fitly that it might
well have been the voice of the swamp itself.

On one side little Niggerwool drained its saffron waters off into a
sluggish creek, where summer ducks bred, and on the other it ended
abruptly at a natural bank of high ground, along which the county
turnpike ran. The swamp came right up to the road and thrust its fringe
of reedy, weedy undergrowth forward as though in challenge to the good
farm lands that were spread beyond the barrier. At the time I am
speaking of it was mid-summer, and from these canes and weeds and
waterplants there came a smell so rank as almost to be overpowering.
They grew thick as a curtain, making a blank green wall taller than a
man's head.

Along the dusty stretch of road fronting the swamp nothing living had
stirred for half an hour or more. And so at length the weed-stems
rustled and parted, and out from among them a man came forth silently
and cautiously. He was an old man--an old man who had once been fat, but
with age had grown lean again, so that now his skin was by odds too
large for him. It lay on the back of his neck in folds. Under the chin
he was pouched like a pelican and about the jowls was wattled like a
turkey gobbler.

He came out upon the road slowly and stopped there, switching his legs
absently with the stalk of a horseweed. He was in his shirtsleeves--a
respectable, snuffy old figure; evidently a man deliberate in words and
thoughts and actions. There was something about him suggestive of an old
staid sheep that had been engaged in a clandestine transaction and was
afraid of being found out.

He had made amply sure no one was in sight before he came out of the
swamp, but now, to be doubly certain, he watched the empty road--first
up, then down--for a long half minute, and fetched a sighing breath of
satisfaction. His eyes fell upon his feet, and, taken with an idea, he
stepped back to the edge of the road and with a wisp of crabgrass wiped
his shoes clean of the swamp mud, which was of a different color and
texture from the soil of the upland. All his life Squire H. B. Gathers
had been a careful, canny man, and he had need to be doubly careful on
this summer morning. Having disposed of the mud on his feet, he settled
his white straw hat down firmly upon his head, and, crossing the road,
he climbed a stake-and-rider fence laboriously and went plodding
sedately across a weedfield and up a slight slope toward his house, half
a mile away, upon the crest o