windows and a high
peaked roof. Now it was a paint-starved gray, with deep veins and
traceries of dirty black upon its clapboards. He dismounted before the
piazza with its four pillar-like posts, and threw his reins to a trooper.
"Suggs!" he called, and obediently his own personal orderly, a plump
blond youth, dropped out of the saddle. Together they walked up on
the resounding planks of the piazza. Lanark, his ungloved right hand
swinging free beside his holster, knocked at the heavy front door with
his left fist. There was no answer. He tried the knob, and after a
moment of shoving, the hinges creaked and the door went open.
They walked into a dark front hall, then into a parlor with dust upon
the rug and the fine furniture, and rectangles of pallor upon the walls
where pictures had once hung for years. They could hear echoes of
their every movement, as anyone will hear in a house to which he is
not accustomed. Beyond the parlor, they came to an ornate
chandelier with crystal pendants, and at the rear stood a sideboard of
dark, hard wood. Its drawers all hung half open, as if the silver and
linen had been hastily removed. Above it hung plate-racks, also
empty.
Feet sounded in a room to the rear, and then Jager's voice, asking if
his lieutenant were inside. Lanark met him in the kitchen, conferred;
then together they mounted the stairs in the front hall.
Several musty bedrooms, darkened by closed shutters, occupied the
second floor. The beds had dirty mattresses, but no sheets or
blankets.
"All clear in the house," pronounced Lanark. "Jager, go and detail a
squad to reconnoiter in that little ravine east of here—we want no
rebel sharpshooters sneaking up on us from that point. Then leave a
picket there, put a man on top of the rock, and guards at the front
and rear of this house. And have some of the others police up the
house itself. We may stay here for two days, even longer."
The sergeant saluted, then went to bellow his orders, and troopers
dashed hither and thither to obey. In a moment the sound of
sweeping arose from the parlor. Lanark, to whom it suggested spring
cleaning, sneezed at thought of the dust, then gave Suggs directions
about the care of his bay. Unbuckling his saber, he hung it upon the
saddle, but his revolver he retained. "You're in charge, Jager," he
called, and sauntered away toward the wooded cleft.
His legs needed the exercise; he could feel them straightening by
degrees after their long clamping to his saddle-flaps. He was
uncomfortably dusty, too, and there must be water at the bottom of
the ravine. Walking into the shade of the trees, he heard, or fancied
he heard, a trickling sound. The slope was steep here, and he walked
fast to maintain an easy balance upon it, for a minute and then two.
There was water ahead, all right, for it gleamed through the leafage.
And something else gleamed, something pink.
That pinkness was certainly flesh. His right hand dropped quickly to
his revolver-butt, and he moved forward carefully. Stooping, he took
advantage of the bushy cover, at the same time avoiding a touch that
might snap or rustle the foliage. He could hear a voice now, soft and
rhythmic. Lanark frowned. A woman's voice? His right hand still at his
weapon, his left caught and carefully drew down a spray of willow.
He gazed into an open space beyond.
It was a woman, all right, within twenty yards of him. She stood
ankle-deep in a swift, narrow rush of brook-water, and her fine body
was nude, every graceful curve of it, with a cascade of golden-brown
hair falling and floating about her shoulders. She seemed to be
praying, but her eyes were not lifted. They stared at a hand-mirror,
that she held up to catch the last flash of the setting sun.

3. The Image in the Cellar

Lanark, a young, serious-minded bachelor in an era when women
swaddled themselves inches deep in fabric, had never seen such a
sight before; and to his credit be it said that his first and strongest
emotion was proper embarrassment for the girl in the stream. He had
a momentary impulse to slip back and away. Then he remembered
that he had ordered a patrol to explore this place; it would be here
within moments.
Therefore he stepped into the open, wondering at the time, as well
as later, if he did well.
"Miss," he said gently. "Miss, you'd better put on your things. My men
——"
She stared, squeaked in fear, dropped the mirror and stood
motionless. Then she seemed to gather herself for flight. Lanark
realized that the trees beyond her were thick and might hide
enemies, that she was probably a resident of this rebel-inclined
region and might be a decoy for such as himself. He whipped out his
revolver, holding it at the ready but not pointing it.
"Don't run," he warned her sharply. "Are those your clothes beside
you? Put them on at once."
She caught up a dress of flowered calico and fairly flung it on over
her head. His embarrassment subsided a little, and he came another
pace or two into the open. She was pushing her feet—very small feet
they were—into heelless shoes. Her hands quickly gathered up some
underthings and wadded them into a bundle. She gazed at him
apprehensively, questioningly. Her hastily-donned dress remained
unfastened at the throat, and he could see the panicky stir of her
heart in her half-bared bosom.
"I'm sorry," he went on, "but I think you'd better come up to the
house with me."
"House?" she repeated fearfully, and her dark, wide eyes turned to
look beyond him. Plainly she knew which house he meant. "You—live
there?"
"I'm staying there at this time."
"You—came for me?" Apparently she had expected someone to
come.
But instead of answering, he put a question of his own. "To whom
were you talking just now? I could hear you."
"I—I said the words. The words my faith——" She broke off,
wretchedly, and Lanark was forced to think how pretty she was in her
confusion. "The words that Persil Mandifer told me to say." Her eyes
on his, she continued softly: "I came to meet the Nameless One. Are
you the—Nameless One?"
 "Are you the Nameless One?"

