Page:Weird Tales Volume 35 Issue 04 (1940-07).djvu/44

his trail were the trails of his little adversaries, herding and harrying him, toward the dark opening among the vines where he had seen and fired upon the quarry that was really a decoy.

“Poor Mr. Ransome,” Pitts was saying. “He should have obeyed the law—you got to respect things like that, or—”

“Stay behind me,” commanded Pursuivant, and bent, thrusting with the muzzle of the shotgun into the space among the vines.

Within was empty gloom, for here the hill rose abruptly under a masking of herbage, and in it was a cave.

“Gontolah—the Hungry Hill,” remembered Pursuivant. Yes, as Pitts had said, this place looked like an open, starved mouth, a lune-shape hole with a flat rim of rock above and another below, like gaping lips. And something was wedged in that mouth-like cavern.

He forced himself to touch it. His fingers closed on a slack, damp wrist. With a heave and a scrape, he dragged the body into view.

Yes, it was Ransome, or what had been Ransome. Pursuivant knew him by the contours of that pounded, lacerated head, by the leanness of the blood-boltered body inside chopped-up rags.

Pitts whimpered as the thing came into the light.

“Poor Mr. Ransome,” he said again. “Now I know how—oh!”

Pursuivant whirled like a top at that final gasp of horror. He saw, too, what Spencer had seen.

The spaces among the bushes along their back trail were full of rabbits, all lean and gray with black and white blazings on legs and ear-tips, and all a trifle larger than ordinary. Every eye in that horde was turned upon the two men, and the eyes of meat-eating animals. They were an army, moving concertedly and purposefully upon the judge and Pitts, who stood cut off with their backs to the cave.

Pursuivant’s big fists tightened on Ransome’s shotgun. He would not throw it, he told himself at once—clubbed, its metal-shod butt would smash these little assailants to rags. But Pitts was trying another weapon.

With eyes and outstretched hands he addressed himself to the foremost of the rabbits, the one that moved cautiously but steadily ahead of the press, like an officer leading troops in an orderly advance. He spoke, audibly and with a tremble of fear:

“H-howdy, Mister Rabbit!”

There was a momentary pause in the oncoming torrent of fur. A little eddy showed, then a parting in the ranks. They were making a way for Pitts to retreat through them, and he needed not a moment to make up his mind. He fairly darted along that open lane, which closed behind him. The expanse of fuzzy backs and upturned green eyes resolidified, and above it Pitts looked back at Pursuivant.

“Better say the words,” he advised huskily. "They’re closing in on you.”

THEY converged slowly and smoothly, flowing like a puddle of grease—but grease scummed over with fur and green-black eyes, sprouting a meadow of ears. Pursuivant lifted the clubbed shotgun and set himself to strike. The leader-rabbit sprang suddenly at him. Pursuivant swung the gun, as a batter strikes at a ball. He could not miss—but the weapon swished thinly in the air, and the little sinewy body struck him at the base of the throat. A moment later more rabbits were springing at him—a dozen, a score, hundreds. His flailing with the gun did not find a single mark. He swayed under the bombardment, but kept his feet—he was stronger and bulkier than Ransome, he would take more battering to bring down—

“Say the words. Judge!” Pitts’s voice