Manly Wade Wellman - John the Balladeer 05 by The Voice of the Mountain (v1.1) Page B

as if I’d shown my ignorance. “You know who Judas was,
John. Judas the betrayer, isn’t that how you think of him?”
                 “Yes,”
I said. “For thirty pieces of silver.”
                 “Judas
isn’t properly understood these days,” Harpe said. “There’s a story, a highly
intriguing one, to the effect that he wasn’t really a betrayer. He informed on
his master and took pay for it because he expected his master to do miracles,
come to the throne as king of the whole world.”
                 He’d
told all that without a-using the name of Judas’s master. I recollected what
he’d said about not a-speaking holy names.
                 “But
it didn’t happen thataway,” I pointed out.
                 “No,”
Harpe agreed me. “When Judas saw that he’d taken the wrong thing for granted,
that what his master chose was martyrdom, he gave back the thirty pieces of
silver and hanged himself. But not at once. First,
before putting the rope around his neck, he wrote his own Gospel—the Gospel
According to Judas. With all his concept of miraculous power
and world rule.”
                 “Well,”
I said, “I want to know.”
                 “If
I had the Gospel According to Judas, I’d know far more than I know by studying
Abramelin,” vowed Harpe. “Maybe that’s to come, now that I have you to help.
But meanwhile, you’ll be interested to hear from Tarrah.”
                 Tarrah
smiled us all round, and she kept her knee nudged on mine.
                 “All
right,” she started out, “I’ve been in this business all my life. My mother
took me to my first witch meeting in Ohio when I wasn’t much more than a baby girl. I
learned how to make rain fall, how to curse people blind and deaf, things like
that. I was doing all sorts of things—profitably—when I was just sixteen. I did
them so well that people got suspicious of me in the town where I lived. So I
thought I’d look for another field for my talents. I went to New Mexico , to a little town called Estevanico.”
                 “Estevanico,”
Harpe said the name. “Little Stephen. Someone of that name roamed over the
Southwest with Cabeza de Vaca. I wonder if your town was named for him.”
                 “I
wouldn’t know,” vowed Tarrah. “It was a town of Chica- nos— Latin-American
people—and they took to talk and my charms and I was living more or less
happily. I could make mothers have easy births, I told fortunes, I cured sick
goats— things like that. But there came a time when a nice-looking young fellow
said I’d put a spell on him to make him fall in love with me. And his father
and mother raised up a gang of neighbors, and they
were going to hang me.”
                 She
stopped long enough to smile all round again. Then: “They got a wagon and
pulled it under a tree and stood me on the wagon and put a rope around my neck
and threw the loose end over a branch. They were just about to drag the wagon
out from under me and let me hang. But right then, who came through the crowd
but Mr. Ruel Harpe.”
                 “I’d
had my eye on you, my dear,” he said, with his own smile. “I try to pay close
attention to people with special gifts. John, for example.”
                 “He
came through and jumped up on the wagon with me,” Tarrah went ahead with her
tale. “He asked them, in Spanish, to let him speak for five minutes. They let
him do that. He pleaded my case. He reminded them what would happen to them at
the hands of the law if they killed me. At the end of the five minutes, he took
that noose of rope off my neck and took my hand and helped me down off the
wagon. We walked off through the gang and nobody said a word or made a move to
stop us. All the time, he talked about Cry Mountain and 1 said Td like to be there. Then—he was
gone from beside