IV MARTIN’S HOLLOW

I have always been of the opinion that, as a good wine needs no bush, a good story needs no psychology to speak of. Yet before I tell mine, I think I had better describe myself briefly as I seem to myself to have been at the moment of my adventure.

I was that most jaded of all types, the professional scorner of fiction. I had my tongue in my cheek for almost everything that came off a printing-press. I was tired of red blood; I was even more tired of the blue blood that drips out of a fountain-pen. I was tired—oh, very tired—of “penny plain,” and almost more tired of “twopence colored.” I had hunted for a real, healthy thrill in the books spread out before me, until I believed there was no such thing. I was like the boy in the folk-tale who could not shiver. I had searched the newspapers for a sensation and found there nothing but musical comedy. Most mysteries turn into farce. Do you remember the Italian opera company that went broke in Samarkand? Or the true tale of Death Valley Scotty? Or the gentleman who discreetly offered a fine Tudor house rent-free for a year to any one intending murder? The prima donna was entertained by the Russian governor-general; Death Valley Scotty (I believe) went into vaudeville; and the gentleman with the Tudor mansion was the mildest of men: a thwarted romantic who wanted an authentic ghost on the premises, and had to be content with an expensive mechanical device that frightened his friends but never, alas! deluded him. Even life seemed to have declined in quality from Gilbert and Sullivan to comic movies.

All this, not so very long ago, suddenly became acute, and I planned an escape. I decided to leave town, and go for a solitary walking-tour in and about and over a certain range of mountains. I knew some of the more important points in the region, but I had never explored the remoter valleys, though I was aware that they were lonely and lovely and sparsely inhabited. Be it understood that I did not go in search of mystery: I went to get back my appetite for plainer food and simpler sensations; to savor to the core the blessed impossibility of reading over-night, and reviewing the next day, ten volumes of the latest trash. I went to get back my tone; to recapture a normal attitude. The return to Nature, if taken seriously, is apt to have bad effects; but I was in no danger of growing mawkish over a woodchuck, or addressing the garter-snake as “brother.” I was willing to pay for hillwinds as I would have paid for a good brand of Burgundy; and to have the sunset thrown in like the smile of the perfect waiter. These things had a value and a charm, a positive virtue of their own. I could not get them in town; so Mohammed went to the mountains, though in no transcendental frame of mind. He took with him survey maps, a rubber cape, a flask, plenty of tobacco, and some of the other things that Baedeker recommends to the pedestrian.

I shall not chart my course for you; I shall not name my mountains or my valleys. I shall make no sociological estimates of the people I met; I shall not account for them in any recognizable way, by descent or occupation, politics or dialect. Let me content myself with describing accurately. Too many people know the trains I took, the towns through which I passed, and the names of the heights I crossed. I have, above all, no wish to fling discredit on that loveliest and loneliest of remote valleys which I shall call Martin’s Hollow. Perhaps I am more sensitive than I need be, because in my early youth I spent many summers in and about these mountains, and have, myself, a vicarious patriotism for the locality. Good men, honest citizens and prosperous, have come out of the district school in Martin’s Hollow—but few of them live in Martin’s Hollow now.

I had been tramping a week or more when the rain came on. Usually I had managed to spend the night in some village hotel or other, but this once I had had to make shift with an atrocious boarding-house half-way up a lovely wooded slope. It was filled with women in cheap frills, who walked on the narrow porches with their arms round each other’s waists, and danced awkwardly together, after the dining-room was cleared, to the nasal tones of a cheap victrola. Some of the older ones played halma in the corners. After a talk with the melancholy proprietor, the next morning, I decided to spend that night on the mountain that lifted itself above the boarding-house. I was to climb it that day, and by the next night I could probably get to one of the bigger hotels in the second valley beyond.

