Yes, that was where first he had really seen it pictured in that curious, unbelievable way; only who would believe that it was Mersereau’s hand? They would say it was an accident, chance, rain dropping down. But the hand had appeared on the ceiling of that room just as sure as anything, after a heavy rain-storm—it was almost a cyclone—when every chink in the old roof had seemed to leak water. During the night, after he had climbed to the room by way of those dismal stairs with their great landing and small glass oil-lamp he carried, and had sunk to rest, or tried to, in the heavy, wide, damp bed, thinking, as he always did those days, of the Monte Orte and Mersereau, the storm had come up. As he had listened to the wind moaning outside he had heard first the scratch, scratch, scratch, of some limb, no doubt, against the wall—sounding, or so it seemed in his feverish unrest, like some one penning an indictment against him with a worn, rusty pen. And then, the storm growing worse, and in a fit of irritation and self-contempt at his own nervousness, he had gone to the window, but just as lightning struck a branch of the tree nearest the window and so very near him, too—as though some one, something, was seeking to strike him—(Mersereau?) and as though he had been lured by that scratching. God! He had retreated, feeling that it was meant for him. But that big, knotted hand painted on the ceiling by the dripping water during the night! There it was, right over him when he awoke, outlined or painted as if with wet, gray whitewash against the wretched but normally pale-blue of the ceiling when dry. There it was—a big, open hand just like Mersereau’s as he had held it up that night—huge, knotted, rough, the fingers extended as if tense and clutching. And, if you will believe it, near it was something that looked like a pen—an old, long-handled pen—to match that scratch, scratch, scratch! “Huldah,” he had inquired of the old black mammy who entered in the morning to bring him fresh water and throw open the shutters, “what does that look like to you up there—that patch on the ceiling where the rain came through?” He wanted to reassure himself as to the character of the thing he saw—that it might not be a creation of his own feverish imagination, accentuated by the dismal character of this place. “’Pears t’ me mo’ like a big han’ ’an anythin’ else, Marse Davi’son,” commented Huldah, pausing and staring upward. “Mo’ like a big fist, kinda. Dat air’s a new drip come las’ night, I reckon. Dis here ole place ain’ gonna hang togethah much longah, less’n some repairin’ be done mighty quick now. Yassir, dat air’s a new drop, sho’s yo’ bo’n, en it come on’y las’ night. I hain’t never seed dat befo’.” And then he had inquired, thinking of the fierceness of the storm: “Huldah, do you have many such storms up this way?”