I

As Dreeme, racing close at the heels of Walden Slater, circled the Westcott farm-house, he glanced up curiously at the windows. There was no light. The building gloomed in its cluster of trees just as it had that first night when he had stumbled after the boy Miles along the uneven path and entered through the back door. It was like a house of the dead, a dwelling-place from which the rose-colored actualities of living had long ago vanished. Around it, the tall dark trees kept their somber watch, standing like ghostly sentinels. The spark of Walden Slater’s lantern sent strange beasts of shadows scurrying into the underbrush that lined the hummocky path. At the back door the farmer set down his light and hammered upon the wood with the butt of his revolver. The sound seemed to echo inside the house. It was like the echo that comes from a musty tomb when the iron grille that guards its dead from the living world is shaken. If there was anything in back of the wood against which Walden Slater was hammering so vigorously, that shape or being or spectre was standing mute.

“Of course not,” muttered the farmer. With a fierce kick of his heavy boot he crashed the door open and it smashed against the wall on broken hinges. The intruder entered slowly, holding the lantern before him in one hand and grasping his cocked revolver in the other. Dreeme followed at his heels. The small beam of light darted about the room reflecting the stuffed chairs, the wax flowers under glass, the photographic enlargements on the wall. Dreeme’s mind automatically swept back to that time when he had followed Martha Westcott through this room trembling from the magnetism of her strange personality. Walden Slater circled the sitting room slowly, lifting his lantern to view the pictures and examining the tables and the chairs. He seemed to be looking for something, some hint that might indicate the direction that he desired. “Uriah,” he muttered, pausing before one picture, a particularly large and atrocious piece of workmanship that hung above the wax flowers. Dreeme caught a glimpse of a glittering eye highly touched by the painter’s art.

“What are we searching for?” he inquired. “Shouldn’t we get on?”

Walden Slater said nothing but strode toward the door that led to the library. He kicked it open unceremoniously and entered and Dreeme followed close at his heels. It was just as the young doctor remembered it.

“Light the lamp,” said the farmer. Dreeme fumbled at the chimney and wick, and an instant later the pale yellow glow illuminated the room. The crowded book-stacks leaned forward, and the ancient volumes seemed to watch the intruders speechlessly. The young doctor walked impatiently about the table where he had once seen Jeffrey Westcott seated. He felt that they were wasting time, that Deborah was confined somewhere in some secret place from which she should be rescued as speedily as possible. He wanted to say this to the farmer, to get him started on the way to the place called Dagon, and yet he refrained from speech, for Walden Slater was obviously looking for something. He, too, circled the room, inspecting the backs of the books with a swift and keen eye. Dreeme paused near one case and read a few faded titles. “Certainty of Worlds of Spirits” by Richard Baxter. “De la Démonomanie des Sorciers” par Jean Bodin. “Sadducismus Triumphatus” by Joseph Glanvil. “Daemonolatria” by Nicholas Remigius. “Discourse of the Subtill Practises of Devilles” by George Giffard. He turned abruptly to the farmer.

“What are we looking for?” he asked.

“The goat’s head,” replied the farmer. He had ruffled through the papers on Westcott’s table.

“Do you know what that means?” exclaimed Dreeme.

Walden Slater nodded.

“Be patient,” he said. “It’s the signal for the Esbat.”

He continued to rummage about the room.

Suddenly he snorted in triumph, and started for the door. Dreeme followed close at his heels. The farmer, still holding his lantern, turned a corner and they began to climb a narrow flight of stairs. Behind them in the deserted library the oil-lamp perched precariously on the corner of the table and quivered at each gust of rainy air that swept through the window.