"I am certainly not nameless," he replied. "I am Lieutenant Lanark, of

the Federal Army of the Frontier, at your service." He bowed slightly,
which made it more formal. "Now, come along with me."
He took her by the wrist, which shook in his big left hand. Together
they went back eastward through the ravine, in the direction of the
house.
Before they reached it, she told him her name, and that the big
natural pillar was called Fearful Rock. She also assured him that she
knew nothing of Quantrill and his guerrillas; and a fourth item of
news shook Lanark to his spurred heels, the first non-military matter
that had impressed him in more than a year.
An hour later, Lanark and Jager finished an interview with her in the
parlor. They called Suggs, who conducted the young woman up to
one of the bedrooms. Then lieutenant and sergeant faced each other.
The light was dim, but each saw bafflement and uneasiness in the
face of the other.
"Well?" challenged Lanark.
Jager produced a clasp-knife, opened it, and pared thoughtfully at a
thumbnail. "I'll take my oath," he ventured, "that this Miss Enid
Mandifer is telling the gospel truth."
"Truth!" exploded Lanark scornfully. "Mountain-folk ignorance, I call
it. Nobody believes in those devil-things these days."
"Oh, yes, somebody does," said Jager, mildly but definitely. "I do." He
put away his knife and fumbled within his blue army shirt. "Look
here, Lieutenant."
It was a small book he held out, little more than a pamphlet in size
and thickness. On its cover of gray paper appeared the smudged
woodcut of an owl against a full moon, and the title:

John George Hohman's

POW-WOWS
or
LONG LOST FRIEND
"I got it when I was a young lad in Pennsylvania," explained Jager,
almost reverently. "Lots of Pennsylvania people carry this book, as I
do." He opened the little volume, and read from the back of the title
page:
"'Whosoever carries this book with him is safe from all his enemies,
visible or invisible; and whoever has this book with him cannot die
without the holy corpse of Jesus Christ, nor drown in any water nor
burn up in any fire, nor can any unjust sentence be passed upon
him.'"
Lanark put out his hand for the book, and Jager surrendered it,
somewhat hesitantly. "I've heard of supposed witches in
Pennsylvania," said the officer. "Hexes, I believe they're called. Is this
a witch book?"
"No, sir. Nothing about black magic. See the cross on that page? It's
a protection against witches."
"I thought that only Catholics used the cross," said Lanark.
"No. Not only Catholics."
"Hmm." Lanark passed the thing back. "Superstition, I call it.
Nevertheless, you speak this much truth: that girl is in earnest, she
believes what she told us. Her father, or stepfather, or whoever he is,
sent her up here on some ridiculous errand—perhaps a dangerous
one." He paused. "Or I may be misjudging her. It may be a clever
scheme, Jager—a scheme to get a spy in among us."
The sergeant's big bearded head wagged negation. "No, sir. If she
was telling a lie, it'd be a more believable one, wouldn't it?" He
opened his talisman book again. "If the lieutenant please, there's a
charm in here, against being shot or stabbed. It might be a good
thing, seeing there's a war going on—perhaps the lieutenant would
like me to copy it out?"
"No, thanks." Lanark drew forth his own charm against evil and
nervousness, a leather case that contained cheroots. Jager, who had
convictions against the use of tobacco, turned away disapprovingly as
his superior bit off the end of a fragrant brown cylinder and kindled a
match.
"Let me look at that what-do-you-call-it book again," he requested,
and for a second time Jager passed the little volume over, then
saluted and retired.
Darkness was gathering early, what with the position of the house in
the grassy hollow, and the pinnacle of Fearful Rock standing between
it and the sinking sun to westward. Lanark called for Suggs to bring a
candle, and, when the orderly obeyed, directed him to take some
kind of supper upstairs to Enid Mandifer. Left alone, the young officer
seated himself in a newly dusted armchair of massive dark wood,
emitted a cloud of blue tobacco smoke, and opened the Long Lost
Friend.
It had no publication date, but John George Hohman, the author,
dated his preface from Berks County, Pennsylvania, on July 31, 1819.
In the secondary preface filled with testimonials as to the success of
Hohman's miraculous cures, was included the pious ejaculation: "The
Lord bless the beginning and the end of this little work, and be with
us, that we may not misuse it, and thus commit a heavy sin!"
"Amen to that!" said Lanark to himself, quite soberly. Despite his
assured remarks to Jager, he was somewhat repelled and nervous
because of the things Enid Mandifer had told him.
Was there, then, potentiality for such supernatural evil in this
enlightened Nineteenth Century, even in the pages of the book he
held? He read further, and came upon a charm to be recited against
violence and danger, perhaps the very one Jager had offered to copy
for him. It began rather sonorously: "The peace of our Lord Jesus
Christ be with me. Oh shot, stand still! In the name of the mighty
prophets Agtion and Elias, and do not kill me...."
Lanark remembered the name of Elias from his boyhood Sunday
schooling, but Agtion's identity, as a prophet or otherwise, escaped
him. He resolved to ask Jager; and, as though the thought had acted
as a summons, Jager came almost running into the room.
"Lieutenant, sir! Lieutenant!" he said hoarsely.
"Yes, Sergeant Jager?" Lanark rose, stared questioningly, and held
out the book. Jager took it automatically, and as automatically
stowed it inside his shirt.
"I can prove, sir, that there's a real devil here," he mouthed
unsteadily.
"What?" demanded Lanark. "Do you realize what you're saying, man?
Explain yourself."
"Come, sir," Jager almost pleaded, and led the way into the kitchen.
"It's down in the cellar."
From a little heap on a table he picked up a candle, and then opened
a door full of darkness.
The stairs to the cellar were shaky to Lanark's feet, and beneath him
was solid black shadow, smelling strongly of damp earth. Jager,
stamping heavily ahead, looked back and upward. That broad,
bearded face, that had not lost its full-blooded flush in the hottest
fighting at Pea Ridge, had grown so pallid as almost to give off sickly
light. Lanark began to wonder if all this theatrical approach would not
make the promised devil seem ridiculous, anti-climactic—the flutter of
an owl, the scamper of a rat, or something of that sort.
"You have the candle, sergeant," he reminded, and the echo of his
voice momentarily startled him. "Strike a match, will you?"
"Yes, sir." Jager had raised a knee to tighten his stripe-sided trousers.
A snapping scrape, a burst of flame, and the candle glow illuminated
them both. It revealed, too, the cellar, walled with stones but floored
with clay. As they finished the descent, Lanark could feel the soft
grittiness of that clay under his bootsoles. All around them lay
rubbish—boxes, casks, stacks of broken pots and dishes, bundles of
kindling.
"Here," Jager was saying, "here is what I found."

He walked around the foot of the stairs. Beneath the slope of the
flight lay a long, narrow case, made of plain, heavy boards. It was
unpainted and appeared ancient. As Jager lowered the light in his
hand, Lanark saw that the joinings were secured with huge nails,
apparently forged by hand. Such nails had been used in building the
older sheds on his father's Maryland estate. Now there was a creak of
wooden protest as Jager pried up the loosened lid of the coffin-like
box.
Inside lay something long and ruddy. Lanark saw a head and
shoulders, and started violently. Jager spoke again:
"An image, sir. A heathen image." The light made grotesque the
sergeant's face, one heavy half fully illumined, the other secret and
lost in the black shadow. "Look at it."
Lanark, too, stooped for a closer examination. The form was of
human length, or rather more; but it was not finished, was neither
divided into legs below nor extended into arms at the roughly shaped
shoulders. The head, too, had been molded without features, though
from either side, where the ears should have been it sprouted up-
curved horns like a bison's. Lanark felt a chill creep upon him,
whence he knew not.
"It's Satan's own image," Jager was mouthing deeply. "'Thou shalt
not make unto thee any graven image——'"
 "It's Satan's own image," Jager was mouthing deeply.

