He nodded. “Just five words: ‘Some of them are here.’ I think it was ‘some of them,’ whoever they were or are, who killed both him and Captain Sterling. The same technique was followed in each case. Furthermore, there have been three more deaths like those of Collins and the captain, though I haven’t clippings on them. One was in Maryland, almost across the bay from Sterling’s place; one was in South Carolina, one in Louisiana. Add the fact that Negro churches in those localities have been steadily losing in attendance to these murders occurring hundreds of miles apart, and I think you have something. Sterling’s death might have been laid to some freak of criminology, or to some wild beast escaped from a circus, but you can’t advance that theory to account for the other killings. Collins writes a letter saying, ‘Some of them are here,’ and dies next day. Sterling receives it and dies exactly the same way two days later. A circus beast might have killed Collins or Sterling, but it couldn’t have traveled from New York to Virginia in that short time. Or, say it was a criminal pervert. Those Johnnies aren’t usually so choicy. Like our Jack the Ripper or your own sadistic murderers, they take their victims where they find ’em. Why should one of ’em kill the Negro Collins in New York, then hop a train to travel to Virginia just to kill the white man Sterling? And even if he did do that, would he be likely then to cross the bay to Maryland, kill a Johnny there, then travel down to Carolina and cross the country into Louisiana just to kill two more?”
“You think it was a gang?”
“I’m sure of it, and—”
“One moment, if you please!” de Grandin broke in. “Await me here; I must know something.” Jumping up, he ran into the house, where a moment later we saw a glow of light shine through the study windows. In a minute he returned, announcing: “I have looked in last year’s almanac. One week before that sack of bones was found in Chesapeake Bay there was a total lunar eclipse, visible from that portion of Maryland and Virginia.”
“Well, what of it?” I demanded. “What’s a lunar eclipse to do with—”
The little Frenchman looked at the big Englishman, and each saw confirmation of a thought in the other’s glance.
“The Black Moon!” Hiji said as he let his breath out softly through his teeth.
“Precisely,” nodded Jules de Grandin. “Also, according to the almanac, another eclipse will occur there in three days.”
“I think we’d better do a move,” replied the Englishman. “Can you put me up tonight, Trowbridge?”
AT OUR BACKS THE sun rose from the Chesapeake; underfoot the shaky little pier swayed with each rising wave; ahead of us the bay showed as clear of any sign of craft as the ocean around Juan Fernandez when Crusoe was cast on its beach. An hour earlier the steamboat which had brought us up from Norfolk had deposited us and a tall, handsome, dark young woman on the dock from which the motor ferry was supposed to operate, and since that time we had seen nothing more than sea-gulls on the water.
“Lost,” Ingraham muttered as he knocked the dottle from his pipe against his heel. “We’ve been marooned, men, and if we can’t reach Sterling’s Landing by tomorrow—”
“Pardon me, sir, did I understand you all are goin’ to Sterling’s Landing?” the tall young woman who was our fellow castaway broke in. “May I inquire your business there? I’m Captain Sterling’s daughter,” she added, softening the apparent sharpness of her question. “You see, I’m his sole survivor, and—”
“Of course, one understands, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin answered with a bow. “I am Doctor Jules de Grandin and these are Doctor Samuel Trowbridge and Sir Haddingway Ingraham of the British Consular Service. We have come to make investigation of the disaffection of your local Negro population—”
The young woman—she was no girl, but five or six and twenty—shuddered slightly, despite the rising August heat.
“I’d like to know about that, too,” she answered. “Papa wrote me of it just before he died. It seems the colored people all refused to work, and some of them were insolent. A pa’cel of strange darkies came and squatted on our land, and when he warned them off they defied him—”
“Do”—the little Frenchman spoke deliberately as he eyed her narrowly—“do you connect your father’s death with this, Mademoiselle?”
“I really couldn’t say, sir. You see, I’m on the stage, and was playin’ in St. Louis when word came of my father’s death. I came as quickly as I could, but”—she paused and bit her lip, then: “I had to wait until I had the money to come home.”