They wandered through two bedrooms, the feeble flare of the lantern illuminating neatly-made beds, and came to a closed door that apparently opened into a room on the rear of the house. Walden Slater, employing his usual tactics, kicked it open and they entered into a small chamber that was entirely unfurnished except for a raised stone slab on three perpendicular pillars of granite in the corner. The farmer made his way immediately toward this strange bit of furniture and held his lantern over it, inspecting the corrugated surface of the stone. Dreeme, standing beside him, saw dark stains on the slab and a small keen-bladed knife that appeared more like a lancet than anything else. The knife glittered in the ray of the lantern and the young doctor was overwhelmed by a sudden fear. He stared wide-eyed at the farmer, and Walden Slater’s long upper lip quivered in the dim light. Dreeme struggled between an absorbed excitement in their discoveries and his intense concern for Deborah’s safety. She was somewhere not far from them, her mind a riot of fear, waiting frantically for him. He was sure of that. But what had happened to her in the meantime, during those hours (and he was not sure how many they had been, for the taciturn farmer had vouchsafed no specific information on this point) she had passed since Burroughs enticed or kidnapped her from the Slater house, he could not even guess. If any harm had come to her (and his heart nearly ceased beating at the thought) he would not leave the valley until he had killed Jeffrey Westcott and George Burroughs. A cold determination seemed to freeze the emotions in him as he came to this decision. His thin lips tightened and his eyes became like blue steel.

“I shall go mad in a minute,” he said calmly to the farmer.

Walden Slater opened his mouth to speak and then, with a grunt that expressed both surprise and relief, he pointed to the corner in back of the stone slab. The dejected carcass of a chicken lay there in its dishevelled feathers, its crop slit open and its blood dabbled upon the floor.

“He’s been divining,” he said. Then he looked closely at the young doctor.

“You perk up, Doctor Dreeme,” he added. “I know what I’m doing. There’s no harm done to anybody ... yet.”

He bent over and fumbled about the limp carcass of the chicken and then straightened his body with a grunt of satisfaction. In his hand he held a small blood-smeared square of paper. Silently he turned and strode down stairs, Dreeme close at his heels. He did not speak until they had regained the comparative light of the library and then he sank into Jeffrey Westcott’s chair by the table. The curtain from the window fluttered inward, narrowly missing the chimney of the sputtering lamp. Dreeme stood before the farmer, his eyes staring and his hands trembling.

“I reckon I’ll have to explain a few things,” he remarked slowly, “or you’ll be fainting on me, Doctor.”

“I’m not going to faint, Walden,” replied the young doctor, “but I am mad to get on. I know Deborah’s in grave danger and I should be with her.”

Walden Slater nodded gravely.

“Westcott is playing his last card to dominate the valley,” he said. “He’s called an Esbat, a meeting, and he intends a sacrifice. I knew it was coming ever since I saw that goat-head in Wagner’s fist. The goat-head is used as an announcement for a coming event. Wagner was on his way to somebody with the sign when he was smashed in the head and killed. That’s when I started thinking. There hasn’t been an Esbat in this valley since old Captain Uriah Carrier died, and my dad told me all about him.”

He cleared his throat after this unexpectedly long speech. Then he renewed his distasteful task of narration.

“We don’t want none of this stuff, Doctor,” he declared. “The farmers want to forget what their grand-dads were. Westcott won’t let us forget. He’s got Uriah’s black book and we’re all in it. He’s got some of us fooled by stirring up feelings in us that we thought had died out of us. It has died out of me. I don’t take any stock in this stuff though my dad was befuddled by old Uriah and went to his Esbat.”

He cleared his throat again and held up the bit of paper. In the lamp-glow Dreeme saw the tiny goat’s head carefully drawn in blue ink and when Walden Slater slowly turned the paper he saw “Dagon—two—nigger” written in small letters. He recalled now that he had never turned over the bit of paper he had given to the coroner. He recalled, too, the antagonism of the farmers who had stood so short a distance from him when he had extracted the paper from Wagner’s stiff hand.

“It seems that they meet at Dagon at two o’clock, and that Dagon is somewhere in Nigger Swamp,” he said mechanically.

Walden Slater nodded his head in assent.

“That’s it,” he said. “Westcott sacrificed a chicken to see if the signs were propitious. Apparently he decided they were, although what a chicken’s crop has to do with it is beyond me.”

He stopped abruptly and turned his face toward the open window. Dreeme listened, too, and he could hear the distinct sound of footsteps going by the house. They apparently died away in the soft grass of the field that stretched from the dwelling to Briony Wood.

“They’re gathering,” remarked the farmer simply. He stood up and regained his lantern.

“We can’t know where they’ve hidden Deborah,” he said, “but we do know that they’ll bring her to the place called Dagon. She’s to be the sacrifice, Doctor.”

