Blair answered quickly. “Suppose some one tried to break away, to renounce the Lodge, expose its secrets. They would treat him so as to make him harmless—perhaps insane, confused, afraid to talk, paralyzed, or even to commit suicide or be killed in an accident. They would put the death thought on him!”
Even in the prosaic jolting of the cab, away from the terrible mysteries of the Red Lodge, one could feel the spell.
The cab stopped. Seward was on his feet in a moment and handing Mrs. Langhorne out at her home. For a moment they paused on the steps for an exchange of words.
In that moment I caught flitting over the face of Veda a look of hatred, more intense, more real, more awful than any that had been induced under the mysteries of the rites at the Lodge.
It was gone in an instant, and as Seward rejoined us I felt that, with Mrs. Langhorne gone, there was less restraint. I wondered whether it was she who had inspired the fear in Veda.
Although it was more comfortable, the rest of our journey was made in silence and the Blairs dropped us at our apartment with many expressions of cordiality as we left them to proceed to their own.
“Of one thing I’m sure,” I remarked, entering the room where only a few short hours before Mrs. Blair had related her strange tale. “Whatever the cause of it, the devil dancers don’t sham.”
Kennedy did not reply. He was apparently wrapped up in the consideration of the remarkable events of the evening.
As for myself, it was a state of affairs which, the day before, I should have pronounced utterly beyond the wildest bounds of the imagination of the most colorful writer. Yet here it was; I had seen it.
I glanced up to find Kennedy standing by the light examining something he had apparently picked up at the Red Lodge. I bent over to look at it, too. It was a little glass tube.