I started out early, and presently struck a trail of which the boarding-house-keeper had told me. It was not on my map. All went well until I reached the summit—or what I took to be the summit. The mountain was wooded to the top, and there was no clearing from which one could get a view. I had a glimpse of the sky, however, from a desolate spot which had, at some time, been cut over; and the sky looked ominous. I decided to make for lower ground and the possibility of a barn-roof, if nothing else, over my head. I always leave behind something of importance, and this time I had forgotten my compass. I had no means of knowing surely into which valley I was going to drop; but I took a trail that came to hand. It looked like an old one; which augured well, I thought, for habitations below me. The rain came on; and I dripped my way along between the dripping trees, at a tremendous downward slant. A little past sunset-time the rain let up, and I stopped on a rock by a spring to eat and drink and look at my map. It marked the trail I had taken; and I gathered from the somewhat unfeatured section of the map that I should presently strike the Martin’s Hollow brook, which, carefully followed, would lead me into Martin’s Hollow.

I have, since then, heard about Martin’s Hollow. It is one of the “shiftless” valleys; a place where the farms have a curse on them and every other family will probably count its degenerates. There are plenty such among our older mountain communities, as every one knows. They get a bad name, and the best element goes away to other countrysides. The feeble and the mad and the shiftless and the hard drinkers are apt to stay; and when they too are withdrawn, their houses fall to ruin, until in after years you trace human histories by old cellar foundations. None of this was in my mind when I took the trail from somewhere near the top of Silvernail Mountain. Martin’s Hollow was a mere name on a map to me; a place where I hoped to find shelter of some sort from the gregarious showers that were chasing each other about the hills.

It must have been eight o’clock when I got below the timber-line on the southern spur of Silvernail. Darkness was thickening, and I could see little except a few separated lights below and beyond me to the southward. The valley is very narrow and very steep; at the bottom, in the middle, there is room only for the brook and a little bordering meadowland. The noose-like road runs higher up, on the hillsides, and along it the farms are scattered. I say noose-like; and yet the loop is incomplete, for the curved head of the hollow is all woods and wilderness, and there is no road across. If you wish to make the tour of the little valley, you can only go up one side, make your way back nearly to the mouth, where the single cross-road lies, and take the other side. The valley opens out at the mouth ever so slightly, so that from the head, on a fine day, you would get a magnificent mountain glimpse.

Here, then, at the head of Martin’s Hollow, I found myself, in the twilight. I knew from the mere look of the place in the dimness that the farms were not good. There was no big bulk of barns, and the hillsides had the rough outline of rocky pasture. Here and there, before me, I could see the glimmer of an irregular and desultory patch of buckwheat. I cursed the weather and my compassless condition, which had combined to pitch me into this stupid gorge. I also cursed a blister on my heel, which had joined itself to the catastrophes of the afternoon. The proprietor of the boarding-house had not mentioned Martin’s Hollow by name. “Better go through the next valley and over to Woodelton,” he had advised. “Or, better still, keep along the lower ridge of Silvernail and Kettletop, and drop right into Woodelton itself.” I had not inquired further, for I had intended fully to sleep on Silvernail and walk for miles through the woods along the irregular ridge, until I found the Woodelton trail. But here I was in Martin’s Hollow; and if the people were an unprosperous lot, I could the more easily induce them to let me sleep in a haymow. The houses would be impossible—of that I was sure. I had seen shiftless valleys before.

And now I come to my adventure: which is nothing more, really, than my single fluttering contact with the devil. If I cannot explain how the walk down the valley, with its casual encounters, was like a sudden hypochondria progressing by leaps and bounds, I cannot make you feel why even the climax seemed to have the terror of inexorable logic, as well as its own unpleasantness, to inflict. I know how Dante felt—except that I had no Virgil by my side.

The first farmstead I came upon was a small, ramshackle, malodorous place. There was a light somewhere within at the back, which illuminated a filthy bit of barnyard. Some tuneless drunken singing of Moody and Sankey hymns was going on inside. I decided to knock and ask for information. There are worse people in the world than men who sing hymns in their cups. The knock called forth the hoarse barking of a dog, but the singing stopped. A youth opened the door. He was surly, but sober. He did not think there was any place in the Hollow where I could sleep, but perhaps Foster’s might take me in. They were over on the other side, beyond the cross-road. But I had better go six miles on to the village. He slammed the door to; the barking subsided, and another hymn began, more tuneless than ever. I went out into the road, slightly depressed. The clouds were ominous; I could hear the soft mutter of distant thunder, and there were already a few practice flashes of lightning. As I got into the road, an upper window was flung up, and I heard the wail of a baby. I turned, but could see nothing. A cracked voice issued from the window, however, bidding me “go away, go away.” I went, with what dignity I could muster—tired of the rücksack on my back, tired of my own spleen and depression, wearying unspeakably for the fly-blown boarding-house of the night before.