“They wouldn’t dare to kill her!” exploded Dreeme.

“There’s some things worse than death,” answered Walden Slater.

He moved toward the door and Dreeme followed him. Behind them the forgotten lamp perched on the edge of the table, and as the wind increased the curtain flapped ever nearer the yellow flame, a flame that sputtered but, being shielded from the worst of the gust by a protector, never went out. The two men passed through the sitting room and out through the broken door into the storm which had now settled down into a gusty drizzle.

“And, besides,” said Walden Slater slowly, “Wagner was killed, wasn’t he?”

“Do you know who killed him?” asked Dreeme. “Was it Jeffrey Westcott?”

“I know that the pegs driven into his eye-sockets were whittled by a mighty dull knife,” returned the farmer grimly.

They plodded on in silence after that, their heads bowed against the driving wind and rain. Occasionally they stumbled over hammocks of wet grass and once Walden Slater sprawled upon the ground, his lantern rolling from his hand and blinking out. With a grumbled curse he scrambled to his feet and picked up the extinguished lantern and examined it.

“It’s busted!” he said vehemently, flinging it from him with an angry gesture. They heard it clatter against a stone wall to the side of them. After that they struggled on in the darkness across the field, the black shadow of Briony Wood in its slight elevation looming nearer and nearer against the faint glow of the stormy sky.

“If you meet anybody,” said the farmer suddenly, “don’t you say a damn word. Keep your head down and trudge along.”

Dreeme muttered something in his throat. Mingled rain and perspiration was streaming down his face and his naked feet were cut by the sharp stones and twigs. He heard his heart beating violently in his bosom and wondered if the farmer was as tired as he. They had crossed the greater part of the field now and the ground was sloping upward before them, sloping upward to tall spectral trees that stood with inter-mingled branches and waited menacingly for their coming. It would be dark in those trees and there would probably be no pathway. But they would have to go on, for somewhere beyond the trees was the place called Dagon, and it was at Dagon that he would next meet Deborah. Sobbingly he climbed the slope at the heels of Walden Slater.

II

The trees reached out and took them in, circling about them in a massed formation. They were in the darkness of Briony Wood now, a darkness that was unrelieved by any light except the pale intermittent glow of the sky that filtered through the bowed branches of the trees. The unceasing storm rumbled in the leaves above them, and the incessant drip of water sounded about them as they lurched over broken branches, stones, unbared roots, and washed-out hollows. Far above the moist darkness through which they struggled Dreeme thought he could hear a faint humming, the sound of wind, perhaps, flowing along the tilted tops of the taller trees. His labored breath chimed with it. Walden Slater was lurching along doggedly beside him now, no longer ahead, but shoulder to shoulder with him except when the unevenness of the road they took caused them to stumble apart. It was good to feel his sturdy shoulder as it struck against him occasionally. It was like a tower filled with armed men who were always on guard. It was a fortress against evil and chance. The farmer was silent, conserving his strength for the difficult journey through the wood, and Dreeme, taking a lesson from him, refrained from speech, although questions were beginning to boil up in his restless mind. His intelligence was clarifying although he was still in a riot of fear over the situation in which Deborah must be. Images appeared and dissolved before his eyes. Deborah lying on the rainy ground bound and gagged. Deborah insensible in some secret retreat where George Burroughs, his sallow face aflame with malice, bowed over her and blasphemously intoned Biblical phrases that were twisted to serve the devil’s purpose. Deborah sitting wide-eyed in an hypnotic trance while Jeffrey Westcott stood before her, his cloven head bared to the rain and the wind. Deborah gazing into the heavy-lidded remorseless eyes of Martha Westcott while the taciturn farmers, muttering to one another, gathered about a great dripping stone in the heart of Nigger Swamp.