With one foot he turned the coffin-box upon its side. Lanark took a
quick stride backward, just in time to prevent the ruddy form from
dropping out upon his toes. A moment later, Jager had spurned the
thing. It broke, with a crashing sound like crockery, and two more
trampling kicks of the sergeant's heavy boots smashed it to bits.
"Stop!" cried Lanark, too late. "Why did you break it? I wanted to
have a good look at the thing."
"But it is not good for men to look upon the devil's works," responded
Jager, almost pontifically.
"Don't advise me, sergeant," said Lanark bleakly. "Remember that I
am your officer, and that I don't need instruction as to what I may
look at." He looked down at the fragments. "Hmm, the thing was
hollow, and quite brittle. It seems to have been stuffed with straw—
no, excelsior. Wood shavings, anyway." He investigated the fluffy
inner mass with a toe. "Hullo, there's something inside of the stuff."
"I wouldn't touch it, sir," warned Jager, but this time it was he who
spoke too late. Lanark's boot-toe had nudged the object into plain
sight, and Lanark had put down his gauntleted left hand and picked it
up.
"What is this?" he asked himself aloud. "Looks rather like some sort
of strong-box—foreign, I'd say, and quite cold. Come on, Jager, we'll
go upstairs."
In the kitchen, with a strong light from several candles, they
examined the find quite closely. It was a dark oblong, like a small
dispatch-case or, as Lanark had commented, a strong-box. Though as
hard as iron, it was not iron, nor any metal either of them had ever
known.
"How does it open?" was Lanark's next question, turning the case
over in his hands. "It doesn't seem to have hinges on it. Is this the lid
—or this?"
"I couldn't say." Jager peered, his eyes growing narrow with
perplexity. "No hinges, as the lieutenant just said."
"None visible, nor yet a lock." Lanark thumped the box
experimentally, and proved it hollow. Then he lifted it close to his ear
and shook it. There was a faint rustle, as of papers loosely rolled or
folded. "Perhaps," the officer went on, "this separate slice isn't a lid
at all. There may be a spring to press, or something that slides back
and lets another plate come loose."
But Suggs was entering from the front of the house. "Lieutenant, sir!
Something's happened to Newton—he was watching on the rock. Will
the lieutenant come? And Sergeant Jager, too."
The suggestion of duty brought back the color and self-control that
Jager had lost. "What's happened to Newton?" he demanded at once,
and hurried away with Suggs.
Lanark waited in the kitchen for only a moment. He wanted to leave
the box, but did not want his troopers meddling with it. He spied,
beside the heavy iron stove, a fireplace, and in its side the metal door
to an old brick oven. He pulled that door open, thrust the box in,
closed the door again, and followed Suggs and Jager.
They had gone out upon the front porch. There, with Corporal Gray
and a blank-faced trooper on guard, lay the silent form of Newton, its
face covered with a newspaper.
Almost every man of the gathered patrol knew a corpse when he saw
one, and it took no second glance to know that Newton was quite
dead.