Again the little Frenchman nodded. Following his quick glance I read the sign upon her wardrobe trunk: “Coralea Sterling, Moonlight Maidens, Theatre.” Some months before, the Moonlight Maidens burlesque troupe had played in Harrisonville, and from theatrical reports I’d gathered they were not very successful.
“May we count upon your help, Mademoiselle?” de Grandin asked.
“Of course. I’ll be very glad to put you all up at the house, and if there’s any way that I can help you find out—”
The hooting of the little ferry’s air-whistle broke in, and in a moment we were headed down the bay for Sterling’s Landing.
THE STERLING MANSION PROVED a disappointment. Far from being the Southern manor house of tradition, it was a fairly comfortable old farmhouse, badly in need of repair, set back from the sand by-road in a plot of rather unkempt lawn with an avenue of honey-locust leading from its gate. A kitchen garden mostly weeds was at its back door, and behind that was a farm of thirty-five or forty acres in a state of almost utter fallowness. Mortgages, I guessed, had been the chief crop of that land for many years. Inside, the house was fairly clean, with some pieces of good furniture of the Victorian era, some family portraits dating to the days before the Civil War, and several chambers with large, comfortable beds. No one met us at the landing, and we took turns carrying the luggage to the house, then at Miss Sterling’s request went down to the village store, where we laid in a supply of canned goods, supplemented by a ham and some fresh eggs and vegetables. By noon we had fire going in the kitchen range and made a comfortable meal.
The interval that followed was a pleasant one. We all turned in to wash and put away the dishes, and as I looked at Coralea enveloped in her big apron I had a hard time visualizing her shuffling and strutting back and forth across a darkened stage while she felt for concealed fasteners in her gown and discarded piece on piece of costume till she stood revealed in pristine nudity beneath the spotlight’s purple glare. With uncanny understanding de Grandin read my-thought. “One often wonders at the lure the theatre has,” he whispered. “I have known mothers to desert their children and wives desert their comfortable homes to dance and sing in third-rate music halls, enduring poverty and social ostracism cheerfully. One cannot explain it, one only knows that it is so.”
I nodded, but before I could reply our hostess spoke: “Can I trouble you gentlemen to make one more trip to the Landin’? There are some more things we’ll be needin’ from the sto’e, and while you’re gone I’d like to visit ’round the neighborhood a little. I can borrow a horse next door at Hopkins’.”
Half an hour later we set out for the small general store, while Coralea waved to us as she walked in the opposite direction, her slim, tall form almost boyish in khaki jodhpurs and checked riding-coat.
While I made the purchases, Hiji and de Grandin engaged some store-porch loafers in confab, and though our actual business occupied a scant half-hour it was mid-afternoon before we started on our homeward walk.
“It all fits in,” said Hiji. “We see a disaffection among the local blacks who refuse work, no matter what the wages are. Negroes are naturally religious, yet there’s a steady fallin’ off in church attendance. Next we have four terrifyin’ murders, identical in technique, but widely separated. Each victim has no known enemies, each was popular among the colored folks. Collins, the Harlem Negro, was something of a leader of his race and highly thought of by both whites and blacks. Sterling enjoyed the confidence of local colored residents, the Car
olina victim was a social worker deeply loved by all the colored folks, and the fourth was a young Baptist missionary from the North who by his eloquence and kindness had won a host of friends, both white and black, and was more than holding his own against the ebb-tide in church membership. Then crack-o! someone murders him, and his congregation falls to pieces. Why should these people, so widely separated by distance, race, vocation and background, have been killed in the same manner?
“Then, here’s another puzzle: The bones they found down here appear to have been relics of a cannibal feast. There’s never been a case of cannibalism heard of in this country; yet—there it is.
“If these murders had been done in Africa I’d say they were the work of Leopard Men. Furthermore, the Human Leopards make a practice of eating their victims, and their big cannibal parties are held during an eclipse—at the time of the ‘Black Moon.’ It looks almost as if this deviltry had been imported from West Africa.”