The humming in the air increased steadily above the two travelers now until it seemed as though a hundred and one far-away aeroplane engines were singing their way through the darkness and rain like a swarm of huge and unbelievable mosquitoes. Dreeme’s labored breath sucked in his throat as he pushed the entangling spiky vines aside and thrust his tired body forward. His bare feet were bruised and cut, but they seemed devoid of all sensation, blotches of white meat that lifted and fell with a maddening regularity. He was not sure that the humming he heard was more than the blood pounding in his ear-drums and throbbing in his temples. Yet it seemed to be more than that, to be, in fact, an ominous and steadily-increasing warning of the approach of mysterious and frightful things. It would not have surprised him to see a host of devils and witches suddenly sweep through the tree-tops screaming and laughing to one another. He could imagine them calling to one another gross phrases, turning their red-rimmed eyes downward at him, pointing with long-nailed hands and bursting into gales of infernal laughter. Then he realized that his imagination was slipping from his control and he strove to concentrate on Deborah, to save himself from his own madness through the memory of her. He pitched forward over oozy hummocks. The fierce thorns of clutching vines ripped along his legs and arms. Malicious branches lashed murderously at his face. Water sucked and gurgled about his naked feet. But he pressed forward half-blindly, hardly conscious of the direction in which he was proceeding, knowing only that Walden Slater’s shoulder struck against his from time to time, and that a desperate and imperative necessity was urging them into the depths of the marshy wood. Some small beast scurried beneath his feet, and he screamed at the nervous tension of the moment. He heard laboring branches crack and groan above his head and the hollow sound where a dislodged stone rolled down an incline and landed in a huge puddle. The humming had developed into a roar about him. It was so dark that he could not see Walden Slater. He could not even hear the heavy thud of the farmer’s boots. Suddenly he became conscious that a devastating delirium of fear was engulfing him and rendering him incapable of any action, “This is horrible!” he sobbed in his throat. He stopped dead in his tracks, straightened his body, and gazed upward until the faint glow of the stormy sky pierced his dulled eye-sight. It came slowly, a gradual light, a milky hue against which the silhouettes of the black branches cut sharply. Gazing steadfastly he strove to quiet the tempest that shook his mind. He thought for a moment that he could see small winking lights scurrying across the surface of that milky sky, but, forcing himself to gaze fixedly, he decided that these lights were no more than optical illusions or the small sparks that rise in tired and over-strained eyes. His heart was beating like a loud trip-hammer and he pressed one hand against it tightly. Standing so for several seconds he experienced a slowing of his nervous faculties, a sensation of again being master of himself and not the victim of an unreasonable fear that was, perhaps, self-implanted by a too imaginative mind. It was with actual surprise that he felt Walden Slater’s sturdy arm about his shoulder urging him forward. Clear-headed now he resumed the laborious toil of the journey.

This is New England, he thought. This is the tired land of forgotten pioneer enterprises. This is the land of machinery and shoe factories and canned goods and ice-skates. It is everything that is material and dispiriting and “up-to-date” and unlovely. It is the land of lean farms and thin mouths, too. It is a land of humming commercial cities, of great businesses, of the New Day. But it is more than this, as well. How if all this glittering commercial civilization is no more than a huge shell, an incrustation of years, beneath which lurk the old pagan madnesses that were corollaries of the Puritan repression? How if the ancient Dionysiac urge did not perish but remained like an ominous monster in a deep cavern biding its time and waiting its day? Suppose that the May Pole of Merry Mount and the Witches’ Sabaoths of Salem were to be reborn with disastrous consequences because of their long suppression? Might not the humming wind be saying, “The day is coming! The Black Man is coming! The May Pole of Merry Mount is to be reared again on the site of the factory! The witches and warlocks are to rule! The cities are to be laid waste for this huge shell of civilization is no more than a pasteboard affair and it is only the ancient furies and instincts that count in the long run!” Dreeme permitted his imagination to go to whatever lengths it pleased as he plunged through the forest with Walden Slater. He was fully aware of the fancifulness and impossibility of his thoughts, but they seemed to act as a release-valve for the feelings that boiled within him.