4. The Mandifers
Jager, bending, lifted the newspaper and then dropped it back. He
said something that, for all his religiosity, might have been an oath.
"What's the matter, sergeant?" demanded Lanark.
Jager's brows were clamped in a tense frown, and his beard was
actually trembling. "His face, sir. It's terrible."
"A wound?" asked Lanark, and lifted the paper in turn. He, too, let it
fall back, and his exclamation of horror and amazement was
unquestionably profane.
"There ain't no wound on him, Lieutenant Lanark," offered Suggs,
pushing his wan, plump face to the forefront of the troopers. "We
heard Newton yell—heard him from the top of the rock yonder."
All eyes turned gingerly toward the promontory.
"That's right, sir," added Corporal Gray. "I'd just sent Newton up, to
relieve Josserand."
"You heard him yell," prompted Lanark. "Go on, what happened?"
"I hailed him back," said the corporal, "but he said nothing. So I
climbed up—that north side's the easiest to climb. Newton was
standing at the top, standing straight up with his carbine at the
ready. He must have been dead right then."
"You mean, he was struck somehow as you watched?"
Gray shook his head. "No, sir. I think he was dead as he stood up. He
didn't move or speak, and when I touched him he sort of coiled down
—like an empty coat falling off a clothes-line." Gray's hand made a
downward-floating gesture in illustration. "When I turned him over I
saw his face, all twisted and scared-looking, like—like what the
lieutenant has seen. And I sung out for Suggs and McSween to come
up and help me bring him down."
Lanark gazed at Newton's body. "He was looking which way?"
"Over yonder, eastward." Gray pointed unsteadily. "Like it might have
been beyond the draw and them trees in it."
Lanark and Jager peered into the waning light, that was now dusk.
Jager mumbled what Lanark had already been thinking—that Newton
had died without wounds, at or near the moment when the horned
image had been shattered upon the cellar floor.
Lanark nodded, and dismissed several vague but disturbing
inspirations. "You say he died standing up, Gray. Was he leaning on
his gun?"
"No, sir. He stood on his two feet, and held his carbine at the ready.
Sounds impossible, a dead man standing up like that, but that's how
it was."
"Bring his blanket and cover him up," said Lanark. "Put a guard over
him, and we'll bury him tomorrow. Don't let any of the men look at
his face. We've got to give him some kind of funeral." He turned to
Jager. "Have you a prayer-book, sergeant?"
Jager had fished out the Long Lost Friend volume. He was reading
something aloud, as though it were a prayer: "... and be and remain
with us on the water and upon the land," he pattered out. "May the
Eternal Godhead also——"
"Stop that heathen nonsense," Lanark almost roared. "You're
supposed to be an example to the men, sergeant. Put that book
away."
Jager obeyed, his big face reproachful. "It was a spell against evil
spirits," he explained, and for a moment Lanark wished that he had
waited for the end. He shrugged and issued further orders.
"I want all the lamps lighted in the house, and perhaps a fire out
here in the yard," he told the men. "We'll keep guard both here and
in that gulley to the east. If there is a mystery, we'll solve it."
"Pardon me, sir," volunteered a well-bred voice, in which one felt
rather than heard the tiny touch of foreign accent. "I can solve the
mystery for you, though you may not thank me."
Two men had come into view, were drawing up beside the little knot
of troopers. How had they approached? Through the patroled brush
of the ravine? Around the corner of the house? Nobody had seen
them coming, and Lanark, at least, started violently. He glowered at
this new enigma.

The man who had spoken paused at the foot of the porch steps, so
that lamplight shone upon him through the open front door. He was
skeleton-gaunt, in face and body, and even his bones were small. His
eyes burned forth from deep pits in his narrow, high skull, and his
clothing was that of a dandy of the forties. In his twig-like fingers he
clasped bunches of herbs.
His companion stood to one side in the shadow, and could be seen
only as a huge coarse lump of a man.
"I am Persil Mandifer," the thin creature introduced himself. "I came
here to gather from the gardens," and he held out his handfuls of
leaves and stalks. "You, sir, you are in command of these soldiers, are
you not? Then know that you are trespassing."
"The expediencies of war," replied Lanark easily, for he had seen
Suggs and Corporal Gray bring their carbines forward in their hands.
"You'll have to forgive our intrusion."
A scornful mouth opened in the emaciated face, and a soft, superior
chuckle made itself heard. "Oh, but this is not my estate. I am
allowed here, yes—but it is not mine. The real Master——" The gaunt
figure shrugged, and the voice paused for a moment. The bright eyes
sought Newton's body. "From what I see and what I heard as I came
up to you, there has been trouble. You have transgressed somehow,
and have begun to suffer."
"To you Southerners, all Union soldiers are trespassers and
transgressors," suggested Lanark, but the other laughed and shook
his fleshless white head.
"You misunderstand, I fear. I care nothing about this war, except that
I am amused to see so many people killed. I bear no part in it. Of
course, when I came to pluck herbs, and saw your sentry at the top
of Fearful Rock——" Persil Mandifer eyed again the corpse of Newton.
"There he lies, eh? It was my privilege and power to project a vision
up to him in his loneliness that, I think, put an end to his part of this
puerile strife."
Lanark's own face grew hard. "Mr. Mandifer," he said bleakly, "you
seem to be enjoying a quiet laugh at our expense. But I should point
out that we greatly outnumber you, and are armed. I'm greatly
tempted to place you under arrest."
"Then resist that temptation," advised Mandifer urbanely. "It might
be disastrous to you if we became enemies."
"Then be kind enough to explain what you're talking about,"
commanded Lanark. Something swam into the forefront of his
consciousness. "You say that your name is Mandifer. We found a girl