I had gone a third of a mile, still on the same side of the Hollow, before I came to another habitation. The darkness had grown thicker: it was virtually night. There was no rain yet, but the wind was tearing over the top of Silvernail, behind me, and the mutter of the thunder had deepened into long, weary, reverberating rolls. Each casual lightning-flash showed me the pinkish road winding on ahead of me. This house was larger than the other, but there was no light in it. I knew all about country hours, and hesitated to rouse folk from their beds; but I should have the rain pelting on my shoulders in five minutes, and I was desperate. There was a bigger barn, and I had hopes of bribing them to drive me to the village. So I knocked. There was dead silence for two minutes. People sleeping so soundly as that would not want to drive any one anywhere, even if they waked to hear my request. I turned to go away again, thoroughly disgusted, for there was no doubt that this wind carried rain with it. Just as I turned, a sudden creak broke through the perfect silence—the door was flung open. I started: for there had not been the faintest sound of footsteps. You would have thought that the person who opened had been sleeping against the door, like an animal. I grasped my stick firmly in my hand and lifted my cap. A lightning-flash came to help me out—the tenant of the house had no light—and I saw a bent and toothless old man staring at me. I put my question, but got no answer. He did not even shake his head. He simply looked me over with an incompetent and hostile eagerness. His eyes rested on my stick, and peered over my shoulder at my rücksack. He was, clearly, very much interested in me, but he did not speak. I pulled the matches out of my pocket, struck one, and gave him stare for stare. He did not seem insulted by my inspection; only craned his neck a little more, as if to see the rücksack better. Apparently his examination was reassuring; but he still made no sound. I tried sign language, thinking he might be dumb; I pointed in various directions queryingly. He made no gesture of reply; simply continued to look me over, with a slow, snakelike motion of the head. Apparently he was satisfied by the time I grew utterly disgusted, for as I turned my back on him he shut the door. I was, for some indefinite reason, on my guard; and I stopped and listened after the door was shut. I heard no voices, but I thought I caught a faint, senile cackle. If there had been whispering, I could not have heard it, for, though it was a warm night, the windows were all shut. I stumbled over a rusted woodchuck trap, and found myself in the road again.

Then the rain came on in earnest—great sheets of it torn from the skies and flung broadcast through the valley. I was tempted to climb through a pasture to the shelter of trees, but the thunder and lightning had now reached the Hollow, peal simultaneous with flash, and I pushed on, with my rubber cape over my shoulders. The violence of the shower took half an hour to spend itself, and in that half-hour—though, to be sure, I walked very slowly, impeded at every step by the gurgling mud of the road—I passed no inhabited dwelling. One ruined house I saw, and I thought of climbing in through one of the paneless windows and taking such shelter as I could; but some fastidiousness of the imagination restrained me. In that hour, I dare say, the trash I spent my life in scorning told upon me. I preferred encountering any of the detrimentals of Martin’s Hollow to spending the night in a hole those detrimentals had forsaken. I do not think, at the moment, I would have accepted the shelter of the noblest castle if I had had to sleep in the haunted room. I leaned against the house wall for a few moments—porch or other outside shelter there was none—but went on.

The thunder and lightning had pretty well stopped by the time I reached the cross-road. The rain still fell and the wind churned up and down the gorge, so that I had reason to expect another shower would presently cross the ridge of Silvernail. I quickened my pace as well as I could for the mud, for I saw lights ahead on the other side of the valley. The six miles to the village—five, by this time—were not to be thought of. At that house I would stop, until the rain was over, at least, come what might.

