“Dead!” gasped one of them.
“He stabbed hisself, I tell ye,” shrilled the sheriff. “He stuck his own knife in hisself!”
The five ungainly figures stared at each other, there amidst the roaring, deserted bonfires. One of them began to whimper suddenly.
“They—they’ll be throwin’ their knives all the way down to the valley!” he gasped. “They’ll be hidin’ behind trees an’ a-stabbin’ at us.”
The sheriff’s teeth began to chatter. The others clutched their weapons and gazed affrightedly at the woods encircling them.
“We—we got to try it,” gulped the sheriff, shivering. “We got to! Else they’ll get guns an’ kill us here. If—if ye see anything movin’, shoot it! Dun’t wait! If ye see anything, shoot....”
With staring, panic-stricken eyes, they made for the woods. Cunningham heard them crashing through the undergrowth in the darkness, whimpering and gasping in terror at every fancied sound.
They left behind them nothing but twelve great fires that began slowly to burn low, and a crumpled figure in barbaric finery lying with his face upturned toward the sky. It was the young Stranger who only that afternoon had told Cunningham of the girl he had loved and lost because she was not of the Strange People. He had stabbed himself when captured, rather than be taken out of the hills and forced to tell the secret of the Strangers.
12
By morning the outside valleys were up in arms. One man—the foreigner of the train—had been killed by the Strange People, and a servant of Vladimir’s had disappeared among them. And witchcraft had been believed in not too long ago in those parts. The wild ceremony of the Strangers among their blazing fires was told and retold, and with one known killing to their discredit and the long-smoldering hatred they had inspired, at the end it was related as devil-worship undiluted. Something out of Scripture came to be put in it and men told each other—and firmly believed—that children were being kidnaped and sacrificed to the Moloch out of the Old Testament. The single Stranger who had been killed became another human sacrifice, confusingly intermingled with the other and more horrible tale, and there was no doubt in the mind of any of the local farmers that the Strangers planned unspeakable things to all not of their own kind.