Walden Slater suddenly clutched his wrist in a huge gripping hand. He drew the young doctor to one side, and as he did so Dreeme became aware of the tiny bobbing jewel of light before them, a spark of yellow that disappeared behind trees only to reappear again. The farmer did not slack his pace but kept on rapidly, but Dreeme noted that there was a tenseness in his walk. The light bobbed before them and they gained on it. It grew in dimensions and before they had traveled many rods Dreeme, by straining his eyes, perceived that it was a lantern carried by a dark figure. He grew aware at the same time that other figures were slipping noiselessly through the trees before them. He even heard the subdued mutter of a voice somewhere to the right of him. Still holding the young doctor by the wrist, Walden Slater made a detour to the left and they circled the bobbing lantern. Keeping their eyes turned toward the lantern they drew abreast of it, passed it, and then Walden Slater uttered an exclamation as he bumped into a sluggishly moving figure in the shadow of a huge over-arching tree. “At Dagon,” said a low voice. An inspiration came to Dreeme. In a calm subdued tone he answered, “For the Master.” The figure fell away into the darkness of the trees and as they forged ahead Dreeme could feel Walden Slater’s fingers tighten on his wrist in an approving manner. The ground was growing more marshy and their feet sank into the soft soil as they pressed forward. The young doctor suspected that they were reaching that portion of Briony Wood that degenerated into Nigger Swamp and that their objective was not so far before them now. Walden Slater appeared to sense the same thing for his pace quickened automatically. They moved rapidly now, their feet making a distinct sucking sound as they lifted them from the muddy earth. The incline turned downward and as its slope increased the two men found themselves wading through good-sized pools of water and tall scratchy reeds that tore against their legs. Their feet sank deeper in slushy mire and occasionally the sleepy croak of a frog sounded in the darkness beyond them.

Although the journey was harder now, a painful lifting of one foot after the other, Dreeme’s weariness seemed to fall from him. He was like an eager hunter hot on the scent with the quarry almost in view. Any moment, he thought to himself, I may turn a corner and see a ring of dim lanterns about a huge stone and know that I am at the end of my journey and that I have seen what no other stranger in this valley has ever seen. The thought exhilarated him. So, too, did the memory that he had passed other mysterious figures in Briony Wood, for it meant that he was not late, that Deborah would be unharmed when he reached Dagon. How she was to be taken away from the group of fanatics who gathered in the swamp he did not know, but he trusted partially to the skill of the silent Walden Slater and partially to the inspiration of the moment. There would be a way, for he would make one. He was pleased to think that there was no fear in his heart now, that his brain had cleared, and that his nerves were steady. He had lost his madness in Briony Wood, and that was good. There was nothing but a clear flame of determination in him.

Walden Slater’s mouth was close to his ear.

“We’re not quite in the swamp yet,” he said. “There’s a road. We’ve got to find it.”

He turned and started to walk rapidly at right angles to their previous direction and Dreeme followed him.

There seemed to be nothing but swampy land, and in certain sunken places the slimy water rose to their knees. The drizzling rain continued to spit about them.

“We should have followed the lantern,” said Dreeme in a low voice.

“We’ll find the road all right,” replied Slater.

They trudged for some minutes through the water and mud and then Walden Slater emitted a low ejaculation of satisfaction. At the same moment Dreeme stumbled upward from the sucking mud to a firm elevation. Turning again in the direction which they had previously followed the two men followed this elevation which appeared to extend in a long narrow ribbon into the darkness before them. It was the road all right, and it ended at Dagon. Some distance ahead of them they could see the bobbing lantern, and looking back Dreeme observed another lantern coming down from the higher ground upon which stood Briony Wood. There were farmers before him and behind them, and the only way in which they might hope to avoid them would mean taking off into the swamp on either side of the narrow road. Walden Slater, as though in answer to an unasked question from Dreeme, said:

“The muck is up to your waist on either side. Don’t step off the road.”

The trees had thinned out, although a few grotesquely-twisted forms loomed up about them. The eery glow in the sky swept across the long desolate expanse, but it was not bright enough for the young doctor to make out anything with any degree of accuracy. All that he could see were great motionless shapeless shadows, bulks that squatted on the marshy ground like prehistoric beasts. In the daytime they would probably dwindle into nothing more menacing than bushes. But now there was something sinister about them. They sat on huge haunches and watched the two men travel along the narrow lifted road that ran through the flooded land. Dreeme could almost imagine great sleepy eyelids beneath which peered motionless eyes. He was neither frightened nor moved by his thoughts. Instead of excitement the slow blood of determination ran through his cold veins. He lifted his hand and brushed the wet matted hair from his forehead and rubbed his straining eyes. He could feel how set his face was, how the lines had deepened in his cheeks, how tight his jaw was set. He could not make out Walden Slater’s face in the deceiving rainy light, but he imagined that it was set like his own, reflecting a determination that would be ruthless and unescapable when the time for action came.