It was about nine o’clock, I fancy, when I reached the house with the lights—just beyond the cross-road, a little way up the valley on the other side. I lit a match on the door-step before I knocked. It was an ancient stone house, low and small, but at least not ruinous. One of the lights I had seen must have been a lantern carried between house and barn, for at present only one window was illuminated. My knock was answered at last by the sliding of a bolt, and an uncouth young fellow stood in the door before me. He was heavily built and strong, but looked stupid. Behind him two fraternal faces appeared. One of the youths behind carried a gun.

“He ain’t here.” The man spoke briefly.

I protested. “I don’t know whom you mean. I don’t belong in this place. I’ve been on a walking-trip, and have got caught in the rain and want some place to spend the night. If you know of a haymow anywhere in this valley—” I stopped. By this time I did not in the least wish to spend the night in his haymow.

The three men had closed in round the door. There was no consulting among them, but presently the second one—the one with the gun—spoke in exactly the tone of his brother.

“We ain’t got no haymow. We gin up keepin’ cattle. You better go on to Foster’s. They got thirty cows.”

“Where is Foster’s? And how far is it?”

The third one spoke. “It’s on a piece, up the road. A white house with two red barns. Them’s the only painted barns in the Hollow. You better hustle. It’s gittin’ late.”

“Could you give me a glass of water?”

The first one answered. “We ain’t got no glass.” The door was shut in my face.

I stepped down the bank into the road again and turned—but not in the direction of “Foster’s.” It was foolish of me, I dare say, but my chief desire was to get nearer the entrance to the Hollow, nearer the village, nearer the world. “Foster’s” was the only suggestion of hospitality, apparently, that the inhabitants of Martin’s Hollow could make. But “Foster’s” was up the valley, nearer that unfinished loop where the woods came down. I wanted every step I took to lead me out of the Hollow, not deeper in. And “Foster’s” was problematical, in any case. The painted barns sounded promising, as if they held whatever prosperity the valley had to offer; yet the recurring suggestion might as easily be sinister as helpful. At all events, I would not go up the gorge instead of down. I was alone, by night, between two storms, in a valley where I trusted no one. I would go down the road. There would be comfort in seeing it—or, rather, feeling it—gradually widen to the outer world. So I plodded on, away from the stone house, away from “Foster’s.”

The thing was becoming dreamlike: my clogged steps taking me, with decreasing speed, nowhere; and each human encounter more sinister than the last. The wind rose and fell, the trees swayed, and now and then dark forms wavered in a hillside pasture. The atmosphere, too, was not without that electrical suspense which is the very breath of thunderous weather. The Hollow seemed to be keyed up, waiting for something. The drunken singing, the foolish ancient’s curiosity, the malicious cackle behind the closed door, the surly speech of the armed brothers, the way in which I was flung to “Foster’s” at every turn—all made me feel an imperilled outsider in some crazy tragedy. The very winds seemed to be in the business: every one in that abominable valley was in it except me. Whatever it was—if it was only a human mood—I did not wish to be in it. I only desired, with a direct childlike passion, a roof over my head, a chance to change into dry socks and shoes, and a stiff drink of Scotch out of my flask against the chill. The very road seemed to catch at my feet as I walked; the unbroken darkness ahead of me defied my efforts to emerge from the detestable gorge, or to make connections with anything, any one, of my own kind. I had lost all sense of time: I no longer took out my watch, even for irony’s sake. I walked on and on, wet, tired, footsore, fatalistically oppressed, dreading every rod of the valley road that stretched on before me in the illimitable dark of a nightmare. Only dawn could rescue me, I suspected; and dawn was far away. But rest I would find; and shelter, even though I could not sleep and a chill was unescapable. I would not, I felt with blind wrath, be beaten by a few fools in a God-forsaken valley not ten miles from a railway.

Finally, I came to another house, set far back from the road. The shutters were closed, but between the slats I could see scattered lights within. No flame could live in that wind, so this time I groped to the bottom of my rücksack and found my little electric flashlight. This enabled me to get a good look at the place before I undertook the flagged path. The house was large and ill-kept, but I could see by the proportions and the general hint of detail that it had once had dignity. Though it was in sad need of paint and, I suspected from my brief survey, of repairs, it looked water-tight—which was all I cared for. The same could hardly be said of the barns. Great gaps between the boards, and a crazy inclination of the walls, showed that they had long been unused to shelter anything. The roof of that house should cover my head until morning, or I would know why. The perfectly responsible pedestrian is by no means unknown in these hills, and I flattered myself that, if I was disreputable, it was at all events not after the fashion of a tramp. I knocked authoritatively on the front door with my stick—making it rattle, and flaking off, I regret to say, a little more of its scanty paint.

