OLD NATHAN(65)

The night was gray rather than black, but trees were indistinct blurs from only a few feet away. Old Nathan moved away from the cabin so that the prowler would have no clue to the cunning man's whereabouts should terror cause him to shoot in desperation—

As Old Nathan intended that he should.

The gusting wind drowned any sounds the intruder might make in the creak of branches and moaning air. The heifers continued to complain but in lowered voices, and the mule chose to be silent for reasons of its own.

Old Nathan knelt, murmuring words under his breath. He picked up a pinch of snow between his left thumb and forefinger, spinning it into the air before it could melt. The tiny vortex grew into a loose, twisting funnel of snow. It glowed with the moonlight which would have fallen on it had the night not been overcast.

The ragged cone slid off among the trees. It moved in a pattern of arcs and reverse arcs, like a hound following a scent trail.

Grinning at the proof of his art, the cunning man sent two more snowy will-o'-the-wisps to follow the first. They were man height but as soundless as the transferred light that illuminated them.

Old Nathan squatted among the roots of a century-old oak whose shade had cleared a considerable circle in surrounding woods. Winter had stripped the undergrowth to blackened stems which would not interfere with the cunning man's shot when his prey came in view. . . .

The intruder's bawl of fear was as high-pitched as the scream of a rabbit with its hind legs snared. A gun banged an instant later, the sharp crash of a rifle rather than the snap of a pistol's smaller charge. Even so, the night muted the sound to merely another forest noise.

Wind-whipped snow crystals melted before they reached Old Nathan's flushing cheeks. Anger and the powers he had summoned warmed the cunning man's flesh, though he knew there would be a price to pay when the struggle was over. He trembled with anticipation.

There was a flicker through the treetrunks. A whorl of moonlit snow reappeared, drifting like a ghost toward its creator. Another funnel glimmered thirty feet to the side, while the third was still hidden deeper in the woods where it prevented the intruder from breaking back.

The will-o'-the-wisps were only patterns of snow and cold light, but the purposeful way they moved regardless of the wind gave them an ambiance still more chilling than the night. They drove their quarry like hounds after a raccoon; and, as with coon hounds, a human gunman waited to finish the job the pack began.

Twenty feet away the prowler crashed through the brittle undergrowth like a panicked doe. His breath wheezed in and out. Old Nathan could still not see him for the gloom.

The cunning man muttered a command. A will-o'-the-wisp drifted directly toward the intruder. The third twist of frozen moonlight was now visible through the trees beyond.

The prowler screamed again and swung his empty rifle like a club. The butt slashed through the snow funnel with no more effect than it would have had in a running stream. On the other side of the target, the rifle stock hit a pine and shattered.

The swirl of snow and moonlight quivered closer yet, illuminating its quarry.

Old Nathan sighted across the silver bead of his front sight.

He did not fire. The face of the prowler was that of Bully Ransden, but its bestial expression was not that of anything human.

Ransden hurled away the remains of his rifle. His eyes were too fear-glazed to take in his surroundings, neither the cunning man nor even the will-o'-the-wisps which had driven him to what a finger's pressure would have made his last instant of life. The barrel clanged on a tree.

The funnels of snow settled because the cunning man no longer had the will to maintain them. Bully Ransden blundered off in the darkness, bleating with fear every time he collided with a tree trunk.

Old Nathan shivered with cold and reaction. There was something badly wrong. The prowler wore the flesh of Bully Ransden, but Bully wasn't the man to skulk and flee. . . .

Old Nathan searched until he found the intruder's rifle. The barrel was kinked, and the stock had broken off at the small. Farther back along the prowler's trail in the fresh snow lay a saddle which the cunning man had hung out of the weather in his shed. The mule saddle was not quite valueless, but it would bring a thief little more than a couple drams of popskull from a crooked buyer.

Old Nathan stared at the saddle and the broken rifle. The yellow tomcat drew himself across the back of the cunning man's boots. "I'm not the one t' tell ye not t' play with things afore ye kill thim," the cat said. "But they hadn't ought t' git plumb clear. 'Specially—"

The cat twisted to look off in the direction Bully Ransden had fled. "—whin they're the size 'n meanness t' tear yer throat clean out the nixt time, old man."

"Whin I want yer advice," the cunning man growled, "I'll ask fer it."