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left to rot on the hill. But Indians said them Conquistadores, ever full moon, gathered flesh and hair on their bones, and come into camp searching for food and fun killin’. It was said this thing that killed them had passed along a piece of himself to them, making them like him. Wolves that walked like men. Indians finally captured these six and even the original hairy one, who they claimed came from some hole in the ground, came up to plague man and spread evil. But they captured them somehow, and buried them deep and pinned them to the ground.”
    “Pinned them?” Jebidiah said.
    “Comin’ to that,” Dol said. “So me and my buddies, we thought it might be fun to dig up them old graves. We wasn’t worried about no curse, but we figured there might be something inside them graves worth somethin’, if it was no more than just a look. Armor, maybe. Swords. Might even have been something in there worth a few dollars. Truth is, we didn’t figure there really was no Conquistadores buried there. But, you get bottle smart when you’ve drunk enough, and we’d drunk enough, and we rode up there and found some old unmarked mounds at the top of the hill, trees and vines grown up on and around them. There was a big old stick, like a limb, stuck down in one of the mounds. It looked fresh, like it had just been put there.”
    “What kind of limb?” Jebidiah asked.
    “What?”
    “What sort of wood was it?”
    “Hell, I don’t know. I think it was hickory or something like that.”
    “Oak?”
    “Could have been,” Dol said. “I ain’t for certain, but I sure wish I could remember, and maybe figure on what kind of trees grew around there and the name of all the plants and birds and such. What is wrong with you fella? Who gives a shit?”
    “My guess is it was oak,” Jebidiah said. “Like the tip of Mary’s umbrella.”
    The ghost just looked at him.
    “Never mind,” Jebidiah said. “Go on with your story.”
    “Tim, he’d brought some shovels and he passed them out, and we started digging. I remember we come to this stick in the ground, a stick carved on with symbols and such, and I pulled it out and tossed it, and, well, drunk like we was, we didn’t last too long. But before we passed out, we did make some progress on one of them mounds, enough to open it. But I don’t remember much about that. Next thing I knowed, I was on my back looking up at the full moon shining down through the trees. I got up on one elbow, and that’s when I seen it. It was the grave we had dug into. There was a hairy arm pushing up out of the ground, and then this long snout sheddin’ dirt, and then this thing pulled its way out of the hole and wobbled up there on the edge of the grave. It was about seven feet tall. It was like a wolf, only it had a long snout and ten times the teeth. Them teeth hung out and twisted ever which way, and tall as it was, it was still bent some, and its paws was tipped out with long, shiny claws. But the eyes, that was the worst. They was as yellow as old custard, except when they rolled, ’cause then they showed a kind of bloody white around them.
    “I tried to get up. But I couldn’t move at first. Drunk and scared like I was, kind of going in and out of being awake. This thing bent over and started digging in the ground, and pretty soon it was tearing at the dirt and tossing it all over the place. It didn’t seem to take no time at all before it had dug into a hole and pulled out another stick like that one I pulled, and then up come another of them things, and he went on to do this time and again, and I tried to get up, tried to shake one of my buddies awake, but he wouldn’t budge. Got my gun out and shot at it, but it ignored me. It just went on getting them others out of the ground until there were six. Well, even drunk like I was, by this time I knew I wasn’t having no dream, and I was scared sober.
    “One of them things picked up one of my buddies by the ankle, held him up high and