I saw a light passing from room to room within the house, then saw it extinguished. Presently I heard footsteps. The door was neither locked nor bolted, evidently, for it opened easily.

The figure that stood before me on the threshold struck me dumb. I could not get out my prepared speech, with its cunning combination of pathos, simplicity, and graceful firmness. The room behind the woman was lighted faintly by four candles set in a row on a central table. They did not flicker in the draught from the open door. I dare say there was no draught; that the wind was, at the moment, hurrying round the other corners of the house, and that the exceeding stillness of the flames in all that hurly-burly was natural enough. But, at the instant, it did not seem natural; and I wondered, somewhere at the back of my brain, “Why four? Why four?”

The woman who surveyed me in silence was enough, as I think any one would have admitted, to put a curse on the candles for any traveller to whom she stood suddenly revealed. She was well above middle height, but her shoulders were fearfully bowed; and her thick white hair, cropped short, stood out like a wild mane. The candles were behind her, so that I could not see her eyes, but I could make out the thinness of the face, and the nose and the chin that approached each other over the toothless mouth. I knew at once that all the stage crones I had ever seen were mere mockeries of make-up. Still I was absolutely silent, and still she did not ask me my business. Over her misshapen shoulder, behind the table, I saw four chairs precisely placed, and, behind those, four-ill-assorted mirrors hung askew on the wall from which the paper was peeling. And still we stared at each other with no word.

Finally she stood aside, obviously meaning for me to come in.

Then I stammered out the ruins of my speech—hypnotized, simply, by the situation; for as soon as I saw her and the room in which she stood, my intention to stop there had slipped quite away. She paid no attention to my words, but put her hand on my arm and drew me inside the door. I hardly realized what I was doing. Not a muscle opposed her touch. Only when I found myself standing in the room itself, I wondered why I had gone in. I put my hand on the knob, intending to pass back at once across the threshold, but she shook her head. I waited, simulating patience, to see what she would do, for one look at her eyes and one quick comprehensive glance about the room had explained everything. There were four spoons on the table and four shovels carefully stacked in the corner against one of the doors. Otherwise—except for a heap of red woollen cloth, evidently an old curtain, on the floor beside me—the room was empty. The careful art of madness had arranged the room, and the hand that had done it was the hand that, a moment since, had been laid on my arm. The eyes and the room together told me everything.

Then she spoke. “Have you seen them?”

I shook my head. “I haven’t seen any one.” And I started to go out, but she twisted herself behind me and shut the door.

She seemed disappointed. “You haven’t seen her, have you?” The dreadful brown eyes came an inch nearer my face.

“No—no one.”

She nodded satisfied. “He isn’t here.”

“No, I am sure he isn’t. There isn’t any one here except you, is there?” I spoke conversationally, edging my way to the door, pushing her slightly before me. My hand was on the knob again.

“Oh, yes, the house is full. But he isn’t here. I wouldn’t let him in. You know I wouldn’t.”

Her voice was very deep, and her speech, though ordinary enough, was not the slipshod idiom of the other inhabitants of the Hollow whom I had encountered.

I opened the door an inch or two—open it farther I could not, she was so close to it. A big moth flew into one of the nearly burned-out candles, sizzling loudly. She started towards it, and I opened the door wider. I did not wish to make any sudden dash, for somewhere back in my head was book-wisdom to the effect that one must be intensely quiet with the insane. She pulled the moth out with her long fingers and came back. Her movements were exceedingly quick, but before she reached me I had time to open the door wide, and to pick up the red curtain and drop it on the floor again between her and me. It parted and fell in four pieces. She did not tread on it; she got down on her knees to push it aside. But by that time I was on the flagging in front of the house.

