They thought that Brand wanted to be left to himself, and to give him
time to unhitch his horse they made a pretense of hanging about in the
doorway while Bosworth searched his pockets for a pipe he had no mind to
light.
But Brand turned back to them as they lingered. “You’ll meet me down by
Lamer’s pond tomorrow?” he suggested. “I want witnesses. Round about
sunset.”
They nodded their acquiescence, and he got into his sleigh, gave the
horse a cut across the flanks, and drove off under the snow-smothered
hemlocks. The other two men went to the shed.
“What do you make of this business, Deacon?” Bosworth asked, to break
the silence.
The Deacon shook his head. “The man’s a sick man—that’s sure.
Something’s sucking the life clean out of him.”
But already, in the biting outer air, Bosworth was getting himself under
better control. “Looks to me like a bad case of the ague, as you said.”
“Well—ague of the mind, then. It’s his brain that’s sick.”
Bosworth shrugged. “He ain’t the first in Hemlock County.”
“That’s so,” the Deacon agreed. “It’s a worm in the brain, solitude is.”
“Well, we’ll know this time tomorrow, maybe,” said Bosworth. He
scrambled into his sleigh, and was driving off in his turn when he heard
his companion calling after him. The Deacon explained that his horse had
cast a shoe; would Bosworth drive him down to the forge near North
Ashmore, if it wasn’t too much out of his way? He didn’t want the mare
slipping about on the freezing snow, and he could probably get the
blacksmith to drive him back and shoe her in Rutledge’s shed. Bosworth
made room for him under the bearskin, and the two men drove off, pursued
by a puzzled whinny from the Deacon’s old mare.
The road they took was not the one that Bosworth would have followed to
reach his own home. But he did not mind that. The shortest way to the
forge passed close by Lamer’s pond, and Bosworth, since he was in for
the business, was not sorry to look the ground over. They drove on in
silence.
The snow had ceased, and a green sunset was spreading upward into the
crystal sky. A stinging wind barbed with ice-flakes caught them in the
face on the open ridges, but when they dropped down into the hollow by
Lamer’s pond the air was as soundless and empty as an unswung bell. They
jogged along slowly, each thinking his own thoughts.
“That’s the house ... that tumble-down shack over there, I suppose?” the
Deacon said, as the road drew near the edge of the frozen pond.
“Yes: that’s the house. A queer hermit-fellow built it years ago, my
father used to tell me. Since then I don’t believe it’s ever been used
but by the gipsies.”
Bosworth had reined in his horse, and sat looking through pine-trunks
purpled by the sunset at the crumbling structure. Twilight already lay
under the trees, though day lingered in the open. Between two
sharply-patterned pine-boughs he saw the evening star, like a white boat
in a sea of green.
His gaze dropped from that fathomless sky and followed the blue-white
undulations of the snow. It gave him a curious agitated feeling to think
that here, in this icy solitude, in the tumble-down house he had so
often passed without heeding it, a dark mystery, too deep for thought,
was being enacted. Down that very slope, coming from the grave-yard at
Cold Corners, the being they called “Ora” must pass toward the pond. His
heart began to beat stiflingly. Suddenly he gave an exclamation: “Look!”
He had jumped out of the cutter and was stumbling up the bank toward the
slope of snow. On it, turned in the direction of the house by the pond,
he had detected a woman’s foot-prints; two; then three; then more. The
Deacon scrambled out after him, and they stood and stared.
“God—barefoot!” Hibben gasped. “Then it is ... the dead....”
Bosworth said nothing. But he knew that no live woman would travel with
naked feet across that freezing wilderness. Here, then, was the proof
the Deacon had asked for—they held it. What should they do with it?
“Supposing we was to drive up nearer—round the turn of the pond, till we
get close to the house,” the Deacon proposed in a colourless voice.
“Mebbe then....”
Postponement was a relief. They got into the sleigh and drove on. Two or
three hundred yards farther the road, a mere lane under steep bushy
banks, turned sharply to the right, following the bend of the pond. As
they rounded the turn they saw Brand’s cutter ahead of them. It was
empty, the horse tied to a tree-trunk. The two men looked at each other
again. This was not Brand’s nearest way home.
Evidently he had been actuated by the same impulse which had made them
rein in their horse by the pond-side, and then hasten on to the deserted
hovel. Had he too discovered those spectral foot-prints? Perhaps it was
for that very reason that he had left his cutter and vanished in the
direction of the house. Bosworth found himself shivering all over under
his bearskin. “I wish to God the dark wasn’t coming on,” he muttered. He
tethered his own horse near Brand’s, and without a word he and the
Deacon ploughed through the snow, in the track of Brand’s huge feet.
They had only a few yards to walk to overtake him. He did not hear them
following him, and when Bosworth spoke his name, and he stopped short
and turned, his heavy face was dim and confused, like a darker blot on
the dusk. He looked at them dully, but without surprise.
“I wanted to see the place,” he merely said.
The Deacon cleared his throat. “Just take a look ... yes.... We thought
so.... But I guess there won’t be anything to _see_....” He attempted a
chuckle.
The other did not seem to hear him, but laboured on ahead through the
pines. The three men came out together in the cleared space before the
house. As they emerged from beneath the trees they seemed to have left
night behind. The evening star shed a lustre on the speckless snow, and
Brand, in that lucid circle, stopped with a jerk, and pointed to the
same light foot-prints turned toward the house—the track of a woman in
the snow. He stood still, his face working. “Bare feet ...” he said.
The Deacon piped up in a quavering voice: “The feet of the dead.”
Brand remained motionless. “The feet of the dead,” he echoed.
Deacon Hibben laid a frightened hand on his arm. “Come away now, Brand;
for the love of God come away.”
The father hung there, gazing down at those light tracks on the
snow—light as fox or squirrel trails they seemed, on the white
immensity. Bosworth thought to himself: “The living couldn’t walk so
light—not even Ora Brand couldn’t have, when she lived....” The cold
seemed to have entered into his very marrow. His teeth were chattering.
Brand swung about on them abruptly. “_Now!_” he said, moving on as if to
an assault, his head bowed forward on his bull neck.
“Now—now? Not in there?” gasped the Deacon. “What’s the use? It was
tomorrow he said—.” He shook like a leaf.
“It’s now,” said Brand. He went up to the door of the crazy house,
pushed it inward, and meeting with an unexpected resistance, thrust his
heavy shoulder against the panel. The door collapsed like a
playing-card, and Brand stumbled after it into the darkness of the hut.
The others, after a moment’s hesitation, followed.
Bosworth was never quite sure in what order the events that succeeded
took place. Coming in out of the snow-dazzle, he seemed to be plunging
into total blackness. He groped his way across the threshold, caught a
sharp splinter of the fallen door in his palm, seemed to see something
white and wraithlike surge up out of the darkest corner of the hut, and
then heard a revolver shot at his elbow, and a cry—
Brand had turned back, and was staggering past him out into the
lingering daylight. The sunset, suddenly flushing through the trees,
crimsoned his face like blood. He held a revolver in his hand and looked
about him in his stupid way.
“They _do_ walk, then,” he said and began to laugh. He bent his head to
examine his weapon. “Better here than in the churchyard. They shan’t dig
her up _now_,” he shouted out. The two men caught him by the arms, and
Bosworth got the revolver away from him.