III

This was Nigger Swamp at last. The dark road ran like a pencil line across the level expanse that waved in the rainy wind its monotonous host of thin reeds. These reeds clacked together with a tiny rippling sound that was half-drowned in the sturdier bluster of the lessening gale. Rain still fell in a dispiriting manner, cold, large-dropped, maddening in its relentless evenness. Dreeme felt the rain no longer, for, soaked to the skin and numbed to the bone, the surface of his body had lost all sensation. Even his feet were senseless now. He followed the lurching beat of Walden Slater’s boots like a man in a trance. Yet his faculties were alert. Though he experienced no physical sensation he realized that his brain was clearing and capable of swift action. It was like a live intelligence in a dead body. It was this live intelligence that noted, even before the phlegmatic Walden Slater, that the bobbing lantern ahead of them had stopped. The young doctor touched the farmer on the arm.

“Look!” he whispered. “The man ahead has stopped.”

Both of them paused in their tracks and observed the stationary light with some unrest. Dreeme glanced behind him and saw that the light which was following them was steadily approaching nearer. He remembered Walden Slater’s warning: “The muck is up to your waist on either side.”

“What shall we do?” he whispered to Walden Slater, indicating the approaching stranger in their rear. The farmer said nothing but opened his coat a bit and loosened the revolver in his belt. He glanced first at the stationary light before them and then at the approaching light behind them. After that, he spat reflectively into the swamp at his side.

“We don’t want to kick up a fuss till we locate Deborah,” he said mildly.

Even as he spoke the stationary lantern before them began to return on its tracks, to approach them from the front even as the other lantern approached them from the rear. They were caught between two fires now.

“Perhaps we can hide our faces,” whispered Dreeme. “Perhaps we can pass them as we passed those other fellows back in Briony Wood.”

“Perhaps,” said Walden Slater noncommittally.

“Shall we stand out in the swamp?” asked Dreeme suddenly.

Walden Slater shook his head.

“You’d never pull yourself out of it again,” he said.

The light before them returned ten or twelve yards on its own track, and then suddenly disappeared to the right, vanishing completely from sight. Walden Slater grunted.

“They missed the cross path,” he said. “It’s a lucky thing for us.”

He started forward, accelerating his pace as much as the hummocky road would permit, and Dreeme, suddenly relieved from the tenseness that had held him like a coiled steel spring, followed with agility. It was remarkable how refreshed he felt after that brief halt. He even forgot the lantern that was following at his heels, perhaps fifty yards behind him in the rainy gloom, a dancing midge in the deceptive air. The road dipped a bit as they proceeded forward, and soon Dreeme observed low bushes lining it, bushes that rose in height as they stumbled along over the increasing unevenness. They were entering another expanse of wooded territory, this time, without a doubt, the center of the swamp. Trees shot up out of the mist about them and the road assumed the aspect of a funnel that dwindled to nothingness before them. Walden Slater walked very slowly now inspecting the bushes at the right of the road. Soon the misty light vanished behind the climbing shrubbery and trees and the farmer cursed softly to himself.

“Whereabouts did that lantern turn in?” he inquired of the night in general. Dreeme did not attempt an answer, but went down and felt the dark ground, fumbling about for possible footprints.

“You can’t find anything that way,” said the farmer ungraciously. He blundered along close to the bushes, sometimes stepping through only to catch himself just in time from toppling into the sunken mire from which the soggy growths sprang. It was intensely dark now and they could perceive nothing before them. Dreeme, lifting up his hand a foot from his face, could not make it out. They were in an alley of small trees and bushes that met above them.

“The lantern came back from here,” muttered Walden Slater. “I’ll swear to that.”

He turned on his heel and retraced his steps.

“Look!” whispered Dreeme.

The lantern that had been following them was now less than thirty yards before them. It approached slowly, its feeble spark illuminating a small circle of milky haze. Who held it or how many were in the party could not be made out. Walden Slater stopped by the side of the path and Dreeme paused beside him. The lantern approached deliberately at such a speed as to indicate that the person carrying it was walking very slowly. The stranger, or strangers, were evidently studying the right side of the road even as Walden Slater and Dreeme had studied it, searching for an ingress into the swamp, for a concealed road that would take them off at an angle from this main path.

