Then he gave them two arrows. They died there. The Lolo went on and caught Creighton by himself. From the story the priests told, he must have thrown Creighton over the cliffs, and at the last moment Creighton used his pistol. At all events, the lamas did not find Creighton’s body, while they did bring in the dead Lolo, Bonner, and Stickley.
And that’s the whole story—the tragedy of Creighton’s broken nerve.
III
When Larsen had finished, he lighted a fresh cigar and leaned back in his chair.
Mainwaring sat fingering the skull-bowl in his lap, pursing up his bearded lips and shaking his head as he listened. Presently he looked up, and his gentle blue eyes were wide, as though the tale of that tragedy had filled him with horror.
“But you said,” his voice was husky, and he cleared his throat, “you said that there was some connection between the story and these skulls?”
Larsen nodded. A flash darted in his eyes and was gone again.
“Yes. Exactly. The bowl in your lap was made from Bonner’s skull. The other was made from Stickley’s.”
Lord! How to describe the loathly horror that I felt at these words! It is one thing to play with the cranium of some forgotten, unknown savage; quite another thing to play with the brain-pan of a scientist, honored and revered, a man almost a friend.
Mainwaring turned absolutely livid. His beard moved. You know how a cat’s fur erects? That way; his beard curled and writhed with the frightful feeling that was upon him. Sweat started on his brow. He reached out and laid the skull on the smoking stand, his fingers shaking. Then he came to his feet.
“I think,” he said, taking a deep breath and shaking his head, “I think—it’s too much for me to stomach. I—I don’t like these ghastly stories.”
He left us abruptly, striding out of the smoking room. Larsen looked after him, then turned his dark eyes upon me. I had set the other skull with the first.
“Gave him quite a turn, didn’t it?” said Larsen. His voice was cold, brittle.
“Confound you!” I answered, nettled. “It gave me a turn. It’d give anybody a turn!”
“Take a cigar,” said Larsen, extending one. “There’s a bit more to the story.”
I took the weed, but made a gesture of protest.
“Never mind the rest of the story,” I said. “You’re too cursed fantastic as a storyteller, Larsen. I don’t fancy this Grand Guignol stuff myself in the least!”
Larsen smiled. “I must confess, my dear fellow, that I told a beastly lie. If you’d examine those bowls, you’d see they are about a hundred years old—the patina shows it. I bought ’em at the lamasery. Bonner and Stickley were decently buried.”
At this, you may judge how I stared at him!
“Well,” I said, angered at the way he had played on my nerves, “all I have to say is that you told a lie in rotten bad taste! Those two men were friends of yours, weren’t they? Then—”
“That,” he interposed cryptically, “was why I told the lie.”
I did not understand in the least. There was a restrained tension in his manner that puzzled me. His fingers were nervous on his cigar.
At this instant we heard a sharp sound punctuating the steady throb of the ship’s engines—a sharp, bursting sound about which could be no mistake. It was a shot.
“Ah!” Larsen came to his feet and took the two brown skull-bowls in his hand. “Ah! There is the rest of the story, old man, as I promised.”
“What the devil d’you mean?” I exclaimed.
“That was our friend Mainwaring—shot himself. I thought he’d do it. That’s why I told the lie in question. You see, Mainwaring was not his real name. His real name was—Creighton.”
And Larsen departed, leaving me to enjoy my cigar as best I could.
THE SINGER IN THE MIST, by Robert E. Howard
At birth a witch laid on me monstrous spells,
And I have trod strange highroads all my days,
Turning my feet to gray, unholy ways.
I grope for stems of broken asphodels;
High on the rims of bare, fiend-haunted fells,
I follow cloven tracks that lie ablaze;
And ghosts have led me through the moonlight’s haze
To talk with demons in the granite hells.
Seas crash upon dragon-guarded shores,
Bursting in crimson moons of burning spray,
And iron castles open to me their doors,
And serpent-women lure with harp and lay.
The misty waves shake now to phantom oars—
Seek not for me; I sail to meet the day.
EXOTIQUE, by Clark Ashton Smith
Thy mouth is like a crimson orchid-flow’r,
Whence perfume and whence poison rise unseen
To moons aswim in iris or in green,
Or mix with morning in an Eastern bow’r.
Thou shouldst have known, in amaranthine isles,
The sunsets hued like fire of frankincense,
Or the long noons enfraught with redolence,
The mingled spicery of purple miles.
Thy breasts, where blood and molten marble flow,
Thy warm white limbs, thy loins of tropic snow—
These, these, by which desire is grown divine,
Were made for dreams in mystic palaces,
For love, and sleep, and slow voluptuousness,
And summer seas afoam like foaming wine.
UNDER THE FLAME TREES, by H. de Vere Stacpoole
I was sitting in front of Thibaud’s Café one evening when I saw Lewishon, whom I had not met for years.
Thibaud’s Café, I must tell you first, is situated on Coconut Square, Noumea. Noumea has a bad name, but it is not at all a bad place if you are not a convict. Neither is New Caledonia, take it all together, and that evening, sitting and smoking and listening to the band and watching the crowd, and the dusk taking the flame trees, it seemed to me for a moment that Tragedy had withdrawn, that there was no such place as the Isle Nou out there in the harbor and that the musicians making the echoes ring to the Sambre-et-Meuse were primarily musicians, not convicts.
Then I saw Lewishon crossing the square by the Liberty Statue and attracted his attention. He came and sat by me, and we smoked and talked while I tried to realize that it was fifteen years since I had seen him last and that he hadn’t altered in the least—in the dusk.
“I’ve been living here for years,” said he. “When I saw you last in Frisco I was about to take up a proposition in Oregon. I didn’t, owing to a telegram going wrong. That little fact changed my whole life. I came to the islands instead and started trading, then I came to live in New Caledonia. I’m married.”
“Oh,” I said, “is that so?”
Something in the tone of those two words “I’m married” struck me as strange.
We talked on indifferent subjects, and before we parted I promised to come over and see him next day at his place a few miles from the town. I did and I was astonished at what I saw.
New