But in that moment an amazing thing happened. It almost seemed as if by magic the room had become peopled by a small army of ghostly, white-robed figures. They came in a sort of wave through the curtained archway through which Claire, earlier in the evening, had made her triumphal entry. And they swept down upon the gold man from behind in the voiceless fashion of avenging spectres.
It was all over in a moment. Cy Liskard was engulfed in the white wave that rushed upon him. There was a moment of confused, voiceless struggle. Then the white-hooded spectres had vanished as they had come and McLagan returned his heavy weapon to the hip-pocket of the evening clothes he so cordially detested.
Cy Liskard had been spirited away by the white-clad Aurora men, and almost on the instant the momentarily interrupted game was resumed amidst a chorus of laughter and eager comment. Nothing would be allowed to interfere with the Speedway’s routine. Even matters of life and death were of no real concern comparable with the success of Max’s annual festival.
CHAPTER IX
The Aurora Clan
IT was brilliant moonlight. Millions of stars were shining on the velvet of the heavenly dome, but their sheen was dimmed against the vivid spread of moving colour that lit the northern horizon. In the cloudlessness of the night the mysterious blaze of the Aurora had transformed the hours of darkness.
It was somewhere beyond the city limits where the plain rose gently towards the distant, surrounding hills, and the open gave place to wide bluffs of forest land. The scene was set in a spacious clearing, with a wealth of spruce and poplar and jack-pine rising out of the tangle of undergrowth encompassing it. And somewhere about its centre stood an aged Western cedar, which looked to belong to other latitudes, other climates.
The cedar was a forest giant of immense proportions. It stood out in the splendid twilight black and overwhelming, for all its height was dwarfed by the lofty, tattered crowns of its aloofly respectful neighbours. It formed a wide canopy of shelter beneath its far-reaching boughs, matted with their manifold carpet of curious foliage. It was a shelter admirably suited to the ghostly scene being enacted beneath its shade.
Twenty white-robed, white-hooded figures stood in an unbroken circle at a point where the wide-flung boughs were at their greatest spread. Right above them, almost exactly bisecting their circle, a monstrous bough reached out supporting a dangling, rawhide rope which terminated in an ominous noose. Within a foot of this noose, gazing squarely at it, bound hand and foot, stood a white man prisoner.