way into silence, and still he stood
motionless, now listening with a new and sudden intentness, for, even
as the clock rang the last stroke, he heard soft, heavy footsteps,
moving slowly and cautiously along the pathway before the house and
directly below the open window. A few seconds more and he heard the
creaking of rusty hinges. The mysterious visitor had entered the mill.
Hiram crept softly to the window and looked out. The moon shone full
on the dusty, shingled face of the old mill, not thirty steps away,
and he saw that the door was standing wide open. A second or two of
stillness followed, and then, as he still stood looking intently, he
saw the figure of a man suddenly appear, sharp and vivid, from the
gaping blackness of the open doorway. Hiram could see his face as
clear as day. It was Levi West, and he carried an empty meal bag over
his arm.

Levi West stood looking from right to left for a second or two, and
then he took off his hat and wiped his brow with the back of his hand.
Then he softly closed the door behind him and left the mill as he had
come, and with the same cautious step. Hiram looked down upon him as
he passed close to the house and almost directly beneath. He could
have touched him with his hand.

Fifty or sixty yards from the house Levi stopped and a second figure
arose from the black shadow in the angle of the worm fence and joined
him. They stood for a while talking together, Levi pointing now and
then toward the mill. Then the two turned, and, climbing over the
fence, cut across an open field and through the tall, shaggy grass
toward the southeast.

Hiram straightened himself and drew a deep breath, and the moon,
shining full upon his face, showed it twisted, convulsed, as it had
been when he had fronted his stepbrother seven months before in the
kitchen. Great beads of sweat stood on his brow and he wiped them away
with his sleeve. Then, coatless, hatless as he was, he swung himself
out of the window, dropped upon the grass, and, without an instant of
hesitation, strode off down the road in the direction that Levi West
had taken.

As he climbed the fence where the two men had climbed it he could see
them in the pallid light, far away across the level, scrubby meadow
land, walking toward a narrow strip of pine woods.

A little later they entered the sharp-cut shadows beneath the trees
and were swallowed in the darkness.

With fixed eyes and close-shut lips, as doggedly, as inexor