“But only indirectly,” said de Grandin. “Me, I have another theory. The islands of the Caribbean reek with voodoo, the black sorcery imported with the slaves from Africa. It began in Haiti before Dessalines threw off French government; it grew upon the ruins of the church the black imperialists tore down. It is said Ulestine, daughter of President Antoine-Simone, was high priestess of the cult. Its blasphemies and obscenities run through the island’s culture as tropic breezes rustle through the jungle trees. There at the time of the Black Moon the ‘Goat Without Horns’ has been sacrificed on voodoo altars; there the drums have bidden worshippers to the shrine of the White Queen; there a priesthood more terrible than that of Baal has ruled supreme since 1791. Ha, but with the coming of American marines the scene was changed. Precisely as you ran down the Leopard Men, my Hiji, the Americans hunted down the sorcerers of voodoo until their power was broken utterly. Now, I damn think, they have decided on a bold stroke. Here”—he swung his arm in a wide arc—“right here, it seems, they have decided to set up their bloody altars and force the native blacks to join with them in a worship which blends jungle bestiality with the depravity of decadent European superstition. Unless I miss my guess, my friends, we are at grips with obeah, voodoo—call it what you will, it makes no difference—”
The furious drumming of a horse’s hoofs broke through his words, and round the turning of the sandy road a maddened beast came rushing, bearing down upon us like a miniature cavalry charge. Clinging to the pommel of the saddle, with no effort to control the frenzied steed, was Coralea Sterling, hat gone, her long black hair whipped out behind her like a fluttering signal of distress. Her eyes were round with horror, her cheeks gray with the waxen hue that comes from but one cause. One glance at her blenched, terrified, drawn face told all. Sheer, ghastly fear had seized her by the throat, strangling back the scream her grayed lips were parted to utter.
“Runaway!” cried Hiji, and poised to launch himself at the maddened horse’s bridle, but the girl waved him frantically aside. Then we noticed that the unspurred heels of her tan riding-boots were beating an hysterical tattoo against the horse’s sides. She was urging it to greater speed.
Like an express train flashing past a way-station, horse and rider thundered past us, while we gaped in wonder. Then:
“Grand Dieu des chats!” de Grandin cried, and sprang into the dusty road, dragging at the handle of his sword-stick. Something eery whipped along the highway, weaving in and out between the tracks left by the fleeing horse, something I could not see, but which left a little zig-zag trail of kicked-up dust like a puff of wind gone crazy. De Grandin brought the slim blade of his sword-cane down upon the dancing dust with a cutting, lash-like motion, and something brown and gray, with a flash of yellowish-white underside, squirmed up from the baked roadway and writhed about his blade like the serpent on Mercury’s caduceus. A strumming like a chorus of a hundred summer locusts in unison sounded as he struck and whipped his sword-blade back, then struck again.
“Nice work, old son—good Lord!” Hiji thrust his hand into his jacket pocket and snatched his blue steel Browning out, firing point-blank into the road six feet or so behind de Grandin. A little spurt of dust kicked up where the steel-capped bullet struck, and with it rose a writhing thing as thick as a man’s arm and half again as long.
“Merci beaucoup, mon ami,” de Grandin grinned. “I had not noticed him, and had you not been quick I fear I should not long have noticed anything. It seems our bag is full, now; let us count the game.”
Dizzy with bewilderment, I stepped out into the road. At de Grandin’s feet, still quivering, but stone-dead beneath the lashing of his sword-cane, lay a diamond-headed rattlesnake, its tail adorned with ten bone buttons. Beyond the little Frenchman, where Hiji’s bullet had almost shot its head away, another snake lay squirming in death agony, thrashing up the road dust into tiny, inch-high sand dunes.
I looked at both the loathsome things with a shudder of repulsion, but Hiji and de Grandin had eyes only for the second snake. “By George!” the Englishman turned the thing over with his foot.
“Mais oui, précisément,” the Frenchman nodded. “You recognize him?”
“Quite. I’ve been to Martinique and Haiti.”
I stared from one to the other, puzzled as a child whose elders spell out words. De Grandin pointed first to one dead reptile, then the other. “This,” he told me, “is a rattlesnake, native of this section, and this,” he touched the other with his sword-tip, “is a fer-de-lance, found in both Martinique and Haiti, but never in this country, except in zoos. You comprehend?”
“Can’t say I do.”
“Non. I am not sure that I do, either; but I should guess those naughty people we suspect have brought in snakes as well as most deplorably bad manners with them. What say you, mon Hiji?”