“If they miss the road they won’t miss us,” murmured Dreeme.

The farmer said nothing but waited mutely for what might happen. When the lantern was within ten yards of them it paused for an instant and then disappeared. Walden Slater crept forward slowly. Dreeme followed close at his heels. Reaching the spot where the lantern had disappeared the farmer went over and fumbled at the ground. The charred trunk of a tree met his hand. He grunted and stepped by it, almost sliding as he struck a sharp incline, and then caught his balance on a narrow ribbon of hard soil. The lantern had disappeared entirely, but the farmer and Dreeme, stepping tentatively, discovered that the tiny footpath they were now on curved steadily. They walked very silently now, stepping as gently as they could along the path, a path covered with the soaked dead leaves of many seasons. Their instincts told them that they were reaching the end of their journey, that the time would soon come for any action that they might plan. Dreeme felt a momentary inclination to ask the farmer what he intended to do, but he repressed it, feeling that Slater desired silence now. Like two Indians they stole forward through the bushes and small trees, disturbing only an occasional frog that croaked dismally from the swamp about them. A musty smell of rotting vegetation was in their nostrils, of green-scummed water disturbed by violent rains, of disintegrating animal life.

After some minutes walk the underbrush thinned sufficiently to permit the pale reflection of the cloudy sky to reach them. It had practically stopped raining, the unceasing drizzle dwindling into no more than an occasional flutter of large cold drops that dashed against their faces. The few trees dripped disconsolately, however, and whenever the uneven road caused them to lurch against a bush they were covered by a tiny unpleasant downfall. Some distance ahead of them they caught unfrequent glimpses of the tiny lantern, glimpses that immediately winked out as the road turned and followed the narrow ribbon of raised territory. Something hard and cold cut against Dreeme’s naked foot and he bent over and picked it up. Holding it up to the faint light he could dimly make it out. A surprised and agitated exclamation broke from him, and he turned to Walden Slater who had paused.

“Look,” he said, handing the object to the farmer.

Walden Slater turned it over slowly in his large dripping hand. His long upper lip drew downward as he recognized it and handed it back without a word to Dreeme. The young doctor stared at it again. It was a brooch. A brooch upon which was the finely-cut cameo of a goat’s head. Deborah’s brooch. The brooch he had seen hanging on her bosom that evening before when they had walked through the quiet street of Marlborough and had told each other so much. She had passed along ahead of them, then, and was already at the place called Dagon. There could be no time to lose now. Walden Slater, who had not said a word, was walking along as rapidly as he could on the narrow uncertain road. Dreeme, close at his heels and sometimes abreast with him when the road permitted, kept pace with the farmer.

They were back among trees again. The young doctor had never realized the extent of Nigger Swamp before. He had always pictured it as a small circumscribed area of loathsome water and rotting bushes but now he understood that it covered a vast expanse of territory. It was either very large or the deceptive path they followed wound round and round it in a spiral. Perhaps they had circled Dagon. Perhaps the path was a maze that took the ignorant wanderer round and round until, by some lucky chance, the riddle was solved and he stood at the heart. As Dreeme labored onward his imagination drew into the dark void about them the first descendants of the fugitive Salem witches who had settled in this part of the world. He pictured to himself a breed of silent, mad-eyed men in steeple-crowned hats and baggy knee-breeches and homespun stockings and square-toed buckled shoes lurching along this immemorial road. On their shoulders they bore heavy bell-mouthed muskets and stands upon which to rest these muskets when they fired at enemies. Powder horns swung from their shoulders and bags of round bullets. There were women, too, sharp-faced, hawk-nosed women in white caps and dull gray dresses, hurrying along and laughing hysterically at the storm for there was no secrecy in those days, no reasons for quietude in the unspoilt wilderness, no one to watch them except the lean Indians in their breech-clouts of deer-skin, their proud fierce faces crowned by the scalp-lock and the turkey-feather peering from behind the trees in superstitious wonder. The startled deer crashed through the underbrush and the brown bears lumbered away from the flares of the torches and the old-fashioned lanterns. All this had died away, had been erased by Time, had vanished into the nothingness of dead and unwritten history.

