STEVE BRILL did not believe in ghosts or demons. Juan Lopez did. But
neither the caution of the one nor the sturdy skepticism of the other
was shield against the horror that fell upon them--the horror
forgotten by men for more than three hundred years--a screaming fear
monstrously resurrected from the black lost ages.
Yet as Steve Brill sat on his sagging stoop that last evening, his
thoughts were as far from uncanny menaces as the thoughts of man can
be. His ruminations were bitter but materialistic. He surveyed his
farmland and he swore. Brill was tall, rangy and tough as boot-
leather--true son of the iron-bodied pioneers who wrenched West Texas
from the wilderness. He was browned by the sun and strong as a
long-horned steer. His lean legs and the boots on them showed his
cowboy instincts, and now he cursed himself that he had ever climbed
off the hurricane deck of his crank-eyed mustang and turned to farming.
He was no farmer, the young puncher admitted profanely.
Yet his failure had not all been his fault. Plentiful rain in the
winter--so rare in West Texas--had given promise of good crops. But as
usual, things had happened. A late blizzard had destroyed all the
budding fruit. The grain which had looked so promising was ripped to
shreds and battered into the ground by terrific hailstorms just as it
was turning yellow. A period of intense dryness, followed by another
hailstorm, finished the corn.
Then the cotton, which had somehow struggled through, fell before a
swarm of grasshoppers which stripped Brill's field almost overnight.
So Brill sat and swore that he would not renew his lease--he gave
fervent thanks that he did not own the land on which he had wasted his
sweat, and that there were still broad rolling ranges to the West
where a strong young man could make his living riding and roping.
Now as Brill sat glumly, he was aware of the approaching form of his
nearest neighbor, Juan Lopez, a taciturn old Mexican who lived in a
hut just out of sight over the hill across the creek, and grubbed for
a living. At present he was clearing a strip of land on an adjoining
farm, and in returning to his hut he crossed a corner of Brill's
pasture.
Brill idly watched him climb through the barbed-wire fence and trudge
along the path he had worn in the short dry grass. He had been working
at his present job for over a month now, chopping down tough gnarly
mesquite trees and digging up their incredibly long roots, and Brill
knew that he always followed the same path home. And watching, Brill
noted him swerving far aside, seemingly to avoid a low rounded hillock
which jutted above the level of the pasture. Lopez went far around
this knoll and Brill remembered that the old Mexican always circled it
at a distance. And another thing came into Brill's idle mind--Lopez
always increased his gait when he was passing the knoll, and he always
managed to get by it before sundown--yet Mexican laborers generally
worked from the first light of dawn to the last glint of twilight,
especially at these grubbing jobs, when they were paid by the acre and
not by the day. Brill's curiosity was aroused.
He rose, and sauntering down the slight slope on the crown of which
his shack sat, hailed the plodding Mexican.
"Hey, Lopez, wait a minute."
Lopez halted; looked about, and remained motionless but unenthusiastic
as the white man approached.
"Lopez," said Brill lazily, "it ain't none of my business, but I just
wanted to ask you--how come you always go so far around that old Indian
mound?"
"No habe," grunted Lopez shortly.
"You're a liar," responded Brill genially. "You savvy all right; you
speak English as good as me. What's the matter--you think that mound's
ha'nted or somethin'!"
Brill could speak Spanish himself and read it, too, but like most
Anglo-Saxons he much preferred to speak his own language.