“Good-night,” I said, as I turned—still forcing myself to move slowly.

“He isn’t here. Come in, come in.” The wind blew the white mop of hair wildly as she craned her neck out into the darkness.

“I know he isn’t. But I have to go, you see.” I was half-way down the path, walking very slowly, though every muscle cried haste, and I was dripping with sweat.

“You’re going to find him,” the voice boomed after me. But, thank heaven, she did not stir.

“Not I.” I was still walking on, but looking back at her over my shoulder as I went. A coquettish, prancing effect it must have given me! At the gate I turned squarely and looked up at the house. One of the candles guttered out, and she must have heard the faint sputter of it, for she turned from the wind and the night and rushed back into the room, slamming the door. Mingled with the crash of the closing door I heard an angry scream—not like other screams. The singular volume of her voice, quite uncontrolled by mind or sense, lent it a quality that I can never describe. Evidently her mad logic saw in the four candle-flames some desperate symbol. I stepped down into the road, and almost immediately I heard a clatter of breaking glass, as if she had mistaken a window for the door. I did not wait to hear more, but broke across the road into the orchard opposite, where I could neither be seen nor divined. Behind a twisted apple-tree, long past bearing, I listened; but at the end of five minutes all was still silent, except for the steady choral chanting of the wind.

I reconnoitred carefully with my flashlight, taking good care to interpose my body constantly between the little spot of illumination and the road. I had no desire to make any further attempt at demanding shelter, though my watch, which I drew out gingerly, showed me it was scarcely past ten o’clock. I asked only to live out the hours between then and daylight with no human interruption. My cautious search revealed to me a little cave ahead of me in the hillside—the entrance shored up with stones, after the troglodyte fashion of the countryside. Very slowly I made my way to it. A vegetable-cellar was not the retreat I should have chosen, but the broken and gaping door suggested that it was no longer used—that at least it was not likely to be occupied. It was a loathsome hole, I found, when I got in. My battery ran down at that moment, and I was reduced to striking more matches. Their little flicker made almost no impression on the stenchy blackness of the place, but by dint of feeling the entire circumference of the walls with a firm hand, I assured myself of its proportions and its emptiness. A rough trough was half-filled with rotten sacking, and across the hard earth floor something brilliant and green writhed in a hundred convolutions. I started—it was so rankly serpentine in that wavering match-flare—but it was only a potato-vine grossly intent on surviving. My chief comfort in being reduced to this shelter was that it had obviously long been out of use. “If she wants potatoes in the middle of the night, she won’t come here for them,” I found myself gravely whispering. I pulled to the rotten door—there was, of course, no inside fastening, and I could only wedge it with sacking in a makeshift fashion, against the wind. The gaps in the boards were many, however, and I withdrew into a corner of the cellar to light my pipe, calculating angles of vision as best I could. I did not care to have the tiniest spot of light visible from the road.

With a great deal of meticulous labor I got out socks and shoes and flask from my rücksack. It really took two hands on that windy night to keep a match going. Finally I managed it, and sitting in the dark on the edge of the trough, I changed into dry footgear and took the most solitary drink I have ever had. There was no hope of a restful position, but by sitting cross-legged in the trough I could lean against the cold stones of the wall behind. I hoped that somnolence would come, if not sleep.

In a measure, I suppose, it did; for though I heard—hours later, as it seemed—the baying of hounds, the sound had some fantastic context that must have belonged in part to a dream. A pistol-shot followed the dogs’ baying, but it, too, wove itself into some vision that I was sufficiently awake to know was partly sleep-induced. The rest of the night was silent except for the sudden gusts of wind and the patter of milder rains. Now and then I relieved my cramped discomfort by pacing the narrow floor of the cellar, but, luckily for me, I was too tired to keep, through the endless hours, unbrokenly alert. My nervousness dropped: I did not feel alarmed. I was in a kind of trance, and my only hold on waking sanity was to say to myself occasionally in a whisper: “Morning will come.” I was to that extent safe on the outer edge of nightmare, and I spurred myself with the assurance now and then, to keep myself on that outer edge. But Martin’s Hollow was very nearly impregnable to common sense.

