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CHAPTER I THE TRACKS IN THE SNOWInvoluntarily I paused, shuddering, on the snow-covered station platform. A strange sound, weird, and some how appalling, filled the ghostly moonlight of the winter night. A quavering and distant ululation, which prickled my body with chills colder than the piercing bite of the motionless, frozen air.
That unearthly, nerve-shredding sound, I knew, must be the howling of the gray prairie or lobo wolves, though I had not heard them since childhood. But it carried a note of elemental terror which even the trembling apprehensions of boyhood had never given the voice of the great wolves. There was something sharp, broken, about that eery clamor, far-off and deeply rhythmic as it was. Something--and the thought brought a numbing chill of fear--which suggested that the ululation came from straining human throats!
Striving to shake the phantasy from me, I hastened across the icy platform, and burst rather precipitately into the dingy waiting room. It was brilliantly lit with unshaded electric bulbs. A red-hot stove filled it with grateful heat. But I was less thankful for the warmth than for the shutting out of that far-away howling.
Beside the glowing stove a tall man sat tense over greasy cards spread on the end of a packing box which he held between his knees, playing solitaire with strained, feverish attention. He wore an ungainly leather coat, polished slick with wear. One tanned cheek bulged with tobacco, and his lips were amber-stained.
He seemed oddly startled by my abrupt entrance. With a sudden, frightened movement, he pushed aside the box, and sprang to his feet. For a moment his eyes wereanxiously upon me; then he seemed to sigh with relief. He opened the stove door, and expectorated into the roaring flames, then sank back into his chair.
"Howdy, Mister," he said, in a drawl that was a little strained and husky. "You sort of scairt me. You was so long comin' in that I figgered nobody got off."
"I stopped to listen to the wolves," I told him. "They sound weird, don't they?"
* * * *He searched my face with strange, fearful eyes. For a long time he did not speak. Then he said briskly, "Well, Mister, what kin I do for ye?"
As I advanced toward the stove, he added, "I'm Mike Connell, the station agent."
"My name is Clovis McLaurin," I told him. "I want to find my father, Dr. Ford McLaurin. He lives on a ranch near here."
"So you're Doc McLaurin's boy, eh?" Connell said, warming visibly. He rose, smiling and shifting his wad of tobacco to the other cheek, and took my hand.
"Yes," I said. "Have you seen him lately? Three days ago I had a strange telegram from him. He asked me to come at once. It seems that he's somehow in trouble. Do you know anything about it?"
Connell looked at me queerly.
"No," he said at last. "I ain't seen him lately. None of 'em off the ranch ain't been in to Hebron for two or three weeks. The snow is the deepest in years, you know, and it ain't easy to git around. I dunno how they could have sent a telegram, though, without comin' to town. And they ain't none of us seen 'em!"
"Have you got to know Dad?" I inquired, alarmed more deeply.
"No, not to say real well," the agent admitted. "But I seen him and Jetton and Jetton's gal often enough when they come into Hebron, here. Quite a bit of stuff has come for 'em to the station, here. Crates and boxes, marked like they was scientific apparatus-I dunno what. But a right purty gal, that Stella Jetton. Purty as a picture."
"It's three years since I've seen Dad," I said, confiding in the agent in hope of winning his approval and whatever aid he might be able to give me in reaching the ranch, over the unusual fall of snow that blanketed the West Texas plains. "I've been in medical college in the East. Haven't seen Dad since he came out here to Texas three years ago."
"You're from the East, eh?"
"New York. But I spent a couple of years out here with my uncle when I was a kid. Dad inherited the ranch from,him."
"Yeah, old Tom McLaurin was a friend of mine," the agent told me.
* * * *It was three years since my father had left the chair of astrophysics at an eastern university, to come here to the lonely ranch to carry on his original experiments. The legacy from his brother Tom, besides the ranch itself, had included a small fortune in money, which had made it possible for him to give up his academic position and to devote his entire time to the abstruse problems upon which he had been working.
Being more interested in medical than in mathematical science, I had not followed Father's work completely, though I used to help him with his experiments, when he had to perform them in a cramped flat, with pitifully limited equipment. I knew, however, that he had worked out an extension of Weyl's non-Euclidean geometry in a direction quite different from those chosen by Eddington and Einstein--and whose implications, as regards the structure of our universe, were stupendous. His new theory of the wave-electron, which completed the wrecking of the Bohr planetary atom, had been as sensational.
The proof his theory required was the exact comparison of the velocity of beams of light at right angles. The experiment required a large, open field, with a clear atmosphere, free from dust or smoke; hence his choosing the ranch as a site upon which to complete the work.
Since I wished to remain in college, and could help him no longer, he had employed as an assistant and collaborator, Dr. Blake Jetton, who was himself well known for his remarkable papers upon the propagation of light, and the recent modifications of the quantum theory.
