"Ah, he!"--and my father's face, which had softened, became rightful again, till for very face I crept closer to him, and gripped him convulsively. He went on in his hushed, tense voice: "It was like this he looked at me when he told me the story. For you see, Tommy, he could hear the voices calling to him; and if he shut his ears against them, there were terrible curses screaming inside his head, for he knew he had left them there to die. And in the night he saw them there, growing thinner and whiter and all wasted with hunger. And he counted the days, and said, 'Now they must be dead!' But still he heard them crying to him; most terrible and piteous it was. And he knew they were dead and were following him, and he couldn't hide from them anywhere. And sometimes they screamed at him, and sometimes they laughed; a hollow wicked laughter, he told me, and wondered I couldn't hear it. And then he knew he could never rest again, but must up and away day after day and night after night, with the dead men chasing him and crying to him and mocking his madness. And so he was whipped on from place to place, never resting. For the terrible voices broke into his sleep like a cry of hounds, and the dead faces peered horribly at him through the dark, and the room was always full of moaning and knocking and a shuffling of feet." If I felt frightened at this strange recital in the gloom of our wayside hut, lit fitfully as it was by the red leaping flames of the fire, which threw distorted shadows on the walls which a boy's imagination might work into terrible fantasies--if I felt frightened it was with a pleasing fear; for I delighted to feel the stirring of unseen things about me, when safe in the comforting security of my father's presence. I remember glancing cautiously around me into the shadowy corners, half hoping to see some white and horrible face gazing out at me; and I strained my ears to catch some echo of the cryings and moanings which my father had been speaking of. The wind had quite dropped, and the night was perfectly still, with a sort of waiting uneasy stillness; and I thought I could hear a movement in the darkness outside. But my father was continuing: "And when he lit his lamp the blackness through the window was full of beckoning hands, and when he blew the lamp out for very fear the room was alive with creeping feet. And sometimes he felt cold fingers on his neck, and sometimes breath in his hair, and sometimes...." At this moment there was a tapping at the window.