CHAPTER XI


THE HOUSE OF THE RED DEATH

Half-way down the ridge a low word from Croisset stopped the engineer.
Jean had toggled his team with a stout length of babeesh on the mountain
top and he was looking back when Howland turned toward him. The sharp
edge of that part of the mountain from which they were descending stood
out in a clear-cut line against the sky, and on this edge the six dogs
of the team sat squat on their haunches, silent and motionless, like
strangely carved gargoyles placed there to guard the limitless plains
below. Howland took his pipe from his mouth as he watched the staring
interest of Croisset. From the man he looked up again at the dogs. There
was something in their sphynx-like attitude, in the moveless reaching of
their muzzles out into the wonderful starlit mystery of the still night
that filled him with an indefinable sense of awe. Then there came to his
ears the sound that had stopped Croisset--a low, moaning whine which
seemed to have neither beginning nor end, but which was borne in on his
senses as though it were a part of the soft movement of the air he
breathed--a note of infinite sadness which held him startled and without
movement, as it held Jean Croisset. And just as he thought that the
thing had died away, the wailing came again, rising higher and higher,
until at last there rose over him a single long howl that chilled the
blood to his very marrow. It was like the wolf-howl of that first night
he had looked on the wilderness, and yet unlike it; in the first it had
been the cry of the savage, of hunger, of the unending desolation of
life that had thrilled him. In this it was death. He stood shivering as