Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 — page 80: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“‘Unhurt?’? He puzzled over this for a moment. Then he said, ‘He put— us down, then.’ — “ “There was a girl with you,’ said Dr. Jamison. _ “ ‘She was dead,’ he answered in a tired voice. Then he turned his strange- ly burning eyes on me and asked, “You saw Him? You saw the thing that walked on the wind? .'. . Then He will return for you, for none can see Him and escape.’ | “We waited a few moments, thinking to give him time to become more fully conscious, but alas, he lapsed into a semi-conscious state. It was then that Dr. Jamison, after another examination, announced that the man was dying. This was naturally a great shock to me, and this shock was empha- sized when Dr. Jamison added that the man Macdonald would in all prob- ability die without ever gaining consciousness. The doctor could not guess at the cause of death, beyond referring vaguely to an assumption that perhaps these men had become so inured to cold that they could no longer stand warmth. “At first I could not guess the significance of this statement, but it came to me suddenly that Dr. Jamison was simply accepting the notion, which had occurred to all of us, that these two men had spent the year just passed above the earth, perhaps in a region so cold that warmth would now affect them in the same manner as extreme cold. “Despite Wentworth’s semi-conscious state, I questioned him, and, sur- prisingly enough, got a rather jumbled story, which I have pieced together as well as I could from the notes the nurse took and from my own memory. “Tt appears that these two men, Wentworth and Macdonald, had got into Stillwater quite late, owing to a sudden storm which had come up and put them off the trail for a short time. They were eyed with distinct disfavor at the tavern, but insisted on remaining for the night, which the tavern-keeper, Masitte, did not seem to like. But he gave them a room, requesting them to remain in it, and to keep away from the window. To this they agreed, despite the fact that they regarded the landlord’s proposal as somewhat out of the ordinary. : “They had hardly come into the room when the inn-keeper’s daughter, this girl, Irene, came in, and asked them to get her away from the town quickly. She had been chosen, she said, to be sacrificed to Ithaqua, the wind- walking elemental which the Stillwater people are said to have worshipped, and she had decided that she would flee, rather than die for a pagan god, of whose existence even she was not too sure. | “Yet, the girl’s fear must have been convincing enough to impress the two men into going away with her. The inhabitants had recently, it seems, been working against the thing they had worshipped, and its anger had been felt. Because that night was the night of sacrifice, strangers were frowned upon. According to suggestions Wentworth made, he discovered that the Stillwater people had great altars in the pine forests nearby, and that they worshipped the thing they called variously Death-Walker or Wind-Walker at these altars. (Though you can imagine my skeptical view of this entire matter, this does seem to tie up with the stories-of giant fires 78 Qa Comichbookszcom