Every now and then he rode over to
the cluster of thatched conical huts which formed the main village of
the Wichitas, and talked long with the old men and shamans about the
snake-god and how to nullify his wrath. Charms were always ready in
exchange for whisky, but much of the information he got was far from
reassuring. Yig was a great god. He was bad medicine. He did not forget things. In the autumn his children were hungry and wild, and Yig was hungry
and wild, too. All the tribes made medicine against Yig when the corn
harvest came. They gave him some corn, and danced in proper regalia to
the sound of whistle, rattle, and drum. They kept the drums pounding to
drive Yig away, and called down the aid of Tiráwa, whose children men
are, even as the snakes are Yig's children. It was bad that the squaw
of Davis killed the children of Yig. Let Davis say the charms many
times when the corn harvest comes. Yig is Yig. Yig is a great god. By the time the corn harvest did come, Walker had succeeded in getting
his wife into a deplorably jumpy state. His prayers and borrowed
incantations came to be a nuisance; and when the autumn rites of the
Indians began, there was always a distant wind-borne pounding of
tom-toms to lend an added background of the sinister. It was maddening
to have the muffled clatter always stealing over the wide red plains. Why would it never stop? Day and night, week on week, it was always
going in exhaustless relays, as persistently as the red dusty winds
that carried it. Audrey loathed it more than her husband did, for he
saw in it a compensating element of protection. It was with this sense
of a mighty, intangible bulwark against evil that he got in his corn
crop and prepared cabin and stable for the coming winter. *       *       *       *       *

The autumn was abnormally warm, and except for their primitive cookery
the Davises found scant use for the stone fireplace Walker had built
with such care. Something in the unnaturalness of the hot dust-clouds
preyed on the nerves of all the settlers, but most of all on Audrey's
and Walker's. The notions of a hovering snake-curse and the weird,
endless rhythm of the distant Indian drums formed a bad combination
which any added element of the bizarre went far to render utterly
unendurable. Notwithstanding this strain, several festive gatherings were held at
one or another of the cabins after the crops were reaped: keeping
naively alive in modernity those curious rites of the harvest-home
which are as old as human agriculture itself. Lafayette Smith, who
came from southern Missouri and had a cabin about three miles east
of Walker's, was a very passable fiddler; and his tunes did much to
make the celebrants forget the monotonous beating of the distant
tom-toms. Then Hallowe'en drew near, and the settlers planned another
frolic--this time, had they but known it, of a lineage older than even
agriculture: the dread Witch-Sabbath of the primal pre-Aryans, kept
alive through ages in the midnight blackness of secret woods, and
still hinting at vague terrors under its latter-day mask of comedy and
lightness. Hallowe'en was to fall on a Thursday, and the neighbors
agreed to gather for their first revel at the Davis cabin. It was on that thirty-first of October that the warm spell broke. The morning was gray and leaden, and by noon the incessant winds had
changed from searingness to rawness. People shivered all the more
because they were not prepared for the chill, and Walker Davis's old
dog Wolf dragged himself wearily indoors to a place beside the hearth. But the distant drums still thumped on, nor were the white citizenry
less inclined to pursue their chosen rites. As early as four in the
afternoon the wagons began to arrive at Walker's cabin; and in the
evening, after a memorable barbecue, Lafayette Smith's fiddle inspired
a very fair-sized company to great feats of saltatory grotesqueness in
the one good-sized but crowded room. The younger folk indulged in the
amiable inanities proper to the season, and now and then old Wolf would
howl with doleful and spine-tickling ominousness at some especially
spectral strain from Lafayette's squeaky violin--a device he had never
heard before. Mostly, though, this battered veteran slept through
the merriment; for he was past the age of active interests and lived
largely in his dreams. Tom and Jennie Rigby had brought their collie
Zeke along, but the canines did not fraternize. Zeke seemed strangely
uneasy over something, and nosed around curiously all the evening. Audrey and Walker made a fine couple on the floor, and Grandma Compton
still likes to recall her impression of their dancing that night. Their worries seemed forgotten for the nonce, and Walker was shaved
and trimmed into a surprizing degree of spruceness. By ten o'clock
all hands were healthily tired, and the guests began to depart family
by family with many handshakings and bluff assurances of what a fine
time everybody had had. Tom and Jennie thought Zeke's eery howls as he
followed them to their wagon were marks of regret at having to go home;
though Audrey said it must be the far-away tom-toms which annoyed him,
for the distant thumping was surely ghastly enough after the merriment
within. The night was bitterly cold, and for the first time Walker put a great
log in the fireplace and banked it with ashes to keep it smoldering
till morning. Old Wolf dragged himself within the ruddy glow and
lapsed into his customary coma. Audrey and Walker, too tired to think
of charms or curses, tumbled into the rough pine bed and were asleep
before the cheap alarm-clock on the mantle had ticked out three
minutes. And from far away, the rhythmic pounding of those hellish
tom-toms still pulsed on the chill night-wind. *       *       *       *       *

Dr. McNeill paused here and removed his glasses, as if a blurring of
the objective world might make the reminiscent vision clearer. "You'll
soon appreciate," he said, "that I had a great deal of difficulty in
piecing out all that happened after the guests left. There were times,
though--at first--when I was able to make a try at it." After a moment
of silence he went on with the tale. Audrey had terrible dreams of Yig, who appeared to her in the guise of
Satan as depicted in cheap engravings she had seen. It was, indeed,
from an absolute ecstasy of nightmare that she started suddenly awake
to find Walker already conscious and sitting up in bed. He seemed to be
listening intently to something, and silenced her with a whisper when
she began to ask what had roused him. "Hark, Aud!" he breathed. "Don't ye hear somethin' a-singin' and
buzzin' and rustlin'? D'ye reckon it's the fall crickets?" Certainly, there was distinctly audible within the cabin such a sound
as he had described. Audrey tried to analyze it, and was impressed with
some element at once horrible and familiar, which hovered just outside
the rim of her memory.