But the big Englishman was intent on a fresh find. “What d’ye make o’ this, Frenchy?” he asked, poking a knot of gum like substance lying in the road.
De Grandin bent and looked at it intently, lowered his head until his nostrils almost touched it, and sniffed daintily. “I recognize him,” he replied, “but I cannot call his name.”
“Me, too,” the Englishman agreed. “A cove who used to live in Haiti showed me some of it once. Those black blighters down there make a mixture by some secret formula and put it where it will be stepped in by someone they don’t love so awfully much. Maybe they smear it on his motor tires or on his horse’s hooves. It’s all one, as far as results go. No sooner does the poor bloke go out than all the bally snakes in seven counties pick his spoor up and go after him. In a little while he gets rid of the stuff or dies by snakebite, for the stuff’s attractive to the little scaly devils as valerian is to a cat.”
“I think that you have right, my friend.”
“You think? You know dam’ well I’m right! Didn’t you see how the gal was kickin’ her cob to more speed when the poor brute was already giving all it had? That was no runaway; that was panic flight. And the snakes—did you ever see a snake, ’specially a lazy rotter like a rattler, pursue a human bein’ for all he was worth? Watch this!” He tossed the knot of gum into the roadside grass and motioned us to stand back.
We waited silently ten, fifteen, twenty minutes; then: “Look sharp!” commanded Hiji. A rustling sounded in the short, dry grass, a little spurt of sun-baked dust showed in the center of the road. Converging on the spot where he had thrown the gum were several snakes: two full-grown rattlers, a small, slim copperhead; finally, sliding like the flickering shadow of a whiplash drawn across a horse’s flank, a six-foot black snake.
“Convinced?” asked Hiji as he turned away.
“No,” said Coralea, “I can’t remember when I first saw them. I’d been the rounds, callin’ on the neighbors and tryin’ to find out something about Papa’s death. The last place I stopped at was Judge Scatterhorn’s, but I don’t remember anything suspicious. A colored lad was out in front when I came out and led my horse up to the carriage block, but—oh!” She stopped abruptly, one hand r
aised to her mouth.
“Yes, Mademoiselle?” de Grandin prompted.
I tossed a dime to him as I rode off, for he’d held my stirrup very nicely, but instead of takin’ it he let it fall into the road and muttered something—”
“He held your stirrup, did you say?” de Grandin interrupted.
“Yes he did, and—”
“Mademoiselle, where are your ridin’-boots?”
“My—my ridin’-boots?”
“Précisément.”
“Why, in the cupboard of my room—”
Without a word the Frenchman rose and hurried up the stairs. In a moment we heard the sharp double crack of his small pocket pistol, and a minute later he came down the stairs with two dead snakes looped across the stick he’d taken from her bedroom window. “They were in your closet, Mademoiselle. When you went to get a change of clothing you would have found them waiting for you. I dislike to say so, but it would be safer if you burned those boots. One can replace burned boots, but it is not often one recovers from a fatal snakebite.”
DINNER WAS A GAYER meal than I had looked for. Somewhere Coralea had found a store of wine, and with this, tinned soup, fried ham and eggs and a liberal portion of fresh melon, we did very well. But though we chatted cheerfully as we did the dinner dishes there was an air of gathering restraint which seemed to seep into the lamplit kitchen as though it were a chilling fog no door could quite shut out. Shadows flickering in the corners took on strange shapes of menace, and more than once I drew my hand back quickly, thinking I had seen the looping convolutions of a coiled snake as I reached to place a piece of china in the cupboard. By the time the last dish had been wiped and stored away our nerves were at the snapping-point. I jumped as if I had been stung when a hail came from the front door.
“Miss Sterling; oh, Miss Coralea, is your ’phone in workin’ order? Judge Scatterhorn’s been killed.”
“You and Doctor Trowbridge go and take a look—medical chaps are better qualified for that sort o’ work—I’ll stay here and keep the jolly home fires burnin’,” Hiji said as we gave over efforts to get service from the telephone. “Sing out when you come to the door, though; I’m liable to have a nervy finger on the trigger.”
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