Dawn finally came. I have had, ever since that night, an absurd consideration for the solar system. Quite honestly, it seemed to me in the hour before sunrise as if nothing less fundamental and august than the central mechanism of the spheres could release me. If anything in magic or human science could have perpetuated that night, I should have felt sure that dawn would never break. If I had not known beyond a doubt that Martin’s Hollow was ultimately subject to the laws of the planet, I should have imagined suns rising over other valleys of earth and leaving this free in its own Stygian aberration. But against that doubt the muscles of my mind contrived to array themselves. Otherwise I should probably long since have qualified myself for residence in Martin’s Hollow.

When the light came, in a blessed irresistible flow, I shook myself together and prepared to start on my way. I was cold to the marrow, and stiff in every joint. Somewhere inside me an insistent little pain protested that I needed food. I was hungry, in no ravenous way, but with a factitious exhaustion, as if I had been fasting for forty hours. And, reassured though I was by the first streaks of light on the orchard outside, I was loath to break my flimsy barricade. I had no wish to look at the house across the road, though it was morning of a perfect summer day. But the desire to have done with Martin’s Hollow overbore all else, and about five o’clock I stepped into the worn-out orchard (not without bravado) like a free man. I kept to the fields for a time, for even in the light I did not care to be hailed from the house opposite. I was not more than three-quarters of a mile above the entrance—or the outlet, rather, as my mood put it—of the Hollow, and I made my way at a good pace to the main road. I passed a few houses, but did not stop. Even if I should have luck, I preferred to eat elsewhere.

In half an hour I was clear of the gorge and on a road that, as my map showed, would take me to Hebron—the “village” of my over-night colloquies. I had turned for one view of the Hollow as I stepped into the main road, and was constrained to admit that it was very lovely. Far up the right-hand side I saw some red barns—undoubtedly “Foster’s.”

Presently a buckboard overtook me. The driver half pulled up as he passed and nodded mechanically. He was a cheerful, shrewd-looking farmer, and I decided to ask him for a lift. The man stopped and looked me over.

“Get in,” he said abruptly.

I thanked him politely, and described my general situation. Instinct warned me not, at the moment, to mention how I had spent the night. Some careful references to the countryside at large, the mention of a certain judge I knew in a small town down the railway, and probably my obvious cockneyism, seemed to reassure him. He broke through one or two of the outer walls of his reserve.

“Got caught in the rain on Silvernail, did you? Well, them showers will come up, this time o’ year. Seems as if we’d had more’n our fair share this season, though. Been awful bad for the hayin’.”

I made a few remarks well calculated to show that I was familiar with the problems of the farmer. I also put a few questions as to crops. My English was as careful as I could make it. A few more outlying bastions crumbled silently. Finally he turned to me.

“Pretty early start I got this mornin’.”

“It is early for any one who didn’t get caught on Silvernail in a shower.”

“Yes—had to take the constable over to Curtis. He come to my place about half-past three. ‘Go ’way, John,’ says I, ‘chickens ain’t up yet.’ ‘You harness up your team an’ take me over to Curtis,’ says he. ‘County business.’ An’ county business it was, but I ain’t had my breakfast yet, ’count of his county business.” He laughed. “They had the hounds out all night, but the rain come an’ spoiled the scent, an’ he went over to Curtis to get the sheriff an’ a posse, an’ they’ll be back some time along. I won’t be drivin’ ’em, though. I’m goin’ to have my breakfast.”

At this moment I happened to remember a college acquaintance of mine who had been born most respectably in Hebron. The man slewed his horses skilfully round a bad break in the road and settled down to comfortable narrative.

“I knew there was trouble up in Martin’s Hollow weeks ago, but I didn’t know when I went to bed last night as how it had broke out again. One of the Teeder boys shot up his cousin yesterday, an’ made for the woods. His three brothers helpin’ him, of course.”

“What was the trouble?” I asked.

