CHAPTER I

The streets of the little mid-Western town were pure gloom save for the
occasional arc-lamps, strange incandescent fruit among leafage so thick
that they gave off rather a white fog than light. Against their pallor
the trunks of the veteran maples loomed black and flat, their shadows
pools of tar.

Few people were abroad, and they were so vague in the gloom that they
seemed not to be persons walking, but the floating shadows of beings
hidden above. Yet their footsteps were audible as they approached and
vanished, the rhythm broken by shuffles and stumbles over the hard
ripples in the brick pavement.

It was impossible to see who was who, but the old lady on the Winsor
porch knew most of her neighbors by their footsteps. There were
Trigger-foot Pedlow and wooden-legged Major Rounds. But they were easy.
She knew also the stealthy tread of Tawm Kinch, who always seemed to be
saving shoe-leather, and the timid patter of old Miss Tiffin’s spinstery
feet forever fleeing when no one pursued.

Mrs. Winsor had sat on her front porch or at one of her windows for so
many years that people’s feet clicked their autographs for her on the
sidewalk. She could tell when there was a stranger among them, if he
walked fast. But to-night the few who were abroad went by so slowly that
her ears could not read their names. This made her lonelier than usual,
for her son was late, and the cook had gone out for the evening.

The poor soul grew afraid to rock her chair: the noise alarmed her; it
might attract burglars. She wished her boy would come home; she wondered
what kept him. He should have been back long ago, to help her indoors.
She was not supposed to be strong enough to walk by herself. If any of
those wayfarers had turned suddenly into her gateless, fenceless yard,
she could have reached the door with a scream, but she needed some such
goad.

She might have called to somebody to help her in. But that would be
advertising her solitude. She wished her son would come home. She had
had a letter in the late mail, and she wanted to read it to him. It
worried her keenly. She felt very old, very much afraid. In the sky
there were flickerings of lightning, rubadubs of thunder.

Mrs. Winsor dreaded storms. The next might always be her last. She
imagined the lightning stabbing the helpless lands beyond the horizon,
and she imagined the people cowering there with no defense against their
invaded sky.

She wished her son would come home before the rain broke over the
streets. He was, as likely as not, standing out on the high bluff over
the river watching the storm come. He liked to go up on high hills or
sit on the roof and study the lightning, shouting to it with hilarious
defiances that scared his mother like a sacrilege. His professor at the
high school had called him a young Ajax, but his name was Oliver. Nearly
everybody called him Noll.

His ambitions had a kind of glory about them. He felt things fiercely;
he was a ferocious partisan of anything he believed in—his baseball
club, his father’s political party, the pattern of skates he wore, his
ward school against the schools of all the other wards, his class in his
school, his country against all the nations in the world in all times.

His mother wished that he would come home. The storm was advancing; the
moon was enveloped—veiled—erased. The lightnings were flashing and
fencing well inside the horizon. But yet awhile the air was still and
warm, expectant, undecided. The air was in a Mona Lisa mood.

Mrs. Winsor was as helpless a spectator of the clouds driven in herds
across the sky as of the phantoms drifting along the sidewalk. It was
the lovers’ hour, and occasional couples mooned by dreamily. She smiled
as she saw two shadows blurred into one, moving in leisurely colloquy in
spite of the omens of wrath. She remembered how she had once gone
enarmed along dark lanes and streets. The maples had not been so high
then, and electric lamps had not been invented; but the gloaming spirit
was as old as Eden and newer than Edison.

From one dual shadow that blurred along she could faintly hear murmurs
with a hint of smothered excitement—a man’s diapason, a girl’s boyish
treble—but nothing she could understand. She followed the couple with
her eyes across the alley till the huge blot of the great tree there
absorbed it. The shadow did not emerge into the dim radiance from the
lamp at the next corner. She supposed the twain had paused for another
embrace.

Then she seemed to feel a little agitation in the air. She seemed to
hear a choked outcry ending in a faint gurgle. There was a sense of
motion within the tree-shadow, like a quiver in black smoke. She smiled.
The girl was probably making herself a little more interesting by the
immemorial feint of resistance. Mrs. Winsor had used those tactics
herself in her time, though she would never have confessed it even to
herself.

