Avon Fantasy Reader No. 14 — page 102: what you’re looking at

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

And when the country began to prow rougher, the grassy carpet sparser, and the rocks blacker and more cruelly sharp, he negotiated the difficult terrain with the supple, careless ease of a mountain goat, while my feeble old mule gasped and heaved and forced me to dismount and struggle along beside her over the crenellated rocks. Our progress, however, was steady, and I found times during the smoother stretches in which to ponder certain Strange pecultarities that I had noticed in the natives of this part of the state—and, more particularly, the peculiar ties that 1 had observed in the eldritch fantasm who was my guide. That he was a hybrid of some sort I had no doubt. Probably he was a Me- lungeon—one of those dark people who are descendants of early English settlers who took Indian wives. Still, [ had never before met one who displayed such a combination of physical degeneracy with wiry stamina. As I con- templated his skipping figure, his pale pink braids waving in the air, his ragged overalls constantly on the verge of slipping off, I couldn’t help but fancy that he wasn’t exactly human—that he was, really, a cloven-footed goblin, am emanation of evil possessed of the immortality and deathless strength of Satan. I smiled to myself. That was giving my fancy entirely too much leeway. For the world to me was a reasonable place—and belief in devils, evil spirits and such I took as a matter of course to be the products of sick minds and the spawn of ignorance. The cyclops had called the mountain we would have to cross the “Black Knicht"”—pronouncing it with the long unused Anglo-Saxon “ch” sound. Black Knicht! Why, the word “knight” hadn’t been Pronounced that way since the Fourteenth Century—a hundred years before America was officially discovered! I knew that the mountaineers inhabiting these peaks are, perhaps, the pur- est bred stock in all America—fair, blue-eyed folk, descended from the earliest English settlers, being born, marrying among themselves, and dying within the radius of a few miles, generation after generation. I have met many whe have never yet seen a railroad train, although I suspect aircraft Passing over- head have become a familiar sight by now. I have found many a treasure of furniture and brassware among their mean huts—articles inherited from father to son down through the centuries. Yet—Black Knicht! It worried me. Fourteenth Century stuff in Twentieth Century America! I concluded that the way he pronounced it must have been only a personal peculiarity, Our ascent had become many degrees steeper. Then, quite abruptly, as we came to a looming wall of rock barring our way, the cyclops vanished. I soon discovered that he had disappeared into a narrow cleft in the raw stone—a cleft that rapidly widened into wide, though unevenly graded, road. Over- head the sky gleamed like a crooked blue ribbon and thinned the shadows within the pass so that the figure of my guiding imp was a visible, though dim, silhouette. A cold, dank wind whispered about my ears and explored my summer clothes with chill fingers. I crouched close to my mule’s neck for warmth, 100 comicbooks.com