“Oh, the trouble goes back a piece, I guess. You can’t keep track o’ things over in Martin’s Hollow. We don’t see them over our side much, except the Fosters. They’ve got a fine farm up there, but they’re down sick with typhoid now. They’re about the only folks in the Hollow that amounts to anything. It’s kind o’ gone to seed. If Jim Foster didn’t have a hankerin’ after his father’s old place, he’d move away, too. Guess he’d sell, but people ain’t buyin’ much in Martin’s Hollow. It’s too discouragin’. Used to be some good places up there, too.”

We went over a dangerous grade crossing with due solemnity.

“I never want to see the place again,” I ventured. And I told him of my vain hunt for a lodging, without going into details. I was sure that the brothers in the old stone house were Teeders, and I had no desire to be detained as a witness in a clumsy country trial.

“Sho!” He laughed. “Excuse me, but the idea of your goin’ round from one of those houses to the other for a Christian lodgin’ is a little too much. How come you didn’t go to Foster’s? ’Twouldn’t have done any good, for they’re down sick, but you could have slept in the barn, maybe. The hired man’s all right. ’Less they took you for Sam Teeder in the dark!” He chuckled over his mild joke. “It was a bad night to be in Martin’s Hollow. Constable had the dogs all over the place. Between you an’ me, I don’t think they’ll find Sam. He might be in most any house over there.”

“Are they all such desperate characters?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say desperate. Most of ’em ain’t up to that.” He laughed again. “But they’re all connected up over there—Teeders an’ Rowells an’ Skeeles—an’ I guess they’ve got sense enough to stick by each other. The man that was shot was a Skeele, but he an’ his family quarrelled, an’ I guess the whole crowd would stick by Sam Teeder. Andy Skeele didn’t have anybody much left but his old father, an’ he’s half cracked.”

“Is there also an old woman in the Hollow who’s more than half cracked?”

“Old Mrs. Rowell, the Teeder boys’ aunt? She’s crazy as a loon. You didn’t go there?”

“I did.” Again I gave no details.

The man slapped his thigh. “Well, of all the—Guess you didn’t want to stop after you seen her, did you? I drove a patent-medicine fellow over to Martin’s Hollow last spring. Hebron’s dry as a bone, an’ all those folks can get is some kind of tonic with a big per cent of alcohol in it. Well, he wanted to stop there—the house is kind of imposin’, you know—an’ I thought I’d let him. I don’t care about agents much. I stayed with the horses. Old Mrs. Rowell come to the door, an’ he lit out with one whoop. I had to laugh. I don’t know what she said to him, but he wouldn’t go anywheres else except Foster’s, an’ of course they didn’t want his stuff. Excuse me, but you certainly did get the worst of the bunch. My father’s told me she used to be a real pretty woman, too, before anythin’ happened to her. There was plenty of good stock up in Martin’s Hollow once, but—well, you know how ’tis.” He looked a little shamefaced and lowered his voice. “Fact is, they’ve intermarried and intermarried over there, till you don’t know what relation any of them is to each other. Guess they don’t know themselves. Now and then they have a row. Them Teeder boys won’t last long. They ain’t worth the stones in their own pasture.”

“What was the Teeder-Skeele quarrel about?”

“Oh, it began with a girl. She died last winter, but there’s been bad blood ever since.”

“Was she from Martin’s Hollow?”

He did not answer my question directly. “Her name was Rowell.”

Though I had known Pete Manning at college, I was still an outsider, and Martin’s Hollow was in the township. I quite understood the psychology of it, and did not press him further. We drove into the peaceful village of Hebron, and I went to the hotel for breakfast.

I did not go on with my walking-trip. I was afraid that my tone was past recovering. I took the afternoon train, very glad to escape from hotel-porch and corner-store gossip. The talk was all of Martin’s Hollow, and I was so bursting with the knowledge of how I could have interested the inhabitants of Hebron, had I chosen, that I was afraid I should proceed to interest them in spite of myself.

Towards noon I met the man who had driven me into Hebron. He waved his hand. “’Spose you’re goin’ up Silvernail to-night?” he inquired jocosely as he passed. The question was purely rhetorical. My answer also was purely rhetorical.

I went back to town where there were a dozen thrillers on my desk, and I reviewed them with a pen dipped in vitriol. With a Martin’s Hollow in the world, there really seemed no excuse for people’s not doing better.