Then, decades and decades and decades later, Uriah Carrier, by the maps in his black book, had found the lost place called Dagon and he had worked on the slumbering instincts of the people about him, appealing to the madness that slept in their subconscious memories, bringing them again to the secret stone and the place where the crumbled bones rested. He had probably promised them dominion over their days, the power of exerting their wills and destroying their enemies, the joys of the liberation of their darkest instincts. It sounded impossible enough on the face of it, like some insane fairytale that a sick imagination might bring forth, and yet it must have been a fact for here he was, a sane doctor in the twentieth century, stumbling through the rotting vegetation of an untraveled swamp in search of a madman and the fanatical minds he had released from the kindly bondage of reason. It was like a nightmare.

Walden Slater halted abruptly. The road had grown somewhat wider now and they had been walking abreast. About them the trees rose to an imposing stature and the ground to right and left of them seemed higher and firmer than that through which they had toiled for the last half-hour. Dreeme imagined that they had reached a sort of island in the middle of the swamp and his conviction was intensified when, after peering right and left, before him and behind, Walden Slater stepped from the road and began to thread a slow circuitous advance through the trees. The ground as he stepped on it seemed softer than safety might desire but the young doctor followed with alacrity. His bare feet sank to the ankles in the soft ooze but following Walden Slater’s example and stepping close to the trunks of the trees he discovered that the walking was not so difficult after all. They appeared to be in a tall woodland now where the thin trees rose straight out of a soggy soil, a soil in which the rotting stumps of lightning-blasted growths and scattered boulders cluttered up and made difficult any swift passage. The boulders seemed unusual and Dreeme wondered about them. They possibly were evidence of a strata of rock, the slice of some prehistoric glacier, that thrust upward out of the marshy soil here. Walden Slater walked warily, taking care to step on no dead branches or to crash through none of the small undergrowths that sprang up between the slender trees. Dreeme followed suit.

They had walked through this woodland for a few minutes only before the young doctor observed a faint glow among the trees that faced them. He instinctively hastened his pace a little and soon was several feet in front of Walden Slater. The farmer plodded along doggedly exhibiting no excitement or unrest. Dreeme, clutching Deborah’s brooch in his hand, was about to break into a stumbling run when the wiry hand of the farmer jerked his shoulder back. A trifle angry but aware of the wisdom of the rebuke the young doctor adjusted his pace to the farmer’s steady progression and they moved forward toward the faint glow, a glow that brightened perceptibly as they neared it. The rain had stopped altogether, even the large infrequent drops disappearing into the mist of the night. In those few minutes while Dreeme crept forward beside the farmer a dozen and one thoughts flashed through his mind, plans of rescue, schemes of attack, possibilities of tactics to be employed. Would they rush into the group of farmers, and, while Walden Slater held them back with the menace of his revolver, would he snatch up Deborah and make away with her along the exhausting road which he had been traveling for nearly an hour? What could they hope to do against a dozen or more men who were mad? He wanted to ask Walden Slater what he thought but the farmer was so evidently bent on silence that he did not venture a word. The glow was quite bright now and it seemed to come upward from the earth, from a hollow beyond them that was masked by crowded tree-trunks. There were many lanterns in that hollow and there were many men. Deborah was there, too. Perhaps at this very moment she was a part of the unclean ceremonies that were taking place. It seemed an eternity to the young doctor while they crept slowly and silently through the last ring of trees, stepping gingerly over the protruding boulders and rotting branches and mouldering stumps. Walden Slater now carried his revolver in his hand. Leaving the last of the trees behind them and facing the yellow glow of the invisible light that formed a strange fan of color against the milky atmosphere they crept up an inclined bank toward a ring of low intertangled bushes. The subdued hum of voices reached their strained ears. Walden Slater carefully pushed aside one of the branches of the bushes against which they now rested and cautiously thrust his face forward. For a second he looked downward. Then he drew back and putting his mouth very close to Dreeme’s ear said:

“This is the place called Dagon.”

The young doctor, his blood beating furiously, crept up to the bush, drew the branch aside, thrust his face forward, and looked downward.