Page:Weird Tales Volume 36 Number 06 (1942-07).djvu/6
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Demon-Ridden
Drama Novelette—
Coven
by Manly Wade Wellman
... They pledge themselves to frequent the midnight assemblies. These conventicles or covens were bands or companies of witches, composed of men and women, apparently under the discipline of an officer. ...
—History of Witchcraft and Demonology, Montague Summers.
CHAPTER I
The Cursed Damozel
WASN’T Shiloh supposed to be named after an angel or a devil? Angels and devils were both there, sorting the two armies through for who should live and who die, who go to heaven and who go to hell. We Southerners won the first day and part of the second, even after they’d killed General Albert Sidney Johnston. When I say he was about as great as General Lee, I expect to be believed. When we fell back, Bedford Forrest sent some of us to save a field piece that Bragg’s artillery left behind. But the Yankees got there fustest with the mostest men. They carried off the gun, and two or three of us Tennessee cavalry with it.
They were bivouacking on the field—sundown, April 7, 1862. I was marched