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 upstream, 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 mackinaw 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, bending his spare, angular body to examine the print. The Professor's vitality all seemed centered in his big-bulged skull that sheltered a marvellous thinking 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 powerful 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 geologist. "By cold."
The journalist laughed mockingly.
"Wait till I write this up!" he sneered. "'Noted Geologist Declares Frigid Ghost Dissolves Granite!'"
Jandron ignored him. He fetched a little water from the river and poured it into the print.
"Ice!" ejaculated the Professor. "Solid ice!"
"Frozen in a second," added Jandron, while Marr frankly stared. "And it'll never melt, either. I tell you, I've seen some of these rings before; and every time, horrible things have happened. Incredible things! Something burned this ring out of the stone—burned it out with the cold interstellar space. Something that can import cold as a permanent quality of matter. Something that can kill matter, and totally remove it."
"Of course that's all sheer poppycock," the journalist tried to laugh, but his brain felt numb.
"This something, this Thing," continued Jandron, "is a Thing that can't be killed by bullets. It's what caught our guides on the barrens, as they ran away—poor fools!"
A shadow fell across the print in the rock. Mrs. Thorburn had come up, was standing there. She had overheard a little of what Jandron had been saying.
"Nonsense!" she tried to exclaim, but she was shivering so she could hardly speak.
That night, after a long afternoon of paddling and portaging—laboring against inhibitions like those in a nightmare—they camped on shelving rocks that slanted to the river.
"After all," said the Professor, when supper was done, "we mustn't get into a panic. I know extraordinary things are reported from the wilderness, and more than one man has come out, raving. But we, by Jove! with our superior brains—we aren't going to let Nature play us any tricks!"
"And of course," added his wife, her arm about Vivian, "everything in the universe is a natural force. There's really no super-natural, at all."
"Admitted," Jandron replied. "But how about things outside the universe?"
"And they call you a scientist?" gibed Marr; but the Professor leaned forward, his brows knit.
"Hm!" he grunted. A little silence fell.
"You don't mean, really," asked Vivian, "that you think there's life and intelligence—Outside?"
Jandron looked at the girl. Her beauty, haloed with ruddy gold from the firelight, was a pain to him as he answered:
"Yes, I do. And dangerous life, too. I know what I've seen, in the North Country. I know what I've seen!"
Silence again, save for the crepitation of the flames, the fall of an ember, the murmur of the current. Darkness narrowed the wilderness to just that circle of flickering light ringed by the forest and the river, brooded over by the pale stars.
"Of course you can't expect a scientific man to take you seriously," commented the Professor. "I know what I've seen! I tell you there's Something entirely outside man's knowledge."
"Poor fellow!" scoffed the journalist; but even as he spoke his hand pressed his forehead.
"There are Things at work," Jandron affirmed, with dogged persistence. He lighted his pipe with a blazing twig. Its flame revealed his face drawn, lined. "Things. Things that reckon with us no more than we do with ants. Less, perhaps."
The flame of the twig died. Night stood closer, watching.
"Suppose there are?" the girl asked. "What's that got to do with these prints in the rock?"
"They," answered Jandran, "are marks left by one of those Things. Footprints, maybe. That Thing is near us, here and now!"
Marr's laugh broke a long stillness.
"And you," he exclaimed, "with an A. M. and a B. S. to write after your name,"
"If you knew more," retorted Jandron, "you'd know a devilish sight less. It's only ignorance that's cock-sure."
"But," dogmatized the Professor, "no scientist of any standing has ever admitted any outside interference with this planet."
"No, and for thousands of years nobody ever admitted that the world was round, either. What I've seen, I know."
"Well, what have you seen?" asked Mrs. Thorburn, shivering.
"You'll excuse me, please, for not going into that just now."