But now a single shadow, a man’s, slowly withdrew from the shadow of the
tree. The other shadow did not follow. As a patch of ink trickles away
from a fallen bottle, the lone shadow flowed swiftly to the next
tree-stripe, lost itself a moment there, then moved swiftly to the next,
and so on tree by tree to the core of light at the corner, where the
shadow seemed to be almost transparent, powdery at least. There it
turned to the left against another line of trees and vanished behind the
silhouette of the corner house.

All the houses seemed to ponder the riddle. The trees considered it.

Mrs. Winsor wondered what had become of the other shadow, but she stared
into the gloom in vain. It was strange for a man to leave a girl there
and run away. They might have quarreled, and she might have ordered him
never to speak to her again, as girls do. She might have resisted a
little too long, and he might have quit her cold. But then he would have
marched away, or sulked along. There was something fugitive about this
man’s departure. And why didn’t the girl go on home? Was she crying? She
made no sound. Perhaps she was petrified with anger and was fighting her
mad out, as Mrs. Winsor had done in her time, slowly in black silence.

Mrs. Winsor twisted her chair around and gazed with a kind of violence
but with no success. The noise of her chair alarmed her. She began to
fear things. The primeval dread of darkness and silence seized her. She
wanted sound. Even the lightning made no noise now. She wished her son
would come home and shield her from the horror of this quiet thing in
the shadow. Perhaps murder had been done.

Then she heard footsteps coming up the right.

She knew their patter. Her son was evidently in a hurry. From his shade
came his familiar voice:

“Mother! You’ve been alone. I’m mighty sorry. I couldn’t help it.”

She sobbed with welcome and put out her arms to him.

He was breathing fast. When he kissed her his lips were cold and
tremulous. He opened the front door, made a light in the hall, lifted
her, and helped her awkwardly inside the house. She loved the light; she
was glad to hear the dear old front door slam; it was the
portcullis-fall of her castle.

She reveled a little moment in her security before she could bear to
send her boy out into the dark to see what was the matter there. Just as
she was ready to speak she saw that he had been through an experience of
some exciting sort.

She noted a bruise on his face—a barked knuckle. The thought went
through her mind like lightning that he would have had time to run
around the block and come home if he had been the shadow that fled from
the other shadow.

Then he picked her up in his arms, and she marveled at the strength of
what was once a babe at her bosom. What she had once carried now carried
her.

He toted her up-stairs to her room; he knelt to unbutton her shoes for
her, and she marveled at his meekness. She loved him with fear, and she
wondered what life was doing to him. He was away so often, in such
unknown companies. And she knew how much evil the small town held. The
old know the world too well. The deep shadows, the quiet porches, the
humble intrigues—she had encountered so much sickening knowledge in her
years; such frightful facts emerged now and then from the shadows.

If her boy had been one of the ghosts under the tree, who was the girl?
Why had he gone by without speaking to his mother? She told herself that
if it had been Noll, he would have called out to her. At least he would
never have stopped to quarrel at the very edge of the yard when he knew
his mother was on the porch. Or if he had done all those things, they
had meant nothing more than a foolish spat. The girl outside had
probably hurried home.

The rain came now. And that would send her scurrying. Mrs. Winsor was
glad to hear a good wholesome growl from the sky. But her smile went
from her, for the thunder was followed by a scream, a kind of white
lightning against dark silence.

Then there was a noise of footsteps, like a heavily running rain. They
came up on the porch. The door-bell clamored.

Noll stood aghast a moment, then darted down-stairs. Mrs. Winsor heard
him unlock the door, heard a man’s voice in agitation:

“Hello, Noll. I want to use your telephone. Where is it? . . . Hello!
Hello! Give me the police-station, quick! . . . I don’t know . . .
something funny. Hello! Is this Marshal Dakin? Say, Marshal, this is
Ward Pennywell. Just now, as I was coming along Fourth Street—with,
well, never mind—we stumbled over the body of a girl. She’s dead, I
think, or nearly—strangled to death, I guess. I lighted a match to see
what it was I fell over. I never saw her before. Better come up. She’s
right outside Mrs. Winsor’s house.”

Mrs. Winsor’s heart began to flutter dangerously. A gentler thunder
groaned from the deeps of the night. The air was filled with silken
whisperings and tappings of soft fingers. The rain was sorry.