She had more than once been seen by those town boys--Leon and his gang--stationed behind the smeared glass of her paintless window, doing strange signaling "stunts" with a lighted lantern, whose pale rays described a circle, dipped and then shot up as, held aloft in her bony old hand, it sent an amber gleam over the salt-marshes. "She's a witch--a witch like Dark Tammy, who lived on the edge of the woods over a hundred years ago and who washed her clothes at the Witch Rock," whispered Starrie Chase and his companions one to another as they lay low among the rank grass of the dark marshes, spying upon her. "She's a witch, working spells with that lantern!" Older people surmised that she was signaling to her vagabond son, who might be haunting the distant marshes, trying to lure him home; shame and grief on his account had half-unbalanced her, they said. But the boys pretended to stick to their own superstitious belief, because, to them, it offered some shabby excuse for tormenting her. Leon Chase in particular made her rank little garden his nightly stamping-ground, and was the most ingenious in his persecuting attentions. He it was who devised the plan of anchoring a shingle or other light piece of wood by a short string to the longest branch of the apple-tree that grew near her door. When the wind blew directly across the marshes, as it did this evening, and drove against that paintless door, it operated the impromptu knocker; the wooden shingle would keep up an intermittent tapping, playing ticktack upon the painted panels all night. Sometimes Ma'am Baldwin had come to the door a dozen times and peered forth over the dark salt-marshes, believing that it was her vagrant son who demanded entrance, while the perpetrators of the trick, Leon Chase, Godey Peck and others of their gang--tickled in the meanest part of them by the fact that they "kept her guessing"--hid among the marsh-grass and watched. Hardly any prank could have been more senseless, childish, and unfeeling. Yet Starrie Chase had actually believed that he got some sham excitement out of it. And to-night as his feet pressed his old stamping-ground beneath that apple-tree beside the house, while the wind raked the marshes and whipped his thoughts into dusty confusion, the old waste impulses which prompted the trick were mysteriously whirled uppermost again. The mischievous tide rip boiled in him once more. Just as he became conscious of its yeasty bubbling, his foot touched something on the ground--a hard winter apple. He picked it up and threw it against the house, imposing silence on his dog by dictatorial gesture and word. There was a stir within the paintless dwelling. Through the blurred window-panes he caught sight of a shrunken form moving. "Ha! there's the old 'witch' herself. She looks like a withered corn-stalk with all those odds and ends of shawls dangling about her. Ssh-ssh! Blinkie. Down, doggie! _Quiet, sir!_"