The THING from Outside
by George Allen England
THEY sat about their camp-fire, that little party of Americans retreating southward from Hudson Bay before the on-coming menace of the great cold. Sat there, stolid under the awe of the North, under the uneasiness that the day's trek had laid upon their souls. The three men smoked. The two women huddled close to each other. Fireglow picked their faces from the gloom of night among the dwarf firs. A splashing murmur told of the Albany River's haste to escape from the wilderness, and reach the Bay.
"I don't see what there was in a mere circular print on a rock- ledge to make our guides desert," said Professor Thorburn. His voice was as dry as his whole personality. "Most extraordi- nary." "They knew what it was, all right," answered Jandron, geol- ogist of the party. "So do I." He rubbed his cropped mustache. His eyes glinted grayly. I've seen prints like that before. That was on the Labrador. And I've seen things happen, where they were."
"Something surely happened to our guides, be- fore they'd got a mile into the bush," put in the Professor's wife; while Vivian, her sister, gazed into the fire that revealed her as a beauty, not to be spoiled even by a tam and a rough-knit sweater. "Men don't shoot wild- ly, and scream like that, un- less—" ‘They're all three dead now, anyhow," put in Jandron. "So they're out of harm's way. While we—well, we're two hundred and fifty wicked miles from the C. P. R. rails."
"Forget it, Jandy!" said Marr, the journalist. "We're just suf- fering from an attack of nerves, that's all. Give me a fill of 'baccy. Thanks. We'll all be bet- ter in the morning. Ho-hum! Now, speaking of spooks and such—"
He launched into an account of how he had once exposed a fraudulent spiritualist, thus proving—to his own satisfaction—that nothing existed beyond the scope of mankind's everyday life. But nobody gave him much heed. And silence fell upon the little night-encampment in the wilds; a silence that was ominous.
Pale, cold stars watched down from spaces infinitely far beyond man's trivial world.
Next day, stopping for chow on a ledge miles up- stream, Jandron discovered another of the prints. He cautiously summoned the other two men. They examined the print, while the women-folk were busy by the fire. A harmless thing the marking seemed; only a ring about four inches in diameter, a kind of cup-shaped depression with a raised center. A sort of glaze coated it, as if the granite had been fused by heat. Jandron knelt, a well-knit figure in bright macki- naw and canvas leggings, and with a shaking finger explored the smooth curve of the print in the rock. His brows contracted as he studied it.
"We'd better get along out of this as quick as we can," said he in an unnatural voice. "You've got your wife to protect, Thorburn, and I,—well, I've got Vivian. And—""You have?" nipped Marr. The light of an evil jealously gleamed in his heavy-lidded look. "What you need is an alienist."
"Really, Jandron," the Professor admonished, "you mustn't let your imagination run away with you." "I suppose it's imagination that keeps this print cold!" the geologist retorted. His breath made faint, swirling coils of vapor above it.
"Nothing but a pot-hole," judged Thorburn, bend- ing his spare, angular body to examine the print. The Professor's vitality all seemed centered in his big-bulged skull that sheltered a marvellous think- ing machine. Now he put his lean hand to the base of his brain, rubbing the back of his head as if it ached. Then, under what seemed some power- ful compulsion, he ran his bony finger around the print in the rock. "By Jove, but it is cold!" he admitted. "And looks as if it had been stamped right out of the stone. Extraordinary!"
"Dissolved out, you mean," corrected the geolo- gist. "By cold."
The journalist laughed mockingly.