Dr. Jetton, like my father, was a widower. He had a single child, a daughter named Stella. She had been spending several months of each year with them on the ranch. While I had not seen her many times, I could agree with the station agent that she was pretty. As a matter of fact I had thought her singularly attractive.
* * * *Three days before, I had received the telegram from my father. A strangely worded and alarming message, imploring me to come to him with all possible haste. It stated that his life was in danger, though no hint had been given as to what the danger might be.
Unable to understand the message, I had hastened to my rooms for a few necessary articles--among them, a little automatic pistol--and had lost no time in boarding a fast train. I had found the Texas Panhandle covered with nearly a foot of snow--the winter was the most severe in several years. And that weird and terrible howling had greeted me ominously when I swung from the train at the lonely village of Hebron.
"The wire was urgent--most urgent," I told Connell. "I must get out to the ranch to-night, if it's at all possible. You know of any way I could go?"
For some time he was silent, watching me, with dread in his eyes.
"No, I don't," he said presently. "Ten mile to the ranch. And they ain't a soul lives on the road. The snow is nigh a foot deep. I doubt a car would make it. Ye might git Sam Judson to haul you over tomorrow in his wagon."
"I wonder if he would take me out to-night?" I inquired.
The agent shook his head uneasily, peered nervously out at the glistening, moonlit desert of snow beyond the windows, and seemed to be listening anxiously. I remembered the weird, distant howling I had heard as I walked across the platform, and could hardly restrain a shiver of my own.
"Naw, I think not!" Connell said abruptly. "It ain't healthy to git out at night around here, lately."
* * * *He paused a moment, and then asked suddenly, darting a quick, uneasy glance at my face, "I reckon you heard the howlin'?"
"Yes. Wolves?"
"Yeah--anyhow, I reckon so. Queer. Damn queer! They ain't been any loafers around these parts for ten years, till we heard 'em jest after the last blizzard." ("Loafer" appeared to be a local corruption of the Spanish word lobo applied to the gray prairie wolf, which is much larger than the coyote, and was a dreaded enemy of the rancher in the Southwest until its practical extermination.)
"Seems to be a reg'lar pack of the critters rovin' the range," Connell went on. "They've killed quite a few cattle in the last few weeks, and--" he paused, lowering his voice, "and five people!"
"The wolves have killed people!" I exclaimed.
"Yeah," he said slowly. "Josh Wells and his hand were took two weeks ago, come Friday, while they was out ridin' the range. And the Simms' are gone. The old man and his woman and little Dolly. Took right out of the cow-pen, I reckon, while they was milkin'. It ain't two mile out of town to their place. Rufe Smith was out that way to see 'em Sunday. Cattle dead in the pen, and the smashed milk buckets lying in a drift of snow under the shed. And not a sign of Simms and his family!"
"I never heard of wolves taking people that way!" I was incredulous.
Connell shifted his wad of tobacco again, and whispered, "I didn't neither. But, Mister, these here ain't ordinary wolves!"
"What do you mean?" I demanded.
"Wall, after the Simms' was took, we got up a sort of posse, and went out to hunt the critters. We didn't find no wolves. But we did find tracks in the snow. The wolves is plumb gone in the daytime!
"Tracks in the snow," he repeated slowly, as if his mind were dwelling dazedly upon some remembered horror. "Mister, them wolf tracks was too tarnation far apart to be made by any ordinary beast. The critters must 'a' been jumpin' thirty feet!
"And they warn't all wolf tracks, neither. Mister, part was wolf tracks. And part was tracks of bare human feet!"
* * * *With that, Connell fell silent, staring at me strangely, with a queer look of utter terror in his eyes.
I was staggered. There was, of course, some element of incredulity in my feelings. But the agent did not look at all like the man who has just perpetrated a successful wild story, for there was genuine horror in his eyes. And I recalled that I had fancied human tones in the strange, distant howling I had heard.
There was no good reason to believe that I had merely encountered a local superstition. Widespread as the legends of lycanthropy may be, I have yet to hear a whispered tale of werewolves related by a West Texan. And the agent's story had been too definite and concrete for me to imagine it an idle fabrication or an ungrounded fear.
"The message from my father was very urgent," I told Connell presently. "I must get out to the ranch to-night. If the man you mentioned won't take me, I'll hire a horse and ride."
"Judson is a damn fool if he'll git out to-night where them wolves is!" the agent said with conviction. "But there's nothing to keep ye from askin' him to go. I reckon he ain't gone to bed yet. He lives in the white house, jest around the corner behind Brice's store."
He stepped out upon the platform behind me to point the way. And as soon as the door was opened, we heard again that rhythmic, deep, far-off ululation, that weirdly mournful howling, from far across the moonlit plain of snow. I could not repress a shudder. And Connell, after pointing out to me Sam Judson's house, among the straggling few that constituted the village of Hebron, got very hastily back inside the depot, and shut the door behind him.
