"I don't tell my victims I'm not a fake. I say they can watch and judge for themselves. You don't believe in spirits, do you?"
"Never did. Until a little while ago, that is."
"What the devil do you mean by that crack, Virgil?"
"Oh, just some funny things that happened."
Barbara tactfully refrained from pressing for details.
"I never did either, but lately I've had a feeling I was being followed," she said. "And this morning I found this on my dresser." She held out a slip of paper on which was scrawled:
"Don't you worry none about Daniel Pringle that old sower-puss. We will help you against him—G."
"I got an idea who sent this, but it won't do no good to explain now," Hathaway mused. "Only I'd like to see you before your séance. G'by."
Three hours later, Hathaway gave up his search through the stacks of the Utica Public Library, having gone through every volume on anthropology, folklore, and allied subjects. He had learned that the stone throwers belonged to the genus of sprite known to the Iroquois as Dzhungeun. They all lived in the southwest part of the state and comprised the stone-throwing Gahunga, the fertility-producing Gendayah, and the hunting and burrowing Ohdowa. But, although it was intimated in several places that the Iroquois shamans had known how to control these spirits, nowhere did it tell how.
Hathaway thought a while. Then he left the library and walked along Genesee Street to a pay telephone. He grunted with pain when he learned the cost of a call to the vicinity of Buffalo, but it couldn't be helped. He resolved, if he ever caught up with Charlie Catfish, to take the money either out of the Seneca's pocket or out of his hide.
"Give me the Tonawanda Reservation," he said. When he got the reservation, he asked for Charlie Catfish. After a long wait, during which he had to feed the coin box, he was told that Catfish would not be back for weeks.
"Then give me Chief Cornplanter."
Another pause. Then: "He's gone to Buffalo for the day."
"Listen," said Hathaway. "Have you got any medicine men, hexers, spook mediums, or such people among you?"
"Who wants to know?"
"I be Virgil Hathaway, of the Penobscots, member of the Turtle clan and descendant of Dekanawida."
He explained his difficulties. The voice said to wait. Presently an aged voice, speaking badly broken English, came from the receiver.
"Wait, please," said Hathaway. "I got to get me a pencil. My Seneca ain't so hot ..."
When Hathaway was driving back to Gahato, he attempted to pass a truck on one of the narrow bridges over the Moose River at McClintock. The truck driver misjudged his clearance, and Hathaway's car stopped with a rending crunch, wedged between the truck and the bridge girders. When the garage people got the vehicles untangled and towed to the garage, Hathaway learned that he faced a four-hour, fifty-dollar repair job before he could start moving again, let alone have his fenders straightened. And the afternoon train north had just left McClintock.
That evening, Barbara Scott had collected the elite of Gahato for her séance: Doc Lenoir and his wife; Levi Macdonald, the bank cashier, and his better half; the Pringles, father and son; and a couple of other persons. Dan Pringle greeted Barbara with a polite but cynical smile. He was plump and wheezed and had seldom been worsted in a deal.
Barbara sat her guests in a circle in semidarkness to await the arrival of her "influences." When Harvey Pringle had fallen asleep, she got out her paraphernalia. She sat on a chair in the cabinet, a thing like a curtained telephone booth, and directed the men to tie her securely to the chair. Then she told them to drop the curtain and put out the lights. She warned them not to risk her health by turning on the lights without authorization. It was not an absolutely necessary warning, as she could control the lights herself by a switch inside the cabinet.
On the table between the cabinet and the sitters were a dinner bell, a trumpet, and a slate. The chair on which Barbara sat came apart easily. Concealed in the cabinet was a quantity of absorbent cotton for ectoplasm. There was also a long-handled grasping device, painted black. Her own contribution to the techniques of this venerable racket was a system of small lights which would warn her if any of the sitters left his chair.
Soon, Barbara gave the right kind of squirm, and the trick chair came apart. The loose bonds could now be removed. Barbara moaned to cover the sounds of her preparations and chanted a few lines from the Iliad in Greek. She intended to have Socrates as one of her controls this time.
She was still peeling rope when she was astonished to hear the dinner bell ring. It wasn't a little ting such as would be made by someone's accidentally touching it, but a belligerent clangor, such as would be made by a cook calling mile-away farm hands. The little signal lights showed all the sitters to be in their seats. The bell rang this way and that, and the trumpet began to toot.
Barbara Scott had been séanceing for several years and had come to look upon darkness as a friend, but now childish fears swarmed out of her. The cabinet began to rock. She screamed. The cabinet rocked more violently. The door of the false side flew open; the cotton and the grasper were snatched out. The curtain billowed. The table began to rock too. From the darkness came an angry roar as the grasper tweaked Doc Lenoir's nose.
From somewhere came the muffled beat of a drum and a long, ululating loon-cry:
"U-u-u-u-u-u-u-u!"
The cabinet tipped over against the table. Barbara fought herself out of the wreckage. She remembered that, her private light switch was in series with the room's main switch, so that the lights could not be turned on until the secret switch had been thrown. She felt for it, pushed it, and struggled out of the remains of the cabinet.
The terrified sitters were blinded by the lights and dumb at the spectacle of the medium swathed in loose coils of rope with her hand on the switch, her dress torn, and the beginnings of a black eye. Next they observed that the bell, slate, grasper, and other objects were swooping about the room under their own power.
When the lights came on, there was a yell and a command in an unknown language. The slate smashed down on Dan Pringle's head. While he stood blinking, glasses dangling from one ear and the frame of the slate around his neck, other articles went sailing at him. He stumbled over his overturned chair and bolted for the door. The articles followed.
When Pringle reached the street, pebbles began picking themselves up and throwing themselves after the mill owner. It took about three tries to get his range. Then a pebble no bigger than the end of one's thumb, travelling with air-rifle speed, hit the back of his thigh with a flat spat. Pringle yelled, staggered, and kept running. Another glanced off his scalp, drawing blood and making him see stars.
The inhabitants of Gahato were entertained by the unprecedented sight of their leading businessman panting down the main street and turning purple with effort. Every now and then there would be the sound of a pebble striking. Pringle would make a bucking jump and come down running harder than ever.
His eye caught a glimpse of Virgil Hathaway letting himself into his shop, and a faint memory of silly talk about the Indian's supernatural powers stirred his mind. He banked and galloped up the porch steps of Soaring Turtle's establishment just as Hathaway closed the screen door behind him. Pringle went through the door without bothering to reopen it.
"Jeepers Cripus!" exclaimed Hathaway mildly. "What be the matter, Dan?"