Page:Weird Tales Volume 36 Number 06 (1942-07).djvu/13

which I saw had begun to thread through with gray. He opened his hard mouth twice before speaking.

“It is the same,” he said then, more to himself than to me. “A strong weapon twice placed in the hands of the righteous.”

The man we had saved sank almost out of the chair, and I caught him. But he was dead, and no wonder, for the beating had been terrific.

Jaeger laid him out on a strip of carpet, and caught a blanket from a cot to cover him.

“Poor Peter Dole,” he muttered. “He backslid from one congregation without rebuke. When he tried backsliding from his new fellowship, it was his destruction.”

I told what had happened outside in full. Jaeger did not seem particularly surprised about the bat-winged monster or the men with masks. He only said, “God grant that the baptism Peter asked for will bring him peace in the grave.”

What is this mystery, Sergeant Jaeger?” I demanded.

He waved the title away. “I am done with war. I am the Reverend Mr. Jaeger now, a poor man of God, striving with adversaries worse than any your rebel army marshalled against me—Wickett, you make a dark hour bright.”

“More mystery,” I reminded him. “I want explanations.”

He studied me, wisely and calculatingly. “If I’m not mistaken, you are hungrier now than when we met before. Wait.”

He left me alone with the blanketed corpse of Peter Dole, and I heard him busy in the kitchen. He came back with a tin plate on which were cold biscuits, sardines from a tin, and some sort of preserves.

He also brought a cup, old Union army issue, filled with hot black coffee.

“Eat,” he bade me, “while I enlighten you.”

“I REPEAT,” began Jaeger, as I gobbled, “that your second appearance to me is in the nature of an act of Providence. How could you meet my need so aptly twice, with years and a continent in which to be lost? Probabilities against it are millions to one. Yet you’ve come, Cole Wickett, and with your help I’ll blunt the claws of demons.”

I scalded my throat with the coffee. “You promised me the story,” I reminded.

“It will be short. You remember the digging up of a grave. The woman you saw was not dead, nor alive. She was a vampire.”

That word is better known now, but I appreciated its meaning with difficulty. Jaeger’s voice grew sharp:

“You must believe me. You were close to a fearful fate, and to me you owe life and soul—when I defended you from that monster. Let me read from this book.”

He took it from a shelf above the table that served him for desk. It was old and musty, with a faded title in German. “The work of the German, Dorn Augustin Calmet,” he explained, and read from the cover: “A Treatise on the Appearance of Spirits, Vampires, and so on. Written a century ago. And here,” leafing through it, “is the reference you will need. I’ll translate, though my German is rusty.”

He cleared his throat and read: “‘They select a pure young lad, and mount him naked on a stallion colt that has never stumbled, and is coal-black with no white hair. The stallion is ridden in and out among the graves, and the grave which he will not cross, despite hard blows, is where the vampire is buried.’”

He closed the book. “You begin to see what service you rendered. That part of the country was plagued by what seemed