n
through the window at me. For maybe, so I thought, maybe he was after
all not headed for Shelton, but perhaps planning on another of his
ghastly tricks.
But in the morning we knew he had been going toward Shelton. Scientists,
doctors, and learned men of all descriptions came out to our village to
see the thing the papers said Si Waters had stumbled upon when on his
way to the creamery that next morning.
It was a skeleton, they said, only that it had a dry skin all over it. A
mummy. Could not have been considered capable of containing life only
that the snow around it was lightly blotched with a pale smear that
proved to be blood, that had oozed out from the six bullet holes in the
horrid chest. They never did solve it.
There were five of us in the store that night. Five of us who know.
Hammersly did what we all wanted to do. Of course his name is not really
Hammersly, but it has done here as well as another. He is
black-whiskered though, and he is still very much of a sphinx, but he'll
never have to answer for having killed the man he once brought back to
life. Hammersly's secret will go into five other graves besides his
own.
Monsters of Moyen
_By Arthur J. Burks_
[Illustration: "_Now," said Kleig hoarsely, "watch closely, for
God's sake!_"]
"The Western World shall be next!" was the dread ultimatum of the
half-monster, half-god Moyen!
_Foreword_
In 1935 the mighty genius of Moyen gripped the Eastern world like a hand
of steel. In a matter of months he had welded the Orient into an
unbeatable war-machine. He had, through the sheer magnetism of a strange
personality, carried the Eastern world with him on his march to conquest
of the earth, and men followed him with blind faith as men in the past
have followed the banners of the Thaumaturgists.
A strange name, to the sound of which none could assign nationality.
Some said his father was a Russian refugee, his mother a Mongol woman.
Some said he was the son of a Caucasian woman lost in the Gobi and
rescued by a mad lama of Tibet, who became father of Moyen. Some said
that his mother was a goddess, his father a fiend out of hell.
[Illustration]
But this all men knew about him: that he combined within himself the
courage of a Hannibal, the military genius of a Napoleon, the ideals of
a Sun Yat Sen; and that he had sworn to himself he would never rest
until the earth was peopled by a single nation, with Moyen himself in
the seat
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